Last Saturday, we saw that John Connor and Marcus were working together to destroy the T-800 and foil Skynet’s devious plan. They managed to destroy one of Skynet’s main facilities, but John Connor was fatally wounded in the process and doesn’t have long to live now.

I didn’t much care for how the screenplay accounts for his injuries but, in fairness, the writers were trying to tie in something that had been mentioned throughout the film. At different points, characters had referred to Marcus’s heartbeat. The idea was that he had a strong heart. I don’t know if the writers were trying to say anything profound about the character with this statement, but the way Marcus’ heart ties into the plot comes into play during this scene.

Kate Connor says that John’s heart can’t take the injuries he’s sustained. This is clunky dialogue to say the least, but it establishes that John needs a heart transplant. Marcus, who was a convicted murderer in his previous life, decides that he’s content with his second chance and offers to give his heart to John.

Nobody protests his proposed sacrifice. I suppose the thinking was that, since John is the last leader of the Resistance, everyone needs him a lot more than anyone needs Marcus. I still found that a bit cold on the Resistance’s part, but noble on Marcus’s part, and his sacrifice does save John’s life. John then gives a final speech, basically saying the war will continue, and ends it with Kyle Reese’s line from the first film (which was actually a quote from John), “There is no fate but what we make.” Then it’s time to roll the credits.

Marcus’s sacrifice at the end…   

I’m torn. On the one hand, he was a murderer. We don’t know exactly what he did, but the writers make it clear that Marcus feels like he’s guilty of the crime. Does that make it right for him to give his life for John? Maybe. As for everyone else, I can understand them wanting to save John’s life; however, it was a callous move nonetheless.

But moral issues aside, this plot turn was very clever. I mentioned in the previous review that the filmmakers had repeated a series of shots from the climax of the first Terminator (1984), implying that time was making a loop or, in some sense, rhyming.

In the third film, the T-800 had said that he’d killed John, and that John’s emotional attachment to the original Terminator was part of the reason for his demise. When John leaves Kyle and the child Star to face the T-800 in this movie, he says he’s got to end this, and that T-800 would’ve heard him say those words. Then that same Terminator fatally wounds John before being terminated itself.

What if when one Terminator kills something, it’s the same as all of them doing it in their mechanical minds? This is what I think the writers were going for. I think they were trying to create the situation where the Terminator “killed” John. But Marcus’ sacrifice has reset the timeline.

The dangers of fatalistic prophecy in action films

This plot turn fixes one of the fatal flaws in the third Terminator movie (2003). The writers made a huge mistake the moment they had the T-800 tell John his fate. In an adventure film, when a character informs us that the protagonist is going to die or the writers make clear that the protagonist is going to die, our certainty deflates our emotional stake in the story. Why would audience members care what’s going to happen if they already know that the person they’re rooting for isn’t going to make it?

Even in a storyline where the protagonist is trying to outrun a fatalistic prophecy, the tension is still deflated because the audience knows that everything they’re seeing is going to reach a point where it looks like the protagonist is dead. In fact, the real story can’t even happen — the conclusion can’t be reached — before the moment of prophecy passes. Until then, the audience is just waiting.

What about tragedies?

The exception to this rule is a tragedy, where the audience follows a character’s expected demise, usually due to a fatal flaw. The Breaking Bad series (2008‒2013) is an excellent example of this genre. But the premise in a tragedy is specifically that the character is going to meet a bad end, and the trick to that genre is figuring out how to resolve the story, even though the main character is going to die.

But the hallmark of tragedy is that the writers let the audience know from the outset, either directly or through implication, that the character is going to perish. In Breaking Bad, Walter’s cancer diagnosis acts as both the Inciting Incident and a promise about what’s going to happen to that character. This timid man intends to go out in a blaze of glory, and the story delivers on that promise.

Comedy or tragedy?

But sci-fi action flicks like Terminator Salvation are not tragedies. The whole point of the war with the machines is to live, and John—and before him, Sarah—serve as the avatars for humanity. The story question and the outcome the audience wants is for those characters to survive because then—symbolically—humanity survives. So, if the writers answer the story question and tell the audience the outcome before the film’s over, the writers have killed the stakes. The story question has been answered before the movie’s conclusion, and that answer is probably not the one they wanted.

To put it simply, stories are either comedies or tragedies. These two categories are different genres. To promise the death of a character in a comedy the same way a writer does during a tragedy is akin to performing a bait and switch. The audience went to see a sci-fi flick and got Hamlet instead.

This is why audiences sometimes become annoyed when a main character dies. It’s not that they’re particularly attached to that main character; they’ve only known him or her for one film. It’s that they went into the movie with a certain set of expectations and were disappointed. They went to see a comedy and got a tragedy instead.

This tension created a real problem for Terminator Salvation — the same problem Alien Resurrection faced after Alien 3. Plot holes aside, the audience wasn’t going to show up for the next movie in both franchises because the third film, in one case, killed off the main character, and in the other, promised that the main character was going to perish. Why show up for the next film? It was a smart move for the writers to correct this issue.

I’ll finish my thoughts on this plot device (called retcon, short for retroactive continuity) and on Terminator Salvation as a whole next Saturday.

Here are the first four parts of my review of Terminator: Salvation:

Terminator Salvation(2009): A better film than Terminator 3 With three Terminator movies talking about the future, it was about time for the future to finally show up. By the end of the movie the viewer briefly sees John become something of a mentor, if not an outright father figure, for Kyle.

Terminator Salvation (2009), Part II: Is Marcus really human? Or has he really been discovered to be a Terminator, bent on killing the human resistance? The dilemma is well handled because John Connor is genuinely confused and trying to understand the situation.

Terminator Salvation Part 3: A Return to Roots This movie remembers what the second Terminator film forgot: the true nature of the machines. The film makes clear that the machines are the enemy because they are cold, and there is something special about being human.

and

Terminator Salvation (2009) Part 4: Marcus, Unwitting Terminator. Marcus learns the horrible truth from Skynet that his mission was to terminate John Connor. Although the Resistance blows up Skynet’s headquarters, the success of their mission turns on saving badly wounded John.