Quote:
|
Actually this is explained somewhat. She wasn't trying to kill her at that point. She was asking her where John Connor was.
|
Fair enough. Although I expect that there were other opportunities for a quick kill that weren't taken.
BEWARE! What follows is a few paragraphs that I've rewritten about five times because each time I think about them I realize something new about the time travel implications as displayed in the Terminator films.
Now that I think about it, the "reverse causality" explanation for the importance of the animal hospital does soothe some of my concerns about the convenience of Connor's appearance there. That location was unimportant in the absence of Terminators from the future, but it was the obvious place to send a Terminator if your goal was to protect both Kate and John.
Kate becomes a leader in the resistance because ->
She survived Judgment Day with John Connor because ->
The Terminator kept both of them alive by protecting them and sending them to the fallout shelter because ->
His mission was to protect young Kate and follow her orders because ->
Older Kate ordered him to do that and only that (or was he also explicitly ordered to protect John?).
She chose to send the Terminator to the animal hospital to preserve the outcome of her and John being saved together. She didn't even explicitly try to prevent Judgement Day, although we can all imagine ways that this particular implementation of Judgement Day
could have been avoided.
So here's a question. Older Kate knows that John Connor is at the animal hospital with her younger self and will be rescued with her, yet she orders the Terminator to not follow orders from John Connor. Why?
And unlike I previously theorized, Kate can't have known about
all of the events depicted in T3, but only those up to the arrival of the Terminatrix in her life. As an example, consider Jose Barrera. In the future that Kate sent the Terminator from, he is alive and acting as a lieutenant for the resistance. Early in T3, he is shot to death at the drive thru by the Terminatrix. He never makes it past Judgement Day, so the actions of the Terminatrix have created an entirely new future. In other words, the past of both Future Jose and Future Kate didn't have a Terminator or a Terminatrix in them. At the end of the film, both John and Kate are living in an unwritten future.
All Kate would have been able to do was to send the protector Terminator back to the one place that she knew it could find both her and John prior to her version of Judgement Day. So this makes the protector Terminator's arrival at the hospital a necessity, not a convenience.
This brings up a question that I don't recall the answer to: Was the protector Terminator surprised to see John Connor there? Kate should have instructed it to protect both of them.
I also have an explanation for why Future Kate didn't order the protector Terminator to stop Judgement Day. Perhaps Future Kate didn't understand why Judgement Day happened, so she didn't know how to instruct the protector Terminator to stop it. Future Kate didn't have the same revelations of her father's involvement in Skynet because her experience of Judgement Day was completely different (and unknown to the viewer). We really don't have any knowledge of the future created by the events of T2 but not effected by the events of T3 other than the invention of yet another Model T800/850 and the creation of a T-X.
