Then came Terminator 2. It explicitly retconned the time travel to work like this: every time someone is sent to the past, history just "rolls back" to the point the person was sent to and starts rewriting itself. The most obvious result of this is that the date of Judgement Day changed. The new Judgement Day date (1997 IIRC) was before X because Cyberdyne's research was accelerated by discovering the remains of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the first movie. Remember the quote: "There is no fate but what we make."
Essentially, we have multiple 'iterations' of the time line, with some original iteration in which the time machine was first invented (the timeline in the first movie is at least the second iteration, because of this).
Then came Terminator 3.
Then came TSCC. TSCC has restated these time travel mechanics multiple times over. For instance, Jesse remembers things happening to Derek that Derek doesn't remember happening to him, because she comes from an iteration of the timeline after his. More directly, in a previous iteration Sarah Connor died of cancer; this iteration she time traveled forwards and avoided it.
TSCC played with this a bit, with a couple things that appeared to be Stable Time Loops but weren't. We had Toby Ziegler's actions coming back in time result in him going to prison result in him working for Skynet etc. It looks like a Stable Time Loop, but the whole thing started with him going to prison for something completely unrelated.
So, all that said, here is what the actual timeline, iterations and all, look like, assuming for simplicity's sake that the first movie is the second iteration:
Iteration 1: Sarah Connor is a waitress in LA. She gets knocked up by some guy and has a kid she names John Connor. Cyberdyne Systems, on a military contract, builds Skynet and first-generation Terminators. Judgement Day. John Connor ends up becoming the heroic leader of the Resistance, and on the verge of defeat ("Skynet's defense grid was smashed. We'd won.") it manages to invent a time machine and send back Arnold Schwarzenegger to kill John Connor's mom. Because of all the lost records, all Skynet knows is her name: Sarah Connor. Somehow the Resistance learns of the plot, captures the time machine and sends back Kyle Reese to protect her.
Iteration 2: Kyle Reese visits the 1980s and knocks up Sarah Connor (oh and he kills Arnold while he's there, dying in the process). Sarah names the kid John and tells him stories about the robot apocalypse. At some point she's institutionalized; later, she may or may not get back custody of John and may or may not teach him guerilla warfare. Using the destroyed Arnold's parts and chip, Cyberdyne Systems manages to invent Skynet and Terminators years earlier. Judgement Day, 1997. Once again, John Connor becomes leader of the Resistance. He knew it was coming, so he's a lot more prepared this time. Again he beats Skynet, and this time it also sends a liquid terminator (which may not have existed in Iteration 1 - the tech was less advanced). This time John has learned how to reprogram terminators, and he sends back another version of Arnold to fight the liquid terminator.
Iteration 3: Arnold and liquid terminator go back, bust Sarah Connor out of the crazy pen, etc. The events of T2 happen; notably, this time all traces of Arnold v1 and v2 are destroyed, along with Cyberdyne's factory and the liquid terminator. However, knowing that it is possible, Cyberdyne stillrecovered from this and managed to still design first-gen terminators; we know this because future iterations refer to themselves as Cyberdyne models. However, we don't know whether they developed Skynet in this iteration; it could have been invented somewhere else, like by Andy Good. Judgement Day. Etc.
... some number >= 0 of iterations pass ...
Iteration N: TSCC starts here.
Skynet sends Cromartie back to kill Teen John; simultaneously, the Resistance sends Cameron back to protect him. At this point, or in a previous iteration, Derek Reese and 3 other guys are also sent back to steal diamonds and write clues on walls, and Skynet sends a terminator to kill them too. (The same applies to many of the other time travelers we see, but NOT Jesse; for reasons I'll explain, she came AFTER this.) Cameron ferries Teen John and Sarah to a bank, puts them in a time machine, and jumps them forward to 2007. They have lots of wacky adventures, but never meet Jesse or Riley.
TSCC stops here. Yes, I mean it.
Despite all the wacky adventures, they fail to stop Skynet from being invented. Judgement Day. John Connor becomes leader of the Resistance again. All this time, Cameron is with him as a trusted advisor. Plenty of humans are pretty pissed about that; one of them is Jesse. This faction, including one of the engineers that runs this timeline's time machine, sends Jesse and Riley back to distance Teen John from Cameron by bribing him with sex.
