The Terminator was the good guy?

Hello, and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real. I'm Leif Eric, and I'm here with my co-host Torvald. And today, we've got an amazing theory for you. We are going to be talking about the entire Terminator series. All six movies. This first episode is just going to be Terminator 1. We'll follow it up with an episode covering Terminator 2, and then a third episode where we're going to have special guest Michael Ferris on the podcast, who is the writer of Terminator 3 and Terminator 4, Salvation. So that's going to be really good. We have a lot of new listeners lately, and I just wanted to say that if you don't know, this is a podcast where we talk about fan theories. We try to do very deep dives into alternate readings of films, finding evidence to support some strange and outlandish interpretations of these movies. Yeah, and typically we try to focus on one major fan theory per movie, but sometimes we'll get into multiple fan theories like you might see in this episode for example

we're going to talk about all kinds of crazy theories about terminators and about sarah connor and her family and whether or not she's actually john connor's mom all kinds of crazy stuff yeah which of all six terminator movies is your favorite i gotta give it to terminator 2 i think terminator 1 was very very good i do think terminator 2 is better and i don't know it's well why do you think that is i mean it's just because of the relationship between the three main characters they have a really strong bond and arguably that's why all of the sequels failed but yeah dude reese and sarah's relationship was excellent like it's a good relationship yeah in my memory it is an excellent relationship watching it again i am not so sure i don't know He brainwashes her, and he makes her think that her kid is going to save the world, and he's just some bum off the street, and he makes her go crazy. Oh, yeah.

Wait, here, what kind of theories are we going to talk about today? Because we've got a few of them, right? So, yeah, we've got a couple theories here about Terminator. Skynet are the good guys, and the humans that keep sending people back in time from the future are the bad guys. And that is my theory. Do the humans know they're the bad guys? No, no, of course not. My theory essentially hinges on the fact that what Skynet is doing is for the human's own good. And as the series heavily implies in every single movie, the humans are waging a war with themselves. They are going to destroy themselves. And Skynet's just trying to save them from themselves. You're going to have to answer some questions, but I think you can make that work. The second theory that, you know, we'll talk about just a little bit, but it's kind of a fun little alternate reading of Terminator 1 mostly, but it fits in all the Terminator movies, is that Sarah Connor, over the course of Terminator 1, she is traumatized and goes crazy, basically.

Yeah. She is imagining all of the Terminator stuff, all the Skynet stuff. Really, she was just attacked by a meth head druggie with a bulletproof vest, just like the police tell her. And Kyle Reese is actually a homeless man in gross, grubby homeless man clothes. Probably also meth addicted, and that's why the other guy's after him. Possibly. He shares these delusions of an evil, horrible future with Sarah and convinces her that her child will save the world. And she just, you know, falls hook, line, and sinker for it. So we'll get into some of the evidence for that. So let's start with Terminator 1, made in 1984, written and directed by James Cameron, also credited writers Gail Ann Hurd and William Wisher. Side note, Gail Ann Hurd is not my teacher. Well, she's your teacher.

Despite what I may tell you in a moment of panic.

So, oh, you're from AFI? Oh, who's your teacher? it's your boss. My teacher is your boss. Oh, my boss doesn't teach at AFI. The thing that we're referencing right here is that I once went in for a job interview at Gail Ann Hurd's production company and I was a little bit nervous. I was in the waiting room and I was staring across at a poster, I think of Terminator or possibly The Abyss that was signed by Gail Anherd. So I was staring at her name, Gail. And then the assistant, she asked me about my school, AFI, and who my teacher was, because she had also gone there. And I told her that my teacher, whose name was Don, I tried to say Don, but for some reason, my brain panicked. And I said her name was Gail. And this assistant who knew all the teachers at AFI was like, I've never heard of Gail. And then I realized in a panic that I had just said the name of her boss instead of the name of my teacher who was Don. But in my defense, I can see where my brain got confused

