At my new job, pretty much everyone there is a comic book/sci-fi nerd. That’s fine with me, cause I can be fit into that category as well. We were talking about sci-fi movies when I posed a question to one of my fellow workers about the Terminator series.

In the first movie, set in 1984, the Terminator failed it’s mission, which led to them sending a new one in the second movie. My question is this: Why send the second one against John Conner? If they really wanted to get rid of him, it would have been more beneficial to send it against a different target. Sarah Conner got pregnant in 1984, which means she had John in either late 84 or early 85 (I don’t know if they ever actually said his birthday in the movies, and I don’t feel like looking it up). The machines know when he was born, however. At that point in time, the only person who knows about the machines is Sarah Conner, so she is the only one who would be able to stop them. Why didn’t the machines wait until Sarah was in labor (when she’d be unable to help), then send a Terminator to kill Kyle Reese’s (John’s father) parents?

At first, he said that it wouldn’t work because the machines didn’t know who John’s father was. I pointed out that in Terminator Salvation, they knew who he was. The guy at work said that if the machines did what I suggested, and pulled it off, it wouldn’t change anything. Nothing would change in the machine’s reality, it would just create another reality in which the machines win. What do you think? What would happen if the machines killed Kyle’s parents?