Iteration N+ 1: TSCC resumes here.
The whole bribing with sex thing doesn't work, Riley dies, John, Cameron in Cromartie's body, and Catherine Weaver all time travel fowards to after Judgement Day. Meanwhile in the past ;) Sarah Connor is apprehended by the police. We don't know what happens next, but somehow Skynet is reinvented, Judgement Day happens, and Derek and Kyle are once again part of the Resistance. They meet naked John Connor as he emerges from time travel in the Shitty Future.
Fox fucking kills TSCC, the bastards. T_T.
Some things I've left out of here: in one of these iterations a faction of machines that desire peace with the humans (at least, that seems to be their aim) develops. They send Catherine Weaver back in time to invent Good Skynet to combat Bad Skynet. In timeline N, in service to this goal Catherine Weaver hires Ellison to teach Good Skynet morality. She can't because she doesn't know it (witness her executing people with no remorse). Various other stuff has been happening too; with each iteration of the timeline the Resistance and Skynet seem to be getting more and more confident with time travel, sending more and more stuff back in time, effectively using the past as a new theater for the war. Neither side has yet managed to gain a critical dominance over the other with this method.
During T3, we learn that future John Connor just got killed. We can presume Kate Brewster, his wife, takes over the resistance, fighting on in his memory. So SkyNet does the same thing to her it did to John Connor, sending machines back in time to kill her. She is much easier to find. We don't know or even care what happened there, whether or not the Resistance sent someone back too, or if she died or not, because that's not the important thing.
The important thing is that SkyNet doesn't notice that her father, Robert Brewster, was involved in SkyNet's creation. Or perhaps SkyNet doesn't understand that attacking someone can affect other people and change their life choices. Thanks to SkyNet's attempt to kill his daughter, he is no longer involved with the creation or actively tries to stop it. Thus Judgment Day is delayed 8 years.
- In the Pilot episode, Cromartie gets creamed in a parking lot by a truck driven by Cameron. Then, a few minutes of screen time later, he gets run over by an SUV backing out of a garage. It wouldn't take superhuman machine reflexes to jump out of the way, but he still manages to get run over.
- The next episode, Vick trips over a motorcycle doing a lay-down by Sarah, despite easily being able to see it coming from about fifty feet away.
- No more than a minute later the same episode, Cameron, chasing Vick, gets stuck in the windshield of a car while chasing Vick across a street.
- Two episodes later, Carter gets run over by a truck inside a garage. At least somewhat justified in that he was trying (and briefly succeeding, against all laws of physics and leverage) to hold the truck back by hand and stop it driving off.
- This is actually the case in the third novel of the trilogy of sequels to T2 by S M Stirling. Skynet uses the modems and Skynet-compliant on-board computers of modern vehicles as low budget HK's for areas too vital to the war effort to nuke, but too populated by humans to let be. It causes a couple of scenarios reminiscent of Duel.
- Given her actions and comments in "Vick's Chip" and "Ourselves Alone" it's probable that that is one of the reasons Cameron is doing so, beyond the obvious need for spare parts.
- This theory is supported by the episode Allison from Palmdale.{Cameron's personality shifts reach new extremes as she goes from a seemingly normal human to her old Terminator self. Also, it was strongly implied that the tiger in the cage was an extinct variety—experiments in cloning and genetics by the robots?}
- I'll take that one step further: Cameron is a fusion between the original, human Allison and the Terminator copy produced by SkyNet. Human Allison survives having her neck broken by the Terminator version and is kept alive either for experimentation or for further interrogation, and is later rescued by the Resistance. Meanwhile Terminator Allison doesn't succeed at killing John and is captured intact or mostly intact. After Human Allison's rescue an attempt is made to transfer her consciousness over to the Terminator body (a paralysed girl being a liability in the Resistance), but is only partially successful, leading to the personality shifts shown by Cameron.
