A paranoia is a bunch of mental blocks.
And when Ben Casey meets Kildaire, that’s called a paradox.
Sherman Allen
The tiny season of Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles has come to an end. I like this show. I like the fact that they skipped over T3, but there is still the problem of Judgment Day looming on the horizon. Before the show came out there were a lot of posters released on the Fox website-many of them featuring the Terminator in various stages of completion. This seemed to imply that there was going to be a lot more of the future in this series than we had seen in the movies.
And there was a lot more future story here. We see Terminators being reprogrammed and some of those reprogrammings failing. It is a dark and evil future without hope, just like we saw in the first movie. In fact, many of the scenes in the Sarah Connors Chronicles are expanded scenes from The Terminator.
In the Terminator, we are given a rule for the Time Machine-only living flesh can use it-odd that, since it seemed to be a Skynet product. And we were told that the Time Machine was destroyed after Reese came through it-though of course, Reese would have no way of knowing if it was or not. This was a good setup for one movie-with the ambiguous ending of Sarah Connors driving off into the dark and dreadful future.
The Grandfather Paradox is one of a long list of mind games that ‘proves’ time travel can’t work. If you go back in time, you could do something that would alter your own time line, thus making you cease to exist. The Grandfather Paradox goes so far as to have you go back in time and kill your own Grandfather. What would happen? If you follow the Back To The Future theory, you would simply fade away and be no more. If you follow the Multi-Verse theory popular on Star Trek-you would continue to exist, but you would be in a new time line where your former memories are no longer relevant as that past no longer exists.
Drawn Together and Family Guy both had Grandfather Paradoxes where the characters ruined their own lives and/or killed themselves. One of the better Simpson’s Halloween Specials had Homer travel back in time and alter reality an infinite number of times until he finally settle on a world that was ‘close enough’ to the one he had started with.
In the last episode of The Sarah Connors Chronicles we have two of our heroes hanging out in a park, one looking at his father as a child, and one looking at himself as a child. To say this is a bad idea would be putting it mildly. Skynet doesn’t know who John Connors father is, and therefore the original Terminator had to kill every Sarah Connors he could find, as well as anyone that got in his way. There are a lot of Terminators running around in this story. What if one of them discovers where John’s father is? What if John somehow altered the time line himself by interacting with his father? What if his uncle decides to help his family by telling them to move somewhere where the bombs won’t fall?
Back to the Time Machine and the rule about living flesh-how did the T-1000 get through? How did the Terminator that was chasing our heroes in the bank vault get through? Like The Matrix, they tossed out the rules that make a new movie-or TV Series- hard to make. After all, a bit of logic would say that if Skynet had a Time Machine, as it clearly does in the first two films and the TV show, then it would have put that Time Machine at the end of an assemble line and sent and infinite number of Terminators into the past.
Another Paradox from the show is when they steal the special Terminator metal and dump it in the ocean. Cameron said that she was made ‘right over there’-why is she still here if the factory where she was built didn’t have the metal needed to make her? Another minor gripe, how is it possible for John Connors to still be a computer genius when is eight years out of the loop?
I like this show a lot and hope they get the next season up and running soon.