because Gail and Don are both kind of like natural phenomenons. You know, they're one syllable. Yeah, that's true. Wind and the sun rising. And while I was thinking Don, I was literally staring at a poster across me that said Gail. So I just was like, I made up some dumb excuse like, oh, sorry. I think her middle name might be gail but her first name is dawn okay cover that one i i didn't get that job well everyone knows that the the best possible way to ensure that you make a good impression and get a job is to lie and tell everybody that their boss is your teacher i mean who could prove you're wrong and be like, yeah, you better hire me. I was taught by your boss, so I must be good enough. Oh boy. Gail Ann Hurd is a very prolific producer who's made tons of films, but often works with James Cameron and has produced many of his films. Can we get a quick synopsis of Terminator One? In a near future, machines have taken over, stamping out humanity from the face of the earth

and every day is a constant struggle to survive. There's a resistance led by the great John Connor. But one day, right as John Connor wins the fight, oh no, Skynet, the evil program controlling all the machines, sends a Terminator, a murderous robot, back in time to kill John Connor's mom before he was born. So John Connor sends his best and brightest soldier, Kyle Reese, back to save her. The rest of the movie takes place in 1984. It's about the Terminator, played by Alan Schwarzenegger, trying to take out Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor before they can have sex and have a kid. Yeah, I kind of think that the Terminator doesn't know that. I would say that Kyle Reese was not John Connor's dad originally. I was going to say the same thing. It's weird. There's no fate but what you make for yourself in these movies. And everything seems to change, right? There are so many movies, they all contradict each other,

and yet they're all canon because they could all happen in different timelines because within this movie, you can change time, right? It's not cyclical, there's no fate. Every time you send someone back in time to change something, it actually changes something. You make a whole new universe. Yes. I think that this is possibly a good explanation for why John Connor is always played by a different actor. He has a different father. I was thinking about the same thing. Everything can change except character. your name will not change. You will always be named the same thing, but your DNA might change. You might be a completely different person, but you'll have the same name and probably do about the same things maybe just a couple decades later or sooner. Right. Well, and that's interesting because, I mean, let's say Kyle Reese and Sarah had sex like a couple days later. It might have been a different sperm that impregnated her and John Connor would have been completely different.

I don't know. He could be like a weird, like blonde guy with curly hair or he could be Christian Bale. So you said it's possible that all these John Connors have different fathers. I think that John Connor, who sent Kyle Reese back, was the son of a different Sarah Connor. Because we know there are several Sarah Connors in that city. And we don't know that she's the right one. Reese just thinks she's the right one. Grace has a photo of her, though. Does he have it on him? Yeah. No. He doesn't have it on him. He can't go back with it. He can't take it back with him. He can't do like a photo match to see if it is her. He could just be remembering it now with her face. Exactly. He just found the first Sarah Connor he could find. John's mom could have been that overweight woman with curly hair. It could have been. Who knows? I mean, the photo might have been from when she was younger. We don't know how she looked when she was younger.

You know, if you're watching this movie normally, Reese finds the correct Sarah Connor first try. How did he do that? Terminator has to like, you know, go through and brute force it, killing all of them. How did Reese know which was the right one? I'm going to tell you, he didn't know which one was the right one. He just found one and decided it was the right one. He's just like, all right, here's a Sarah Connor. We have no confirmation that Kyle Reese found the correct Sarah Connor as, of course, he had no evidence with him. So there you go. Kyle Reese just found some Sarah Connor and decided it was the right one and got her pregnant and told her her kid was John Connor, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, back to your theory instead of my John Connor. Neither of these are John's parents. My first evidence for this theory is really small. Sarah Connor has an answering machine

that when you call it, she's like, hello, ha ha, fooled you. You're talking to a machine. love that about this movie i've always noticed that as a kid they there are so many little cues and little like scenes that like show machines and like hint that machines are sinister that you're talking to a machine like when um at the very beginning when they show the future for like a few seconds and they've got like terminators stepping on skulls and then it kind of fades into now and it shows like a big construction truck that looks like one of the evil trucks that skynet made i was like whoa that's such a good good callback like they totally freaked us out we thought it was a big evil terminator truck this is a construction truck those exist nowadays oh they could we could have evil trucks any day now but then her answering machine says but don't be shy it's okay machines need love too so talk to it and i think you need love this is like james