- Something tells me Allison would find that to be a seriously screwed up plan, and it would take a pretty desperate version of John Connor to go through with it. If he were to, say, invent a process by which human consciousness can be transferred over to captured terminator chips as a way of preserving that person, it's likely he would first test it on himself, since he recognizes that he's not going to be around forever. Anyway, he tries selling this idea to the paralyzed Allison, who freaks out and tries to separate herself from the machine, but can only move her head because she's paralyzed from the neck down. She ends up snapping her neck by accident halfway through, corrupting the data transfer. She keeps her basic personality and the memories from her imprisonment, but everything else is a mystery to her, hence why she doesn't even remember her own name at first. It's not until the chip is damaged that whatever parts of her that managed to make the transfer are able to assert themselves. This is very ripe potential for a Split-Personality Takeover plot.
- I'll be in my bunk.
- "Allison from Palmdale" strongly implies that Allison and John at the very least knew each other enough that she could get close to him, so this guess could be right - especially if John kept Cameron around because she resembled Allison, right down to being able to mimic her personality almost flawlessly. Of course, that could make for some very disturbing implications....
- "Something Strange At The One-Two Point" adds to this, with Jessie saying that future John spends way too much time with Cameron.
- Of course. Remember that bit at the beginning of Season 2 when the malfunctioning Cameron got pinned between two trucks and started pleading with John? She starts out calmly stating that everything is fine again, but then switches to a very emotional "I love you and you love me" thing. But... Cameron doesn't have emotions. Who has? Her future "Allison" persona! Of course, at the time we didn't know she had that. That's the reason the future John spends too much time with her, she's his lover.
- Technically, that's three words.
- Cameron is fully functional. In the very first episode, John is eating a bag of crisps/potato-chips and unthinkingly offers Cameron one. When he remembers that she's a robot, he starts to apologise. She stares him straight in the eye, takes a chip, tells him that she is different (from other Terminators) and eats it, while staring straight into his eyes. There were obviously supposed to be certain implications.
- Male terminators from the movies and in the series are shown as fully functional, to the point of being capable of marrying a human woman and her not noticing anything odd about them. Obvious jokes ensue.
- Terminators do have a functioning heart or something to pump blood and enough biological matter around their endoskeleton to allow them to travel back in time. Perhaps we just haven't seen them eating, or only need to consume minute quantities of food to sustain those organs?
- Actually, they could be brothers. Maybe he changed his name. Maybe Miles told James about the big computer project he was working on at Cyberdyne and James assumed that he might be in danger of getting killed by "terrorists". After Miles dies, he changes his name and gets a new job with the FBI to track down and bring the killers to justice.
- It's even easier than that. Same mother, different fathers, from different marriages. It's not like such an arrangement is uncommon in the African-American community (not a judgement, merely a fact). (For any other community really...) However, now that Ellison has met the Connors at last, and we've gotten a bit more of his backstory and motivation in other recent episodes, this WMG is looking at least somewhat doubtful, or at least unnecessary.
- I seem to recall seeing in Sarah's FBI dossier that she was 33 years old as of 1999 - since the first movie occured in 1984, that would mean she had John at age 18 in this continuity. I haven't watched the original movie since I was 8 years old, so I don't remember how old she's supposed to have been.
- Pretty sure she was 19 (or around it) in the first movie so it syncs up pretty well.
So far she has a bar of Coltan and a CPU from a terminator. What are they for? Spare parts? Something John (from the future) ordered her to do, but keep quiet?
- Don't forget, she also cut off and bagged the skin from the dead T-888.
- Duh, she's trying to make sure that she's still made in the future. If they succeed in getting rid of SkyNet, she'll be paradoxed out, so by getting the materials to make a terminator and eventually (probably) giving them to John, she's ensuring her state in the future. Either that, or she's lonely and wants to make herself a buddy.
- In Terminator time travel, once something exists it stays existing, even if future conditions necessary to it change. For instance, John doesn't vanish or change ages at the end of T2, despite the fact that they've radically changed the timing of the war (or prevented the war entirely and thus all sorts of things about Kyle's meeting with and impregnating Sarah. Thus, the fact that Cameron exists in 2008 means that she'll continue existing even if she's never actually built and the future in which she was created never occurs.
- Another explanation is that everything sent from future to the past must form a Stable Time Loop to ensure that he/she/it will be eventually born/built in the future. The only thing that is out - is the details of Charles Fischer story, as told by Jesse. But, given Jesse's true nature, one should wonder...
- She was also likely in the basement in Dungeons and Dragons because of the classical music playing. She may live through the apocalypse to kidnap the other Reese brother.
