Last Saturday, I discussed the way stories are driven by archetypes — basic situations most readers will recognize. Archetypes make the emotional stakes relatable. Nobody is really going to care about a war between futuristic robots without something to relate to emotionally.

In the Terminator franchise, the writers related the concept of a futuristic robot war with the concept of family. Sarah Connor wants to save her son because her son is going to save the world. So the stakes are: Save the son; save the world. So the writers took an outlandish concept, a war with robots nobody can really relate to, and combined it with a mother’s love for her child. With the two ideas linked, the audience has some way to care about the situation.

But then the writers of Terminator Genisys (2015) turned her son John Connor into the movie’s main villain. This was a terrible mistake. The fact that the writers insulted a beloved character in this way should infuriate fans, but the issues run much deeper.

John Connor as the Evil Child archetype

Making John Connor the villain created two problems. First, as noted, the writers destroyed the relatable grounding for the end-of-the-world scenario. A future robot war is too hypothetical. Nobody’s been in a futuristic robot war, so any emotion it may prompt is only going to be a vague sense of “that sounds bad.”  And without the goal of saving her son, Sarah Connor becomes a floating character with no reason to continue to be invested in her cause.

The second problem is that the writers unknowingly created a bait and switch. The “Evil Child” is an archetype unto itself. Stories like “The Bad Seed” or “The Omen,” or more recently “Brightburn” play into this idea. This archetype is more commonly found in the horror genre, which features the necessary buildup of tension. The parent must weigh love for the child against a mounting pile of evidence that suggests the child is evil. Here, the writers shifted John suddenly from a hopeful archetype to an evil archetype, which, in my opinion, was simply jarring.

If the writers wanted to play with the concept of making John an “Evil Child,” they needed to have him spend more time around Sarah and Kyle. They needed to have John do a variety of conflicting things, some good and some bad, that would eventually lead up to a reveal at the climax.

This approach, borrowed from the horror genre, would accomplish several things. It would add some badly needed tension and further established Kyle and Sarah as the mother and father figures. It would make the audience long for that hypothetical family to succeed at some point in the future. Then, if the scriptwriters dash these characters’ — and the audience’s — hopes right at the end, they would be giving Sarah a wholly different reason for fighting Skynet: It had destroyed her son and her future. And it would’ve given the audience some consolation to because we wouldn’t have to live with John’s fate for too long, and Skynet would pay for what it had done shortly after the reveal. This approach could’ve worked because the first Terminator film is known for combining the sci-fi and horror genres. But in the first film, the writers also understood what they were doing.

Mixing the genres the wrong way

The writers mixed sci-fi’s fast pace with a horror archetype that requires a lot of tension in order to create the proper emotional impact. John Connor revealing himself to be a robot after being back on screen for less than fifteen minutes doesn’t give the audience enough time to process a rather painful revelation.

The audience needs foreshadowing: John’s good and bad decisions over a period of time would help us understand that the story question is whether John is a good guy or a bad guy. That way we can brace themselves for the answer. Not doing so made John feel like an insertable villain from a B-movie, which is not fitting for a central character of an entire franchise.

If the central character can be turned against everything he stood for, then so can the current protagonists. If the protagonists can be turned into villains in the next movie because the writers don’t even care about the central character of the entire franchise, then why should viewers care about the protagonists’ fate?

Deflating Sarah

On top of that, this turn of events deflates Sarah’s motivation as a character. Later in the film, she coldly says that this John Connor isn’t her son, and that’s the end of it. So, the only reason she has for continuing the fight a hypothetical war that nobody can really relate to is some vague fear of an apocalypse. She doesn’t even feel anger for what the robots did to her child!

In short, family means future. No family. No future. No reason to care. This is the real story people are watching, the real plot. Most people don’t realize why they enjoy certain stories, but if they thought about it, they’d discover they’re not just going to the theater for popcorn.

When I was an actor, one of my directors had a saying, “If you believe, they’ll believe.” He was talking about an actor entering the stage with conviction. Later, I applied his statement to knowing my character’s motivations. Well, this idea doesn’t just work for portraying a character. It applies to writing them.

If Sarah Connor doesn’t have a reason to believe in her fight against the machines, then the audience isn’t going to believe in the story. That’s why John Connor is so important. He’s her motivation; without that, Sarah Connor no longer exists. She’s just another generic tough girl fighting an army of robots. Compare the number of those generic movies to the number of classic sci-fi stories you remember. We’ll cover what happens after John’s reveal next Saturday.

The columns I have written so far on Terminator Genisys (2015) are all linked here:

Terminator Genisys Review, Part 7: Now John Connor is the Bad Hat. Why don’t Hollywood screenwriters understand the importance of what the audience thinks is at stake? The way writers make fantasy engaging — and sci-fi is a form of fantasy — is by anchoring the hard-to-grasp concepts with familiar ideas.