Last Saturday, I discussed how time travel, like all technology in science fiction, operates in a similar way to soft or hard magic systems in fantasy. I promised to show how this applies to the Terminator franchise, not only because we spent so much time on it but because it beautifully demonstrates the perils, along with the promise, of the Time-Travel Trope.

Both Back to the Future and the first two Terminator films brought time travel to modern audiences. While it would’ve been fun to look at Back to the Future in this context, the Terminator franchise is unique. It illustrates a very specific problem that the trope presents… as time goes on — if you’ll humor a terrible pun.

Conflating two different magic systems

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the Terminator films’ main plot mistake was that they ended up conflating the soft and hard magic systems, which created conflicting emotional stakes. The first two films kept time travel ambiguous, and rightfully so.

The time machines in that movie were just the mechanism used to create the inciting incident. The first movie took the risk of creating a paradox at the end by making Kyle Reese John’s father. However, this wasn’t too much of a risk because, at the time, nobody knew there was going to be a sequel. So the writers could use the paradox to keep the ending open-ended.

The film also kept the time travel theme vague enough to lean into the mystery a paradox creates, which is the hallmark of a soft magic system. That system is designed to either introduce mystery or rescue the protagonist when the objective is escape.

Handling a paradox in a smart way

Terminator 2: Judgement Day was risky in the sense that now the paradox that time travel has created is in play. Thus the film has an additional rule to contend with. But the writers handled this risk in a smart way. It directed the audience to focus most of its attention on the T-1000.

Then in a dramatic twist, the new objective becomes fixing the paradox—no fate. This was ultimately accomplished by destroying the T-1000, Skynet, and the T-800 sent to save John. Only after the T-800’s dramatic death is the loop finally closed.

There were two rules in Terminator 2: time travel itself, treated as soft magic, and the paradox the time travel had created, and the movie dealt with both of them.

But then things shift toward hard magic…

Then Terminator 3 entered the scene, and things began to fall apart. Now, the film had three rules to contend with: time travel, the paradox, and fate. The problem was that the soft magic system has just become a hard magic system. Why?

Someone might argue that Terminator 2 had a hard magic system, but I disagree because the paradox is surrounded in mystery. All the audience really knows is that time travel itself creates paradoxes. But the details remain unclear and don’t interfere with the logic of the story. Sarah infers from a dream that she can end the paradox by destroying Skynet or the man who is going to create Skynet. And in the end, the T-800, the one who is most likely to know the truth, reveals that he must be destroyed as well.

The writers chose to keep their cards close to the chest about all this, and the mystery that choice created helps drive the plot. So I would say that the time travel in Terminator 2 is fundamentally soft because the story question is essentially how to solve a problem the protagonists don’t understand.

As an aside, I should also like to point out that, even in Terminator 2, the future events are not hard to guess. John sent Kyle Reese into the past to save his mother, but John must’ve missed something during the future war, and the robots were able to try again. So, because it’s evident that future John will be unable to solve the problem, the only solution is to keep the apocalyptic future from happening in the first place. Thus, we don’t need any information beyond what is happening in the films to infer what’s happening in the future.

So where did Terminator 3 start to go off the rails?

Terminator 3 crossed into hard magic territory when it added the concept of fate to time travel. While fate is often portrayed as mysterious, there’s no mystery to the basic idea: No matter what else happens, certain events in the future are fixed and will lead to certain outcomes. That’s a hard rule, and there’s nothing for the characters to discover, much less correct.

The rule instantly reduces the mystery and lowers the stakes in the story. Why should the audience care if whatever happens is going to happen anyway? It also doesn’t help that the film is sloppy at best. If it weren’t for the ending, I would consider the movie a total failure.

But Terminator 3 was still salvageable because the one thing the writers did right was position John as the future leader of humanity. The past may be fixed, but, from the audience’s perspective, the future is still very much in question, so as long as the next movie focuses on the war. If the time-travel narrative is dropped altogether, there’s no lasting damage. This is what the next movie did.

The introduction of fate in Terminator 3 also offered an advantage in the sense that the concept of fate doesn’t conflict with a paradox. In fact, it’s arguable that a paradox could be explained by fate. The paradox must be a necessity in order for fate to happen. The two rules might be too complicated for easy comprehension, but they don’t contradict.

But then the story gets very complicated

Then Genisys enters the scene and starts adding multiple timelines, time machines, and robots. In fact, there are so many robots and time machines it’s impossible to construct a scenario to explain everything without writing a novel. That’s too much work for an audience. They get confused, get bored, then check out.

When Dark Fate arrives, everything collapses because fate is mixed with infinite regresses. Now not only is it difficult to construct a scenario to explain everything, it’s impossible because the franchise’s rules have become contradictory. There can’t be fate if one robot army is going to replace another army—but it’s not even the same army and John isn’t the same John.

Someone might call that a sort of momentum—there will be a robot war no matter what—but that’s not the fate described by the third film. Skynet itself is still created despite Skynet’s past tech being destroyed. John is still forced to be the leader of the resistance despite destroying Skynet, and the whole war still happens within approximately the same time frame; it’s only pushed back a few years. That war and that John are meant to exist. Skynet and John are fated to exist. Dark Fate attempts to twist fate’s definition but just ends up contradicting the rest of the franchise.

Furthermore, the only reason the Terminator was sent in the first place was Skynet. If Skynet is destroyed, the Terminator is never sent, period. The fact that the T-800 from the second film remains and has to destroy itself only proves that the T-800 was right. The paradox from the first film proves that events in the past and future are connected by some kind of loop, so Dark Fate cannot claim that the Terminator remained despite Skynet being destroyed.

The entire franchise collapses under the weight of its own rules. That’s why time-travel stories are difficult when the time travel is treated as a hard magic system. But there’s a reason the writers did this, and I’ll cover that next Saturday.

Here’s the first essay on my series on time travel: The pluses and the perils of time travel in science fiction. Time travel can be treated as a form or hard or soft “magic” but it is important not to confuse the two. Soft magic is vague and incidental; hard magic imposes rules on the story. Too often in science fiction, these rules get broken.