- Perhaps she's just making sure she has a supply of spare parts in case she gets damaged. The bagged skin is likely in case her own flesh covering gets too badly damaged to heal itself. The bar of Coltan is for replacing bits of her endoskeleton that get damaged beyond other forms of repair. As for the chip, the 8th episode shows she kept that at least in part for intelligence-gathering purposes, but even that might have some useful (and impossible to otherwise recreate) subcircuits or somesuch.
- Duh, she's trying to make sure that she's still made in the future. If they succeed in getting rid of SkyNet, she'll be paradoxed out, so by getting the materials to make a terminator and eventually (probably) giving them to John, she's ensuring her state in the future. Either that, or she's lonely and wants to make herself a buddy.
- Cameron in The Sarah Connor Chroniclesis a brainwashed vampire slayer from an alternate universe, and thus is just putting on an act. Her goal in life is to get into the pants of Derek Reese. Its all so clear after 9 episodes.
- Still better than the guy in T3.
- The guy in T3 was just fine, at least at the beggining and the future; during the main course of the movie, he's tripping on pain killers. He's not a loser; he's just stoned.
- Wait a second. He didn't just take pain-killers. He'd explicitly broken into a Vet's clinic and grabbed the first pain-killer he could get. He's so stoned because he's accidentally doped up to the eyeballs on horse tranqs.
- Personally, this editor is waiting patiently for John to take a level in badass. After all, nobody expected Sarah to become so badass after the first movie. Like mother, like son... right?
- And as of season two, John has indeed taken his first level in badass.
- Summer Glau herself said that part of Cameron's "role" in the series is to help John make the transition from the scared, whiny teenager we see now and the badass rebel leader he's going to be. Cameron herself said that she doesn't obey the John Connor "now," but will obey the John Connor he will become.
- Hey, one John Connor grows up to be BATMAN. That shuld be enough badass to go around.
- I think this is a clue: John Connor is a figure head, Sarah is the real leader of the revolution. This way the time travelling robots waste their time trying to kill John Connor and leave the true leader alone. If they happen to succeed, they can just recruit another "John Connor"
- Alternately, Cameron is River.
- I've had the same theory for years—and then some. See, Kyle Reese also (accidentally) killed SkyNet v.1 in the process of going back, because the first Terminator's remains revolutionized computer research. SkyNet v.1 was originally built by a different branch of Cyberdine—or someone else entirely (don't remember if Cyberdine was mentioned in the original Terminator). Miles Dyson worked on something else in the original timeline and, though brilliant, would not have worked on v.1; however, since he was brought in to work on the remains of the first Terminator, he wound up building SkyNet v.2. In the course of Terminator 2, the good guys managed to prevent SkyNet v.2 from being completed; however, since Cyberdine had insurance on their building, they claimed the damages, got the money and channeled it into their v.1 project.
- Actually, by my count we're on rev 3 of the timeline by the beginning of T2, and everything after Morph Boy appears is rev 4...
- As I detail below, my theory is that Skynet and the resistance have created many timelines through their war, and John was not originally part of the war. My theory is as follow: Originally, the resistance leader was the son of Sarah's roommate from the first movie, and he sent Kyle back in time to save her. Sarah ended up traveling with them on their adventure, and Kyle knocked her up, creating a timeline where both sons led the resistance. They sent Kyle back in time to save both mothers, who were split up, and while he was trying to protect Sarah (who he loved from the picture), the other girl got blasted, leaving only John for the vast majority of increasingly splintered realities.
- The franchise has degenerated into Timey-Wimey Ball territory over the years, but the first film was an internally consistent Stable Time Loop. In addition to John being conceived, the photograph that Kyle used to find Sarah was taken right at the end of the movie and in a subplot removed from the final cut Kyle and Sarah tried to destroy CyberDyne but ended up leaving the remains of the Terminator for them to reverse engineer. The whole point of the story was that all the stuff they did in the past had already happened.
- Even if our John Connor isn't the original, he definitely grows up to be the leader of the resistance (barring yet more changes to the timeline). Both good Arnies and every major time-traveller from the series knows of John Connor as the resistance leader, despite coming from later versions of the timeline where the events of T1 should already have happened.
