Amph Terminator Timeline Puzzle

I've been watching the Terminator movies in preparation for seeing Genisys.

Watching The Terminator, it struck me. How could John have existed, fought the machines, and won the war (sending the original T-800 was an act of desperation on Skynet's part) in the original timeline before Kyle Reese was sent back.

Answer: John must have been fathered by someone other then Reese originally. That's fine. So John Connors parentage changes thanks to the events of the Terminator (just as Skynet's does).

What's MORE puzzling. Is Reese tells Sarah he volunteered for the mission to "meet the legend". As Sarah trained John to be a leader before Judgement day even occurred. This makes ZERO sense. In the orignal timeline (before either the original T-800 or Reese is sent back) why would Sarah train John (who was at this point fathered by someone other than Reese) to fight and be a leader before judgement day?

Riddle me that.

 

Metal skeletons are cool.

 

You know there's a Terminator thread for you to figure this puzzle out in.

 

Jesus Christ, Jules! If you want to be a mod just go and ask in Comms!!!!!!

 

I did not. Thanks. The rest of you .. have too much time on your hands.

 

The point is that it is a paradox. There is no one else who is John's father, other than Kyle Reese. It's not like "Back To The Future" where Marty travels back, makes the changes and then history always had his parents as cool and confident people, and not the broken losers that they were.

That's not quite how it works, nor would that be the reason that Jules does this. I wasn't bucking for Mod when I was approached, yet I was being helpful in the same manner.

 

Thanks for taking the post seriously. Or were you simply posting a random thought?

 

I was gonna ask "are you like this in real life?", but the question seemed redundant.

 

One of my favourite lampshaded time travel movie dialogue bits is in Looper when Old Joe sez: "I don't wanna talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're gonna be here all day talking about, making diagrams with straws!"

 

In the first place Connor could be a legend without his mother having trained him. There is no paradox there at all. In the secondwhen simply assume that every individuals personal history is inalterable and fixed. Therefore there is no contradiction in what happened to Reese because events occurred chronologically within his own life time regardless of their position in the overall timestream.

 

John couldn't be a great military leader if he didn't have training. That would only happen if he was trained since in the other timeline in the second film, he went into politics rather than the military. So Sarah always took him out to be trained.

 

The way I see it, Sarah has a line in Genisys where she mentions "moving in a straight line" which is sort of representative of how to look at time travel. John Connor never had any other father but Kyle Reese, it always was Kyle in 1984.

 

That's a bit silly. Oliver Cromwell didn't have any meaningful public career until quite late in his life, and didn't start in the military until he was in his 40s. Despite not having any real military training before that point, he went on to become on the most successful commanders in English history, and a seminal--if controversial--figure in the history of the United Kingdoms. Being taken out for training by his Mom, who also had no formal military experience, is certainly not a prerequisite for his later success.

 

No, but in the first Terminator movie, Kyle mentions how he reveres Sarah because she's the "legendary" mother who trained John Connor to lead the fight against the machines.

 

terminator: ginnysis part 2: skynet sends a terminator back to africa 160k years ago and he nukes it. the end

 

That was fine back when The Terminator was a standalone, but as soon as T2 made it clear that history actually could be changed and introduced a new future, it was called into question. Closed causal loops only really work with eternalist models of time.

Since I agree that Kyle should have always been John's father, however, I prefer to think that there is no "original" timeline ... and all the various time travel shenanigans that keep generating new futures eventually come back around to recreating the exact future from which T1 Kyle is sent back to father T2/3/Salvation John.

That way, even if history can be changed, the history of history cannot.

 

Why did Miles Dyson look like Joe Morton in one movie, and like Courtney B Vance in another?

 

Right.

REESE: "It was an honor. A chance to meet the legend. Sarah Connor. Who taught her son to fight...organize, prepare. From when he was a kid. When you were in hiding, before the war."

 

Because actors age like everybody else.