In the previous review, I discussed how revealing Sarah Connor too soon in Terminator Genisys (2015) killed the tension in the next few scenes. But the problems run much deeper, revealing a sort of laziness that’s almost enough to make a viewer resentful.

Viewers may not know that Terminator Genisys was seen in the industry as so bad that some Hollywood bigwig actually decided that the only thing to do was make another sequel from scratch, effectively wiping this timeline from the canon altogether. I think I have figured out one reason why —perhaps the main reason, assuming that somebody in the upper echelons of Hollywood actually cares about writing. I am referring to the decision to have Skynet attack John just before Kyle enters 1984. Once the ramifications of the decision to have Skynet attack John when it did dawned on me, I realized that this movie made the entire franchise fall apart. Let’s look at how that happened.

Skynet itself?

The problem starts with the moment John is attacked by Skynet’s final robotic form just before Kyle is teleported back in time. It’s important to understand that this robot isn’t another Terminator; it’s Skynet itself. That means Skynet is no longer sending robots to various points in time to hunt for John or Sarah. Skynet has found John and not only found John but has pinned his location for some time and has been following him.

There was so much going on during this scene that I didn’t give the stupidity behind this decision the proper consideration. I was distracted by the fact that there’s no reason for Skynet to attack John when it does. John, Kyle, and his army spent so much time in the time machine room that the Skynet robot would’ve had countless opportunities to strike. Why did it wait until right before Kyle was sent back? Furthermore, why didn’t Skynet kill both John and Kyle? Why did the robot wait until it was literally surrounded by countless gunmen?

Also, the reason that the Terminators are covered in living tissue is so they can travel through the time machine. If metal enters the field around that machine, it will react the same way a can would react inside a microwave, so all anybody has to do is push the robot into the machine while it’s attacking John. Arguably, John wouldn’t be harmed, but the robot would be destroyed — Skynet itself would be destroyed.

While we’re here, why didn’t Skynet just send a Terminator with the Resistance? Why did it go itself? The only reason would be out of spite. It wants to deal with John personally. As has been said countless times in these reviews, robots don’t feel things like spite, but narratively speaking, this is a minor issue.

The ambiguity of the overall story

In order to properly explain the major problem, I have to make a cumulative case, and that case begins by rehashing what we’ve already seen. In the previous three films, there’s been a degree of ambiguity behind how and when these robots are being sent back. In the first film, there was a strong possibility that the choice to send Kyle was an impromptu decision. That is to say, in Timeline A, John impulsively sent Kyle back, not knowing that Kyle was his father. But in Timeline B, Sarah has made a batch of recordings, informing John that Kyle was his father. So now John knows who Kyle is and must send him back anyway.

This creates a moral dilemma, but so far, the timeline — or at least a semi-coherent story — remains intact. But when we get to Terminator 2 (1991), we’ve got a problem. Presumably, the first film was supposed to mark the end of the future war, creating a neat time loop that, while ultimately a form of Orwellian Doublethink, was at least somewhat easy to understand. But with the addition of Terminator 2, the audience realizes that the war didn’t end, at least not at the exact moment Kyle was sent back. Something else happened, and somehow, another Terminator, the T-1000, was ordered to kill John. Terminator 2 doesn’t address this problem because it’s ultimately inconsequential to the movie’s plot. Judgment Day is stopped, and Skynet is destroyed. So whatever happened in the future doesn’t really matter because the future has been changed by the end of the film.

But then enters Terminator 3 (2003). Now the coherence of the story starts to wobble. Not only did the first time-travel attempt not the end of the war, but it turns out that Judgment Day is fated — that is to say, impossible to stop — and now another Terminator has entered the scene. This raises the question of why robots aren’t being sent all along the timeline. But with a little creative imagining on the part of the audience, even this can be ignored, provided a certain condition is met.

The poor writing in Terminator 3 made this condition impossible to meet, but Terminator: Salvation (2009) tried to fix the third film’s error. I’ll address how and why this is relevant later. At least the third film was smart enough to cut off any possibility of a future Terminator scenario by burying John and his wife under a mountain.

What’s gone wrong is quite simple from a writer’s perspective

Terminator: Salvation takes us to the war which means that the writers had the chance to explain how all of this happened. This was when they fixed the problem in the third film, making it possible to reconstruct a future that lined up with the previous three films. After that, we should’ve gotten that entire trilogy, but we didn’t. We got Genisys instead, which has Skynet intersect with John Connor the moment he sends Kyle Reese back in time, destroying the entire franchise.

The writers have introduced a new element to the story without realizing it. Not only have they introduced yet another robot, which is Skynet itself, but they’ve also given Skynet information it’s never had before: John’s movements and what he knows.

In the prior films, the audience could assume that Skynet was ultimately ignorant about humanity’s location and intentions. Skynet didn’t know why or how its Terminators were failing. It was essentially sending robots to random points in the past and hoping for the best.

In Salvation the writers took the risk of having the robots realize Kyle Reese was John’s father, but there was a variety of ways the writers could have worked that into the story. They could have had the robots do a DNA test on John at some point when they’d wounded him in an earlier battle. Or perhaps Sarah put Kyle’s name on the birth certificate. There are a number of ways to fix that plot hole that would keep the story coherent.

However, the one thing the robots absolutely cannot know is that John Connor knows about their time machine! Why? Because then all the robots have to do is move the time machine! They don’t need to send multiple Terminators at all!

A number of scenarios can be imagined where Skynet would send multiple Terminators anyway. Perhaps Skynet has built two machines, and John found one, and Skynet is able to keep the other hidden, at least for a while. When the robots realize that the first machine hasn’t worked, they used the second one to send the other two Terminators.

The only problem is that in order for this or any scenario to work, one vital condition must be met. What is that condition? All the Terminators must be sent within a short span of time. I’ll explain why next Saturday.

Here’s what I wrote on Genisys last Saturday and the previous one:

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 1: What was the point? When filming a sequel, it’s important to draw on the previous story, to keep the viewer emotionally invested in the characters. Genisys completely ignores everything set up in Terminator: Salvation and Terminator 3 and assassinates John’s character, reducing the emotional stakes.

Terminator Genisys Review Part 2: A colossal monster mash The writers wanted the recreated scenes to be fond “memory berries” for the audience but they ran into problems setting them up properly. Terminator Genisys is one of those movies where that create a growing sense of unease that viewers can’t quite put a finger on.