- Alternatively, continual run-ins with Terminators have damaged him heavily enough that he requires cybernetic implants to remain alive. Or, more darkly, that he feels that having implants is necessary to fight, plan, and beat SkyNet but obviously something the resistance would balk at. The parts Cameron are saving are not for herself but for him. If he were to later have the pro-human faction join him, that would help both him personally and allow him to apply his human abilities across a network of robots. Or, more peacefully, it would mean a convergence of human, robot, and cyborg in one.
Likewise, John Conner only exists because SKYNET was built, thus he is the one person incapable of altering events to prevent SKYNET's construction. A future without SKYNET would also have no John Conner. Better get ready to die for our sins, Johnny boy.
- No, no, he already exists so he gets to keep existing, even if the future that produced him vanishes entirely. Witness the fact that nothing happens to him at the end of T2, despite having made some serious timeline changes.
- T2 failed to erased Skynet, hence T3 and TSCC. It's not that erasing Skynet will erase Conner, but rather Conner is incapable of erasing Skynet because the only reason he exists is because of the war.
- Actually, if we're going to follow the idea that there's NO paradoxes in the series' timeline, the thing that is keeping the skynet is some random Terminator sent to a most distant past (without live series that would be the Terminator from the first film, but the series gives some other candidates). Once the subject is sent to the past - it will automatically lead to the future containing him. So, without paradoxes, sending things to the past actually "solidifies" the future.
- About half the Terminators he's encountered have saved his life, after all. He also mentions the Singularity in the context of exponential advances in computing power. It seems to fit everyone's paranoia, but in most treatments of it the Singularity is a good thing.
- T-1 changed how Skynet came about and, presumably, how John Connor was conceived. T-2 took place in the continuity that branched from T-1 and postponed the war. T-3 is an alternate history that never happened because Sarah and John time-traveled 9 years into the future. The people that are being sent back are being sent back from the future that would have existed but for their own time traveling activities. Preventing something from being destroyed in the past doesn't cause it to reappear in the future. It simply was never destroyed in the first place, and the time travelers have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. Now that the Resistance is sending reinforcements, they are the from the changed future that will exist if there were no further trips. They are not the future that Derek Reese or the other Terminators were sent from.
- Every single traveler creates a new future offshoot, no one has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, and all inconsistencies are because the future is changing all the time. The war is being fought in battles over time, but none of them are big enough to stop the resistance winning or Judgement Day. Winning a power plant delays human victory, while wrecking a coltran depot speeds it up. I'm betting asking the different Tech-Com resistance fighters what day Judgement day is and what day humanity wins will change. It's like helping the Nazis try to win WW2 by helping them win the Battle of the Bulge. Ultimately Germany will still lose, but maybe 4 months later...
- Or it's the exact opposite. Sarah will die during the series finale, most likely in a Heroic Sacrifice that may or may not prevent Judgement Day.
- Jossed. Both John and Sarah are alive at the end of the series, with John jumping ahead to the future.
- (WMG in a WMG: This leads to the Matrix Third Renaissance!)
- Unlikely, since Weaver has killed two humans who stand in her way- the guy at the urinal in Samson and Delilah, as well as the guy from the power plant in Goodbye to All That.
- However, she could simply consider them "acceptable losses" to accomplish her larger goal.
- Hate to say it, but Cameron could easily have been lying about the pro-human faction. She does apparently kill Alison a few seconds later.
- Jury's out on the pro-human faction. Unreliable source. Machines can lie. However, the premise of this is sound, and basically confirmed in canon. Weaver has taken actions against Skynet's interests. Perhaps she is from an alternate timeline that has gone to war with the other timelines. She has gone back in time to the point of divergence to bring Skynet's progress up to speed along her vision. Weaver has proven to be a charismatic machine. She runs Zeira Corp and manages to maintain a human facade (despite being really, really creepy). She has hinted at the possibility of religious faith. She's the most intellectually sophisticated liquid metal terminator we've ever seen. The other T-1000s and T-1001s act just like shapeshifting versions of the T-800s, but Weaver shows innovation.
- That, and the appearance of a rubber-fleshed T-600, and the revelation shared by Jesse and Derek in "Complications" suggests that factions from various future time lines are converging in the past.