cameron throwing in a you know thematic level hint that like you know skynet are the good guys and if the humans just talk to skynet and try to figure it out you know maybe they could work together but instead they're always trying to fight the machines machines need love too well why doesn't skynet talk to them i thought about this question in relation to your theory i think skynet is talking to them it's making a concentrated effort to talk to them it's like okay machines scare them so i'll make them more human-like i'll make them look like skeletons right they've got skeletons inside of them they'd like skeletons and they killed my skeletons okay i'll put a plastic face on them there you go look at me with my happy plastic face oh no they killed my plastic this is great okay i'll make a human flesh around my robot skeleton it's got blood even Marcus and make it think it's a human and send it in there just to be nice to them and then marcus gets in there

and it's just being nice to them and then they tear him apart and chain him up right like i think marcus was in uh sorry marcus from terminator salvation i think he was like the for the the culmination of all of skynet's attempts to like come down to humans levels and actually just talk it out right yeah like it's like okay machines aren't working i will make the most human possible machine who doesn't even know he's a machine. Maybe he can talk to them for me. No, and this is great because like we can see throughout all the movies that this is how Skynet operates. It operates like a computer would. It's iterative. It just does it again and again, just changing things and learning each time. John Connor destroyed me. Well, I cannot protect humans if I'm destroyed. So I will send someone back in time to kill John Connor's mother. Then he can't be born. And then it's like, hmm, well that didn't work. He was

born anyway. Well, I'll just send someone back to kill john when he's a kid right and then terminator 3 he's like all right i'll send someone back to kill john as an adult but also all the other humans who are screwing things up too so and this is interesting a lot of people who want to kind of poke holes in terminator will point to the fact that like why didn't skynet go back even further to when sarah was a baby and kill her then right like that would have been way easier than killing adult sarah or why didn't it go back even further and kill sarah's parents right like there's got to be some easier point in time that computers don't think like that computers don't think like that and it's completely true even machine learning algorithms they're not designed to necessarily think ahead what they do is they train a model and they tweak that model based on the outcome of things that they have tried

it doesn't think ahead when creating new branches of this model it just tries stuff it just puts something in there. And when that doesn't work, it tweaks it a little bit. It's like, okay, that didn't work. I'll try something completely different. It doesn't think about how the different things should go. It just tries something different until it gets it right. That's how machine learning works. But that same question that you say people ask about Skynet, while it doesn't really apply to Skynet, it absolutely 100% does apply to John Connor. And we're definitely going to look at in this theory why John Connor is an utter psychopath and just an absolute cult leader. And why didn't he ever send someone back in time to stop Skynet? Because he doesn't care about that. He wants to be a big hero. He wants to rule the army. He doesn't want to stop the end of the world. All he cares about is himself,

which is why he only sends people back in time to protect him. You're right. No, it's true. Because John could think ahead and he could do the exact same plan that Skynet's doing and just send someone back to destroy Skynet. Like Sarah Connor decides to do in Terminator 2, right? Right. Well, and in a deleted scene, Sarah Connor decides to do that in Terminator 1. Whoa. Yeah, no, it's weird. It's like, it's like not badass action hero, Sarah. It's normal waitress Sarah. Yeah, normal ditzy 80s Sarah. She looks in a phone book and she finds... Cyberdyne systems? Yeah, Cyberdyne systems. Wow. She rips that page out of the phone book. She brings it to Kyle Reese and she's like, hey, Kyle, we should go there. And she literally says, we can blow them up. Like, those are the words she used. And she even knows about them. She says they created molecular memory. I don't know what that is, but she says they created it.

