Discussion WhatAnIdiot / Terminator

What that entry is calling "idiotic" is Sarah's refusal to get down, as the T-800 suggested. While it makes sense that she wouldn't listen to him due to her stubborn independence and distrust of the Terminator in general, I agree that it was pretty dumb of her to basically just stand in one spot and shoot. That only made it more of a miracle that the T-1000 barely missed stabbing her through the head or neck.

Like I said, I was tempted to remove it once because it made sense based on Sarah's character, but I have to admit that it was still pretty stupid.

That's not a fair, accurate or apt description of my work at all. And this might be less relevant, but they are not even my Fridge Logic, as the idea to make this page came from watching some reviews from Canal Random and Agujeros de Guión. However, I agree with many of their points (not all, in fact) and I'm willing to back them with arguments.

Your explanation about Sarah, for example, doesn't even address the point. What I said is that Sarah committed a huge mistake by mentioning time-travelling robots at all. And mentioning them wasn't even necessary in order to ask the police to investigate Cyberdine. All she needed was giving a bit of credible flavor to the story: "yeah, that insane bomber Reese forced me to blow up Cyberdyne, but in the process I learned he had inside men in Cyberdyne, and they were speaking about doing bad stuff with tech or something like it. That corporation might be infiltrated by terrorists, go investigate them". If the police finds out Cyberdyne was covering up weird things, good for Sarah, then she can open up. If they find nothing, well, at least it doesn't make Sarah look like a maniac; what she was claiming was something perfectly possible, even probable.

"A character made a mistake" is a subjective opinion, and even in this case, it's not nearly dumb enough to qualify as What An Idiot. What An Idiot is a basic violation of common sense. For example, let's look at the events of the first film. Telling the police what happened when they find you in a half-destroyed factory along with a dead body is not a "basic violation of common sense", especially when you think they can just go look at the hydraulic press and see the killer robot for themselves. How was Sarah supposed to know that Cyberdyne would cover it up before then?

The major issue with your response here is that you're taking the Armchair Writer response to what you think would have been a smarter or more sensible thing for characters to do in hindsight.

And isn't a violation of common sense to make myself look crazy when the entire world depends from me? It sounds similar to You Have to Believe Me!.

To put myself in Sarah's shoes... I could imagine any tech company trying everything in their power to keep the mysterious future technology for themselves, even sending a poor woman to the madhouse if it was needed, so I would have definitely counted on Cyberdyne screwing me up and launching a coverage.

Moreover, it's Cyberdyne. Kyle told Sarah they were Skynet's creators; if we remember that famous deleted scene from the original script, Sarah even planned to blow their building up until Kyle told her it was "tactically dangerous". If I was Sarah, I would be overrun by traumatic paranoia after the battle and believing Cyberdyne was even in the loop with Skynet or something (which ended up being more or less Right for the Wrong Reasons in T2).

Well, I could say my issue with your reply is that it fails to demonstrate that there weren't actually much more smarter or more sensible things for characters to do, which is the meaning or What An Idiot in the first place. But to adress my own response, I don't think I'm arm-rewriting the story at all. For instance, note that Sarah was free and content at the end of the very first film; if T2 didn't start with her in a psychiatric hospital, that sole epilogue would make me believe Sarah actually did everything I said and successfully became free of suspicions. The only bits that would rewrite the story were the point about Skynet nuking out Los Angeles, which I included as a formality because it seemed inevitably obvious, and the ones about sending Terminators to 1984, which seems even more legit to me because it was eventually done in Genisys.

The second film shows that Sarah was driven partially insane by the knowledge of what happened in the future, and that she became desperate to stop it at all costs.

"Putting yourself in Sarah's shoes" is a pointless exercised, because you're not a scared 19 year old who just went through the most traumatic 2 years of your life and were told that the end of the world is a few years away.

In the theatrical film, all we know that Kyle told Sarah is the Model number of the Terminator: Cyberdyne Systems Model 101. In the deleted scenes, what you're leaving out is that Sarah convinces Kyle to go through with the plan to destroy Cyberdyne. The entire point to those scenes (before they were cut) was that Sarah was right and Kyle was wrong: Kyle is a broken human being permanently scarred by the future he lived through. He was focused on the mission, and not the bigger picture.

Further, what you're doing is Speculative Troping. Just showing us Sarah being free at the end of the story DOES NOT mean she did anything you said. That's troping what is "likely" instead of what's actually in the story.

Also, no. Multiple Terminators were NOT sent to 1984 in Genisys. The T-1000 and Pops were sent to 1973 and the original T-800 was sent to 1984. The only reason the three Terminators meet up in 1984 is because Sarah and Pops had evaded the T-1000 for that long.

I always thought she was driven insane for being powerlessly imprisoned, beaten up and medicated for pathologies she didn't have, given that she looked pretty okay at the first film's epilogue, but I guess that's irrelevant.

Haha, I could seriously joke on that from my personal life. But it would be pointless, as pointless as claiming I cannot put myself on the shoes of someone only because my personal circumstances are apparently different or less dramatic. What an irrational thought.

What? who's talking about which of them is right and who's wrong? You are again addressing the wrong point, one that I have not even grazed. If anything, you only reinforce my idea that she should be considered aware of Cyberdyne's role.

I'm now under the impression you are deliberately distorting my words, either that or my writing style is seriously hard to understand. I didn't say Sarah did what I said, because obviously she ended up in that madhouse; I said she could have been interpreted as having done it (or something similar) had she not ended in the madhouse. Similarly, the idea that I claimed to be used in Genesys is more Terminators being sent back to the setting of the first film; which exact year or which Terminator is irrelevant and not the topic here. See now?