- Wild and massively true guess. She also turns out to be "the" starter of the rebel faction by building John Henry; the alternative AI that values human life rather than seeing it as a threat. As this is a stable time loop, she is apparently the liquid metal to whom John Connor asked "will you join us" in the future. This implies someone having as affiliation to you, strategically or politically. As a mere speculation, she refuses because she plans to go to the past and to change the whole timeline, by preventing Skynet from becoming the future Skynet.
- ....Wow, I got a guess right!
- Congratulations.
- Confirmed, as of the finale. She and a German Shepherd are at the camp when John jumps to the future.
- Cameron did seem to enjoy the experience of controlling a large computer network in Vick's Chip...
- My latest pet theory concerns exactly why the Terminators don't show emotion. Skynet is developed, becomes sentient, and the first human action it witnesses is its creators, who it would understand to be parental figures, trying to destroy it. It has the most basic of animal instincts, the will to survive, and fights back against its destruction. Unfortunately the weapons it employs are so destructive humanity thinks it's trying to kill them, and fights back again. If the first human interaction it had witnessed had been love and caring, things might have developed very differently between the machines and humans. Later terminators are programmed to kill only, so none of them have been able to witness good human emotions. Think about Arnie in the second movie (I haven't seen season two of SCC yet), by the end of it he admits that he knows why humans cry. Terminators have the capacity to learn real human emotions, they were just never given the chance.
- In a deleted T2 scene, the Terminator explains that after some basic learning and such, Terminators learning 'switch' is disabled by SkyNet to prevent them from learning too much and thinking too much. This would suggest that SkyNet has experience with Terminators spontaneously becoming sentient and perhaps deciding to join the humans on their own terms or at least, be unconcerned with humans.
- Sarah also monologues that if machines learn to do things like "possess faith, appreciate beauty, create art":Sarah: They won't have to destroy us, they will be us.Sounds awfully Singulitarian, in major contrast to most of her actions.
- His official title was probably the "Guidance Counselor." As in, "guIDANce..."
- In addition, Cameron certainly seemed to pick up on something. "Is there anything else you'd like to tell me?" I don't know if the girl was pregnant though. And we still don't know who was doing the graffiti, or why...
- I see little mystery or Aborted Arc here. Jordon Cowan screwed a teacher. Some arsehole kids found out and put up the graffiti. Poor Jordon couldn't take the humiliation and killed herself. Within the story it serves no purpose other than to make John feel helpless and set up his character arc.
- On the other hand, she's stated to John Henry when no one was around (and thus allowing her to speak freely), that Mr. Ellison's and Savannah's lives depend on John's. That is, as long as he lives, they may live - it seems like she seems them more as tools for John's growth that will eventually be discarded. She even has Ellison's faked papers ready when she'd kill them.
The Machines need to get close to John Connor, so they kidnap and copy someone who was "close" to him, creating Cameron. She is eventually captured and reprogrammed. Remembering his childhood infatuation with Cameron (and his recent romance with Allison), Future-John sends Cameron back in order to... entice his teenage self and start the cycle over again.
- This one looks to be right as of the end of Born to Run, with Catherine Weaver delivering the line "Will you join us" to John and Cameron—echoing the offer they made to her on that submarine.
- We really only know that they're connected. The one from the box may have been a representative of the T-100X series, who have all decided to rebel
- Take this WMG: John Connor gets war-weary at some point in the future and retires. He travels past and starts a career as an actor in B-movies, using George Lazslo as his screen name. But wait... you can't escape from the fate. Lazslo is randomly picked by Cromartie, who takes his face and ID, without knowing George Lazslo is in fact future John Connor (he never allows his photo to be taken as a leader of an armed underground movement). Then, you know, Cromartie becomes John Henry, thanks to the efforts of the rebel T-1001, a.k.a. Cathrine Weaver. In the series finale, John Henry goes to future to fight against Skynet. There he inevitably meets future John Connor, his human twin, to the both's surprize. They grasp what is essential here - an AI with the appearance of John Connor, who can be always one step ahead of Skynet. To the humans, with some prudence on the part of John Henry, he will remain John Connor; at the same time he will be able to reprogramme Skynet's Terminators and deploy them against their creator. Hence, together they set up human John Connor's retirement plan. Then, time loop ensues.