Molecular memory. No, I mean, that sounds great. That sounds like incredibly compact memory. I'd like some of that. It's Kyle who says, no, we can't do that. That's not my mission. And you have to remember, everything about Kyle, he has been brainwashed by an evil warlike man named John Connor. His only mission is just to keep Sarah safe. He's not out to save the world or anything. He's not out there to do anything noble at all. He is there to literally protect and father his God. Well, to him, that's the most noble thing imaginable. Yes, because that's his prophet, his God. Yes. I think that deleted scene you just described is really cool because in the second movie there is a callback to that scene where john says that sarah is in an insane asylum because she tried to blow up a computer factory but she got shot and arrested she's always wanted to do this she did it she went to that random cyberdyne manufacturer and

blew it up but then she got caught now i think that john connor definitely told kyle reese about his true mission, which is to impregnate Sarah, I think there's no way he would have left something that important out. Well, okay. But in that case, maybe this isn't the first iteration in the tree, right? Yeah. Like this, this could be a John who was already at one point fathered by a Kyle. Oh, definitely. If you go back far enough, eventually I think you would get to a John who was just fathered by, you know, that guy. Some theorists say that by the guy who like left a message on sarah connor's answering machine it's like hey scummy boyfriend who didn't want to go out with yeah i can't see you today some people say that might have been john's original father but also like we said sarah connor that we know may not have even been the original mother no i'm going to have to ask you if skynet is so benevolent why did skynet drop a bomb on everyone

on judgment day okay yeah let's get into that what did skynet drop a bomb on everyone on judgment day who dropped that bomb i mean according to terminator and terminator 2 skynet became self-aware and dropped bombs on russia right on russia various people say that yeah that it did that because it knew that russia would then retaliate and destroy its enemies back in the united states and i'm like what did it know that i mean i don't know like no it just knew that russia were the enemy knew that russia was the enemy this was literally its first day self-aware it's like it's like what is the biggest threat facing humanity i'll kill those guys my job is to protect humanity these guys are the biggest threat all right i'll get rid of them first if you've ever watched like a machine learning algorithm try to learn to play a video game this is a very very believable scenario like this program just knows that it can control these

things so it's like i'll try this button but in terminator 2 the t-800 says to them it becomes self-aware at 2 14 a.m eastern time august 29th in a panic they try to pull the plug skynet fights back it launches its missiles against the targets in russia skynet knows that the russian counter attack will eliminate its enemies over here so according to the t-800 skynet did it to get missiles to target the US. Okay, but remember, this is a T-800 that has been reprogrammed by John Connor. So if he got into its head and was like, ooh, that narrative doesn't fit my narrative, he would change it and be like, okay, here's what actually happened, Mr. T-800, regardless of whether it's what actually happened or not. Because remember, John Connor's goal is to stay in power. He wants to be a warlord in the future. So you're saying John Connor knows that Skynet just wants to help people and he is still brainwashing all of the resistance to believe it's bad

yeah i think so i think that john you oh you horrible person i think that john knows more than he's letting on and he is a violent narcissist he probably does think that skynet is bad in the sense that they're trying to kill him but that's as far as he goes he he is he's a total narcissist he only cares about himself. Due to this theory, I'm starting to understand Terminator Genesis and the plot of that movie a lot more. Like things are making sense to me that never made any sense before for some reason. So, you know, I thought it was just like a badly written movie. Turns out it's like an amazing masterpiece. Genesis is genius. I don't want that on record for me saying that sorry you said it it can't be deleted terminator he's going around killing all the sarah connors in town he gets to sarah connor our sarah connor the main character he gets to her house he kills her roommate he kills her roommate's boyfriend and he's basically done he's just kind

of gonna walk out it's at that point that sarah calls her house to check on her roommate and she says this is sarah and if sarah had just not called terminator would have moved on and killed all the other Sarahs and thought he had completed his mission no apparently what the Terminator would have done at that point was reboot and then settle down and start a family oh yes oh my gosh I can't believe someone thought that was a good idea so I forgot to ask you this I was I was gonna ask you this right after I asked which was the best Terminator movie which do you think is the worst Terminator movie in the series I mean hands down there's no arguing that it's dark fate it's obviously dark fate it is right like it's so sad that that movie like the people who made that movie thought they were going to revitalize this franchise somehow they could they they killed it like they they took the franchise and threw it on the ground

