Terminator: Dark Fate

[Saintheart]

I don't agree that adult John sending Kyle back means that his future is set. Even if not sending Kyle back means there is no John Connor, he still has that choice. He could send someone else back, even though that would mean that someone else (maybe) is born instead of him. Or he could go back himself, send more than one person, etc.

I guess that comes down to which model of time travel and causality one accepts as governing any/all of the Terminator films - and indeed part of the problem is that the models seem to change across the films.

To me, T1 seems to pretty clearly imply at the end of the film that there's only one timeline that can happen, that only closed loops of causality are possible. That's the point of the picture of Sarah Connor: it's taken at the end of the film, and we know as the audience that it's the very same picture that inspires Kyle to volunteer for the mission back in time. There's even the bittersweet fact that Kyle speculates what Sarah was thinking about when that picture was taken, and the film reveals it was actually Kyle she was thinking about. Those plot points or happenings in the universe of the film are not affected by characters' beliefs or suppositions about how time travel works in their universe, they are statements of reality, which (I think) would have to trump fallible characters' beliefs.

I accept that Kyle Reese does say that the future he's from is one possible future from Sarah's frame of reference, but he immediately cuts away from that saying he doesn't know tech stuff. But what the characters believe about how time travel operates in the fictional universe does not necessarily constrain how we as the audience are meant to think it behaves, i.e. we're meant to be the objective observers with a better picture of the story and the universe than the characters in that universe have.

Kyle's message onscreen in T1 is: ""Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years. I can't help you with what you must soon face except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never exist. That's all."[/i]

So the famous 'no fate' quote never actually happened. Not on screen anyway, unless we headcanon a conversation Sarah and Kyle have in which he remembers the bit about no fate and then never references that part onscreen in T1 again. I think the simpler explanation is that Sarah misremembered John's message. As far as it goes is that John Connor says the future is not set. You could also argue he's had the advice of the same techs Kyle Reese has spoken to in saying that. What I think works best is that, simply put, Kyle, John, and the techs have it wrong: they might believe they are only one of many possible futures from Sarah's point of reference, but the reality of the universe as revealed to us by what happens onscreen is that there's only one timeline. There are only closed timeloops, and even if you're a superintelligent AI and try to act to prevent your killer's birth, all you're going to do by dint of even trying to prevent your killer's birth is actually cause your killer to be born in the first place. Had the Terminator not been sent back, Kyle would not have had to go back after him, and John Connor would not have been born. Either that, or John is trying to fool Sarah into thinking the future isn't set so as not to deprive her of all hope, thus giving her the drive to survive and go on to give birth to him.

As said, T2 seems to operate on a different model of causality, the first point in favour being that Sarah and young John refer to a message that Kyle never said in the first film. They had to take it in that direction in order to not wind up with the same tone as T1, perhaps.