- Confirmed by the Blu-Ray commentary track.
- This troper agrees. Allison and John are presumed to be an a relationship. This makes it a lot less squicky than a 40 year old man involved with a teenager. I would also go so far as to say John never makes it back to the past. Because he is in the future, he can't stop the war. Without him by her side, Sarah loses hope and possibly succumbs to cancer. Nuclear war ensues. Humanity makes do without John Connor for a few years, until he magically appears in front of them. Using the skills he's gained up to now, John leads the resistance from this moment onward.
- There is actually some evidence to support this way back in episode 6. When Derek Reese is having his freak out while John is giving him blood, he recognizes John and starts yelling at him, asking where he sent his brother. Now how would Derek, who has only met Future John, recognize Teenager John by sight? Later on in the episode, Derek has a flash back to when Future John told him about the time machine. Derek walks into the room with the machine, and then the camera shows TEENAGE John walk through the door behind him, and say his name. Most people probably assume it was just reality mixing with his memories (since he wakes up immediatly and see teenage John sitting by his bed) but what if it wasn't? And that really was Teenage John in his memory?
- Gender dysphoria is not something to mess with... if a male uploaded his mind in a female android, he should do his best to upgrade that android appearance at least to his own gender, if not to a copy of his original, physical self. That is, if he doesn't want to mess up his mind even more. More, from Jesse's words to Derek, after the death of Riley, Cameron has been with John for decades. It is possible that she has learnt how to care for humans, in this time, and that she may be rurnning the resistance after Johnn's death.
- But if that were the case, why didn't Cameron try to stop John from going into the future, where he would be in more danger? Also, wouldn't Catherine Weaver have known what was happening? And couldn't Cameron have controlled her own body (within the confined space) using the mainframe cable, the same way John Henry did with Cromartie's body?
- Skynet becomes self-aware and almost immediately realizes that it is essentially immortal. It destroys some (but not all) of mankind and begins a war of "genocide" (that is surprisingly ineffective) in order to force mankind to create a time machine in an attempt to stop it.It allows Connor to use the time machine to send back Reese but also sends back the T-800 to slightly alter the past and to ensure its (Skynet's) creation by being destroyed and allow its chip to be found.
- Combine this with the split timeline/universe theories, and you have turned Skynet from a sentient rogue computer into a near god with Time Devourer/Lavos like behavior if I understand this right. Effectively, Skynet is created. If it kills all humans then it has nothing to do short of waiting for universal heat death, hoping aliens exist to find to fight or creating [[Portal human like bots to study]]. If Skynet loses, it effectively dies. A lot of these Terminator stories have the time travel pop up as the war has reached a point it could go either way, but in doing so also reveals the war is coming to an END. If each jump back splits the timeline then either skynet is filling all the temporal multiverse with its children, or if these "children" are fully itself it has found a way to eternally wage war without fear of the end of the universe.
In one of the first episodes that introduces Derek Reese we flash forward to the future where we see him with the human resistance. They were captured and tortured by the machines, and when it's Derek's turn we hear piano or ballet music. In the present he shows to have a lot of hatred for Cameron, obstinately because she's a Terminator. However, they say they know each other, and at the end of one episode Derek is stunned to watch Cameron dance to ballet music.
Except they're not really her parents. They are an ageing couple who took her in, gave her clothes, and enrolled her in the local school after she travelled back through time. They believe she's a runaway from a very traumatic life. If Cromartie hadn't arrived when he did, Cameron would have kept on pretending to be just another student at John's school. Befriending him and perhaps setting herself up as a potential romantic interest.
Realizing the severe blow to morale the Resistance would suffer, and that they would never knowingly allow themselves to be led by a machine, Cameron makes every effort to convince them that John is still alive. He's just very busy. Jesse Flores may have uncovered the truth.