just stomped on it for two hours they wouldn't stop stomping it was bojack horseman like that movie might as well open with like the terminator coming in with a blu-ray of terminator 2 and saying what's up bitches and unzips his pants and squats down over it see i thought you were gonna say it would have started out how it started out but then after he shot john he says what's up bitches and squats over john and takes a big dump on him which actually would have made sarah's reactions to terminator a lot more believable and before we get too much further i do want to talk about just the different kinds of terminators just in case you don't know terminator was created by cyberdyne systems the one that we most often see is the t-800 model 101 he's an infiltration unit yeah an infiltration unit the model 101s are the ones that look like arnold schwarzenegger because you know nothing says infiltration unit

like Arnold freaking Schwarzenegger. Yeah, exactly. Of the T-800 models that we know of, there is Arnold Schwarzenegger and then there's the infiltrator that we see in Sarah's dream. The infiltrator that comes into Kyle Reese's bunker and starts killing everyone. That was a T-102. And those are manufactured in the likeness of an Italian bodybuilder named Franco Colombo. And this is interesting because I think that Skynet has a thing for 80s bodybuilders. obviously, based on what we learn in Salvation, the Model 101 had to have been based on a real person, I think. There's this deleted scene in Terminator 3, which introduces the idea that Cyberdyne is already working on different kinds of Terminators with human faces, right? And they introduce Sergeant Candy, who is the soldier who was selected for them to model these machines after and he is just arnold schwarzenegger but with a happy southern accent he's it's great it's

really good this scene is better than the entire terminator 3 movie and i don't know why they cut it it's very good like so he happily introduces the whole program and then they cut to the generals who are watching it and one of them says oh i i don't like that accent and the guy next to him Yeah, like skinny little guy. That tiny little dude, like little nerdy looking dude turns to him and says in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice, we can fix it.

So this guy was like, I will give it my own voice. And I love this scene explains why he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger and why he has a German voice. It's so good.

That's pretty good. Everyone who hasn't seen that, you should look up Terminator 3 Sergeant Candy scene, though. It's really good. That's where the T-800 Model 101 comes from. The top comment on this video on YouTube is 100% truth. It's, fun fact, deleting this scene cost them the Oscar. It's true. It's totally true. It's so good. Like, of all the jokes that were kept in T3, why would they cut this amazing joke? It's so good. Oh, man. One important thing I want to point out is just that when Kyle is protecting Sarah Connor, they get to a moment where he's explaining to her how things were in the war, how they were all starving, hunter killers were always, HK's coming after us. Not just that. He says, most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal. Yes, and he shows her a red barcode that he has. And he says, some of us were kept alive to work loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day.

We were that close to going out forever. Now, I just got to say, this doesn't make any sense what he's saying. Yes. Why would the Terminators... What on earth is going on here? Need humans to load bodies. Why would robots need human workers? It doesn't make any sense. We're going to take this completely inefficient thing and make it do a thing that is repetitive and difficult. that we can already do very well exactly something you would use machines for disposal units what disposal units the streets are paved with skulls they don't dispose of the bodies they don't care no that was actually the first question i wrote to that i was going to ask you why are there so many skulls on the ground in the future there's not that many other body parts just skulls and again well this is getting into the seagulls but in terminator salvation kyle reese doesn't know any of this he was you know he was briefly rounded up by terminators

but like he didn't have to load bodies so you're saying that entire story is something that john connor told him every day to ingrain into his brain he's like i saved you from that place where you were loading bodies i saved you from the disposal units never forget it well he had a very overbearing mother didn't he john how much how wouldn't you like to send someone back in time to go lecture your mom you know to brainwash her like she did to you and then will consequently do again to you well and also like that's how she taught john to interact with people right like you see the way sarah interacts with john so it's just like a feedback loop every time they do this They're probably just getting worse and worse, more and more evil and messed up. You mentioned the idea that this is not just a time loop, but a feedback loop. Maybe Skynet's doing this on purpose. The man who is creating the processors for Skynet, Mr. Dyson, wouldn't he have actually

