Quote Originally Posted by Starbuck_II View Post
So, each movie is a different timeline because they have changed the future slightly.
But the overall message is the same.
That's my personal head canon. I always had the idea that The Terminator was not even the first time through. First time through, John Connor was just the child of Sarah and the person she ended up with from the nightclub. Then a version of the whole thing happened, with Kyle Reese going back and resetting things, now John is a different person. The events of that probably brought the time of Judgement Day forward, because of the tech existing. The next time through is the actual events of The Terminator, and that stays in place because no one goes back to before that time again (at least until Genisys). But T2 reset the timeline, giving us T3. The Sarah Connor Chronicles should have eliminated T3 from existence.
This fits (for me, at least) with the changing John Connor and Kyle Reese that Saintheart points out, and fits with what Traab had to say. I don't think Judgement Day has to happen - if they took a different approach and tried to eliminate Judgement Day by eliminating nukes or something instead of just perpetuating violence, maybe - but it would be very hard to stop, since it didn't originally come about simply because of time travel bootstrapping.