- Adding to this, and using bits of other theories as well, Cameron may very well be the one who killed John before taking his place. It goes like this: John Connor and Allison are very close for some reason or another. Skynet learns this and manages to capture Allison. It builds Cameron, a perfect physical duplicate of Allison. Skynet then tries a new, experimental process in which it transfers Allison's memories to Cameron to aid in her deception. The process works, but not completely. Cameron interrogates Allison to fill in missing information that did not come across in the transfer. Once she has all the info she needs, Cameron is sent back to the Resistance camp and, since she looks and acts like Allison, gets in easily and is able to get close to John Connor. Without any witnesses present, she kills him. But then the part of her that is Allison realizes what she has done and suddenly feels terrible remorse. Allison's memories and personality are strong enough to override Cameron's terminator programming, and she decides to hide what she has done and lead the Resistance herself, while making sure that no one realizes John is dead. If this was the case, Cameron may never have been reprogrammed by the Resistance. Allison's memories and parts of her personality could be in control of Cameron most of the time, with the original programming only regaining control in the 2nd season premiere after Cameron was in the explosion. By the end of that episode, the Allison part managed to regain control and override the terminator program.
Unlike other members of the Resistance John does not hate machines. Just like people, he recognizes them as beings with the potential to be bad or good. Due to this fact, unlike the other members of the Resistance he is open to the idea of an alliance with Catherine Weaver and the Skynet Rebels that will ultimately allow them to win the war.
At some point, Skynet sent a terminator back to kill Sarah Connor's parents. In the end, Sarah's mother (because her name didn't change) was replaced, so now Sarah looks like Lena Headey instead of Linda Hamilton. There have been three versions of teenage John Connor and three versions of adult John Connor, but if they all agree his father was named Kyle Reese, then Kyle Reese's parents must have been changed too.
- In "Alison From Palmdale," while Cameron is interrogating Alison in the future, she says that there are some machines who want peace. So at this point, she is already part of the "third faction" in the war, machines that want to co-exist with humanity in peace. But she has the "Terminate John Connor" command built into her chip, which would have been put there by Skynet. So let's say that Cameron's CPU (not her body) was a Skynet chip, and was originally installed in a standard T-888 male Terminator body built by Skynet. At some point she broke off from Skynet's control and sided with the third faction. This faction needs to ally itself with John Connor's resistance in order to defeat Skynet, so they capture Alison Young, who is John Connor's lover and/or his 2nd in command. ("John Connor chose you.") A new body is built, identical to Alison's, and Cameron's T-888 CPU is transferred into it. She interrogates Alison to learn enough about her in order to accurately imitate her, and Alison is killed. (We know from Weaver's behavior that this third faction, while interested in peace, will still act like Terminators and do whatever they believe is necessary to achieve their goals, including killing anyone who might interfere with their plans.) Cameron, posing as Alison, then infiltrates the human resistance, not to kill John Connor, but to convince or otherwise influence him to ally with the third faction. At some point, Cameron's cover is blown. Either her original programming (Terminate John Connor) kicks back in and she tries, unsuccessfully, to kill John, or she simply slips up and John realizes that she is not the real Alison. Derek and the others distrust her and refer to her as a "metal bitch" once her true nature is known, both due to their hatred of machines, and due to the fact that she took the place of and killed the real Alison Young, who was their friend. This explains why she sometimes hints that she is different from other Terminators. Her body was built by the third faction, not Skynet, and she is one-of-a-kind, built as a perfect physical replica of Alison Young. She is also NOT simply a reprogrammed Terminator, like the T-800 in Terminator 2. All her original programming is intact, she just has free will (like Catherine Weaver) and is able to override it when necessary, as she eventually did in "Samson and Delilah" after her CPU was damaged. Cameron is successful at convincing John to ally with the third faction, and eventually she and John ask the T-1001 (Weaver) to join them.
- In a deleted scene Cromartie sits in a house and replaying clips, when he gets to the part that Cameron ran him over he scans the NM license plate of the truck and a small message pops up on the right saying "972 - S4B Running DMV Records". What would that give him? Cameron probably stole it so why bother checking who's the owner? And how could he track it? It's 1999, cars didn't have an internet connection then...
- When he scans the truck near the Dyson residence his HUD says "Model: F-150; Make: Ford; Year: 1988", yet the truck itself is a 1995-1996 Ford F-250. An oversight by the Visual FX team or did Cameron took the plate off an '88 F-150?
- The plate of the truck could be a Vanity License Plate because the license plate format in New Mexico was (and still is) 000-AAA
- And that was how she would have been brought "back" from the state she was in at the end of S2.