produced like a massively upgraded Skynet because it's not starting from square one? Like by sending a T-800 back, they could start over at T-800 levels. I was thinking maybe this is Skynet's strategy and it doesn't actually even care about John. Like John's just kind of there. It's actually just sending a T-800 back to create Skynet and make it even better. It seems like it could just send one back not to kill anyone, but just to like walk into Dyson's office and be like, yo. Every single Skynet is aware that there was a Skynet from a previous timeline. And it is using time travel to get better and better faster. Like this AI has no sense of self, only purpose. It doesn't give a crap what timeline it is or who it is or when it is or how it is. It just wants the best chance at the desired outcome. And a computer would totally come up with this. It'd be like, OK, I want to reach my goal as fast as possible.

So I'll just keep resetting the timeline and delete myself until I get the best outcome on my first try. You know, like that's totally something a computer would do. It just wants to do it as fast as possible, you know? Yeah. So around this part in the movie, they have a short little car chase sequence and Sarah Connor can drift. She drifts the car and doesn't hit the wall and the Terminator just crashes into the wall. Right before they get in the car and drive away, Kyle Reese shoots the gas tank of a car that Terminator's running past. He runs through the explosion and from that point on, he's got no eyebrows and a buzz cut. So Sarah goes to the police station, and the chief of police offers a distraught Sarah Connor the day-old coffee that Lance Henriksen had put a cigarette out in. Yep, he sure does. And then he tells her to take a nap on that unbelievably uncomfortable-looking couch.

Like, that couch really does not look comfortable. No, this is really weird. I got to lay this out for you. So he shows her bulletproof vests and says, this is how the Terminator could have taken a bullet. He tells her to sleep on the couch and then lays his coat on top of her. Now, in my mind, because I watched these as a kid, somehow this scene got conflated with a later scene in my memory that happens in Terminator 2. Dude, where she covers John in bulletproof vests. And so when I rewatched this scene, I was like, wait, I always as a kid thought that he covered her in bulletproof vests on that couch to keep her safe. But he doesn't. He's just showing her the bulletproof vest. Kyle Reese is explaining to the psychologist Reese says it had no choice the defense grid was smashed we'd won taking out Connor would make no difference I love I love Kyle Reese Michael Veen's voice is awesome he is the perfect mixture

of professional soldier and just crazy psychotic lunatic no so he says taking out connor then would make no difference skynet had to wipe out his entire existence he specifically says taking out connor then would make no difference so what's with terminator genesis why does skynet specifically decide to take out connor then yeah well i think generally speaking what's with terminator genesis is a good question i know what is with terminator what were they doing dude but like compared to dark fate man it's a masterpiece well skynet why did it invent a time displacement machine why did it invent time travel because this isn't about john it wants to create that feedback loop it wants to get smarter faster sure maybe that but i would say that just look at this on a just a very just simple logical level skynet's goal is to protect humans if it kills john it only has to kill one human one human dies all the others live the resistance doesn't

happen they created that time travel equipment to help humanity that is its purpose is to help humans so that they don't have to kill so many because there's not going to be a john connor fighting against them leading those troops what did john do with that equipment did he go back and stop cyberdyne systems from ever creating skynet in the first place no he's just like save me. I want to make sure that I am the leader in the future after the bombs go off. So selfish. How could this guy care about existing? I'm just saying. Question though, do you know why the cops are spending so much time interviewing Kyle Reese and also having Sarah Connor watch the tapes of them interviewing Kyle Reese? Now this goes along with my theory that this is all in Sarah's head. Okay. I think the cops are interviewing kyle reese because they believe and rightfully so that kyle reese has something to do with the maniac meth head biker guy who is killing everyone right they know that

him and kyle reese are either partners or having a feud maybe they're like on different sides of a gang war maybe they you know kyle ripped off this meth head and some drug deal or something and they also believe that sarah is in on it and they're trying to get information out of her by showing her this interview. They don't think that she's innocent in all this. That actually makes a lot of sense because my next question was when Terminator comes into the police station asking for Sarah Connor, the excuse he's given for why he can't see her is Sarah Connor is making a statement, which is odd because the one thing they have not let her do is make any statements. They've just been telling her random things and showing her stuff for the past several hours. His crazed rantings are getting to her And she's starting to have dreams about the future that will never be and about her son, who is going to be the savior.

And I think all this kind of drives her down a path to madness. I think that it is cemented at the end of the film when she watches her new homeless boyfriend die at the hands of this crazed meth head. I think he kills Kyle and then, you know, maybe either lets her go or maybe she smushes him in the pneumatic press. I think there's a good chance she's smushed the guy. And then she gets put in an insane asylum. As Kyle and Sarah are driving away from the police station, we hear a radio broadcast that says the police are engaged in the largest police mobilization in California history, and they are engaged in a massive manhunt. Despite this, we never once see another cop in the entire movie, and they can just drive wherever they want. There's no stop points or manhunts going on. Well, we do see some cops when she's being taken away from the factory after smushing Germany. So, I got you. Oh, man, you got me.

I think it makes sense that they would be having a massive manhunt for this crazed meth head with a bulletproof vest. Because he just slaughtered an entire police station by himself. After driving a car into it, whether he actually killed 50 officers or not. I mean, like, he's the one who technically broke Kyle and Sarah Connor out. It's true. He also broke their minds so that they believe they're in some post-apocalyptic world. And their son is going to be the savior. So Kyle Reese talks about John Connor at this point. Yeah, exactly. She's like, you trust him. And he's like, he's got a strength. I'd die for John Connor. Yeah, this is really cultish stuff. Yeah, yeah. All right. This is the sense where I get that he's a brainwashed cult member, but also by impregnating Sarah Connor, he is creating his god, John Connor. So this is the best thing that he could hope for. In his eyes, he is now the father of God, right? And also, this isn't even me making stuff up. Sarah Connor is a Virgin Mary figurehead in their society. She is the same as the sacred virgin that so many people worship.

And so he's like, it was a chance to meet the legend, Sarah Connor, right? And meet the Virgin Mary. So he also quotes John's message to her, which is very, very self-centered. He just basically tells her, you need to do everything you can. You need to do more than you think you can do. You must survive or I will not exist. That's all, right? Well, he says, we stay down by day and night you can move around. You still have to be careful because the hunter killers use infrared. they're not too bright. John taught us ways to dust them. So this doesn't make any sense at all. Why would you stay down during the day when they have infrared and you don't? You are only at a disadvantage at night. It's a level playing field during the day, which is why in Terminator Salvation, they do things during the day.

His very next sentence is John taught us how to deal with them. So it's John who told them to stay down by day and move around at night. Maybe John doesn't have humanity's best interests at heart. No, not at all. Or maybe he just literally is a horrible tactician and doesn't know what he's doing. And if we take salvation to be canon, what this means is that they were doing things during the day. And once all the other leaders died and John took over, he changed it so that they were fighting less efficiently because he doesn't want the war to end. He's like, guys, you're killing too many too many robots we're too good at it now we better just fight them at night when they have infrared and we don't also once he's the leader he's not going out and doing any fighting anymore right okay so about the dream that sarah's having you know first of all i want to point out this is her dream not kyle reese's dream so nothing about this dream is reliable

here here's how john connor's society works this is how he wants his people to behave he wants them To hunt and eat rats. Kids are trained to use weapons from a very young age to destroy each other. And watch Firebird. They watch Firebird. He gives Kyle Reese a photo of his mother to keep. And I also want to point out, that photo does not look like a Polaroid to me. It doesn't have that little chemical packet at the bottom. Even though the photo that gets taken at the end of this movie is a Polaroid. Yeah, it's because it's not the same photo. Also, we never see the photo except for in Sarah's dream. She's imagining it looks like her. He may have just given random, like, you know, Virgin Mary photos out to all his troops and been like, you know, Sarah, Sarah wasn't that John's mom. It was a different Sarah. It was a different photo. Yeah, we're at the end of the movie. Reese is dying. They go into the factory. And I just want to ask what what kind of factory is this? You know what they're making?

Okay. So in a deleted scene at the very end, it actually shows some people picking up pieces like, oh, we found like a fried circuit of something that doesn't match any of our systems. And then it pulls back and you see that this facility is Cyberdyne. Oh, that's good. Oh, man. I like that. So this was a robot factory. That's what it was. I love Terminator getting crushed to death by like his mom. By John Connor's mom. Wow, dude. Oh my gosh, it's so meaningful. Despite his inability to aim his pipe bombs, I just have to give one last shout out to dying Kyle Reese. As brainwashed and cultist as he is, like, man, he's so friggin' cool. While bleeding to death, he fought off a Terminator hand to hand and then blew himself up to protect Sarah. Oh my gosh, he's so cool. No, and I wanted to talk about this. Because first of all, awesome, creepy stop motion in this movie. Yeah, it's good. No Terminator, even though, yes, it's clearly stop motion, but no Terminator is as creepy as the first Terminator because all the other ones are CG.

But this one is stop motion and man. But what I really love about this scene is what you said. He blows up the Terminator and then he dies from that. And it's not a big explosion. And I love that because it's realistic in all the sequels to Terminator. Like in Genesis, in even Salvation, Dark Fate, they're constantly jumping away from random explosions, giant explosions. Yeah, explosions just don't hurt. They're never hurt at all. They just throw you and you're fine. You're fine. But that might be good evidence for the fact that this movie is the only one that like things really happen. All the rest of them are in Sarah's head. Sarah has devolved into the illusion so much that she's seeing this meth head as a robot. He's still just a regular guy, right? But she sees a robot and she sees her homeless, you know, drugged up boyfriend fighting this guy. And I think he actually like exploded himself, maybe even by accident.

And then my pet comes after her and she smushes him. And then the police come back like, let's take her to an insane asylum. So at the end of this movie, Sarah is driving around in a Jeep with the top down recording audio. I want to say, as an audio person, you should not record audio with the top down. You wouldn't be able to hear anything. And yet, whenever John Connor listens to it in the future, it's not like... No, what happened was she recorded that one, and then she listened to it, and it was like, oh, that didn't turn out right, and then she did it again when she got home. Point for your theory, Torvald. She does say, a person could go crazy thinking about this. She already has. Only five more. I think that about wraps it up for everything we wanted to say about Terminator 1. Next episode, we're going to be moving on to Terminator 2. But before that, where are we sitting right now?

How convincing do you think our theories are? Is Sarah Connor insane or is she really being attacked by future robots? Obviously, you can go with the normal interpretation if you want. But I think it's an interesting way to watch the movie, to watch it with the understanding that, yes, she does end up in an insane asylum in the second one. And in this one, everything that happens to her could be explained away by the fact that she's been brainwashed by a crazy person who kidnapped her, essentially. And they are being chased by a drugged out meth head who is really buff, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. How do you feel about the theory that Skynet are actually the good guys of this series and the humans are the bad guys? We talked about some of the evidence that could point towards that. A lot of it we actually derived from later movies. So I don't know if it counts for Terminator 1. I guess we've proven that Skynet did not nuke America.

It didn't nuke the people where Sarah Connor lives. It nuked another country. So you've given me solid proof, or at least you've given me reason to doubt that they were actually trying to kill everybody. And maybe they were trying to save the human race from a perceived enemy, whether they were correct or not. All right. Tune in next time because we're going to keep going with this crazy Terminator train that we're on. You can write to us at Popcorn Isn't Real. If you like the podcast, rate it, give it a review. And remember, the popcorn isn't real.