Born to Fail - part 1

[roxybisquaint]

It's been a week now and after my fourth viewing of Born To Run, it doesn't make me miserable anymore. I guess I finally desensitized to what I disliked and that freed me up to think about the rest. I've got gripes and grievances, nits to pick and sundries to poke. But there are good moments to talk about too (and lots of speculation to be done).



I'll show you my shielded nuclear power source if you show me yours

If Cameron's power supply was damaged, wouldn't John have cancer too? Even so, if she believed it could be leaking radiation, why the hell would she let him touch it? And she really had to be laying down and he had to be on top of her to get to it? Please. That scene just didn't add up. It was either a really flimsy setup for Jameron cheers or it was a weak manipulation by Cameron that worked because the blood had left John's brain. I tend to think the latter. Since we just had the Jesse story wherein she spent all season trying to win future war by messing with John's love life, I really hope we're not going to find out Cameron was doing the same. But at this point it's looking that way.

Regardless, to try to get us to the point of John choosing to throw away everything to follow Cameron through time, we needed something like that — a moment of intimacy to push him from being unsure about his feelings for Cameron to deciding he loves her and can't live without her. So forced and awkward as it was, John checking out her breasts, climbing on top of her and slipping his fingers in her, um, sliced open chest, served a purpose.

Massive points for the not!sex cleverness of the scene, but it was disturbing on many levels. From the sadomasochistic not!foreplay with the knife to the "that's good, that's perfect" intensity of John realizing Cameron isn't the cause of mom's cancer, one thing is clear: that boy needs some therapy. I don't think John actually wants to fuck his mother, but the connection between Cameron and Sarah was clear...

In Charley's house in the pilot, Sarah was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her it's freaky when she does that and asks, "what's going on?" She tells him they have to go.

In the motel, Cameron was sitting on John's bed, watching him sleep. He jolts awake, tells her not to do that because his mom used to do it and he hates it. Then he asks, "what's going on?" Not!sex happens and she tells him it's time to go.

Aside from the squickiness of the similarity of those scenes, the other significance is that they both ultimately lead to a time jump.



The time jump

While the jump has the potential to push the story too far from its roots (and jackknife a giant puh-lease on the already congested time travel highway), it's also an interesting way to explore the what if scenario of a future war without John Connor. So I didn't mind the jump and I'm actually curious to see how it plays out. What I did mind, though — what I absolutely hated — was the way it happened:

John ditched his mother, who he believed had cancer, and bailed on trying to stop the apocalypse so he could jump to the future with some liquid metal he'd just met (whose motives were questionable at best and who was verbally bitch-slapping his mom all over the place) to pursue his one true love: a computer chip. I can't cheer that. I can't be wowed by that. I can't even pretend to enjoy that. It's fucked up and I'm not okay with it. Sarah, however, was okay with it. Um, what?

When John got aroused by touching Cameron's icy cold heart power supply, I should've known this wouldn't end well. I realize he's only 17 and doesn't always have the best judgement. He makes mistakes and acts rather impulsively and irresponsibly at times. I get that. In fact I like a flawed John Connor. I like that the show didn't present him as this perfect teenage kid that's ready to take on the role of saving the world. But we've gone through a lot with him this season and throwing away everything his life has been about felt like a major step backwards.

So we sort of circled back around to Samson & Delilah, but instead of John being unable to let Cameron go because he viewed her as a better protector than his mom, this time he was unable to let Cameron go because he loves her. The mother/lover blurring was getting thick anyway, so I'm glad it's over. I think I'm glad John finally came out of the closet as a cyborg lover and moved out of 2009. And it was fun that he moved in with dad. Check the final VO line in my faux S&D script from last August :D

I'd like to think the reason Sarah let John go is because she figures he's better off with Cameron in the future than alone in the present watching her die (just like when she took him to Charley). I'd still have a hard time with that, but at least it would carry some emotional weight. The other possibility is that Cameron's attempt to manipulate Sarah with "humans are the problem" actually sort of worked. When she was stepping out of the bubble, though, she said "John, we can't." We can't. Sarah didn't want him to go, didn't think he should go. So that pretty well cancels out any notion that she was thinking he'd be better off leaving — better off being away from her.

In "Samson & Delilah", Sarah told John "Maybe you could fix her. I know you want to try, but I can't let you." And we know how that ended up. In "Today is the Day pt1", she told Cameron she'd thought about taking her out with Derek's sniper rifle but she didn't because John would never have forgiven her. So maybe the desperation in John's voice when he said, "he's got her chip, he's got her," made Sarah realize she'd truly lost him to Cameron.

I still don't know if Sarah thought John loved Cameron or was bonded to her like family or what, but at the very least, Sarah understood that John had a powerful attachment to her and there was nothing she could do or say to come between that. So she let him go and she stayed behind to carry on the fight alone. It doesn't work for me, but that's all I can come up with so far.



Without John, your life has no purpose

The series started with Sarah telling John she'd stop Skynet and she reiterated that as he was leaving. So she still has a mission, still has a goal, still has a purpose and that's why she stepped out of the bubble. But what happens to Sarah when she doesn't have her son to fight for anymore? John has sort of been Sarah's moral compass. How could she raise him up to save humanity if she gave up her own in the process? So she's been fighting the good fight for his sake. She has "participated in the miraculous and the terrible and through it all... maintained a moral and good soul." Well, mostly.

She'll continue to battle Kaliba and work to stop judgement day, and with John gone, I think we can be sure she'll throw herself into it like never before. Cancer or no cancer, you know the woman will fight on until she collapses. But will she still be fighting for John or fighting for humanity or will she just be fighting because it's all she knows? Will she start to believe, as Ellison said, that she's got nothing left to lose? "There's always something to lose," though. I think that something is her soul.

Here's bad news...



Sarah and John failed

Sarah never did stop Skynet and John never did lead the resistance. There was no John Connor when the resistance was formed. He vanished off the face of the earth in 2009 and didn’t resurface until 2027(?). And since it's a post-apocalyptic world, we know judgment day happened. It gets worse. With John at one end of the timeline and Sarah at the other end of that same timeline, it's a closed system. The future IS set now. It's a done deal... They failed.

Assuming judgement day is still set at April 21, 2011, Sarah might spend the next two years running from the law, protecting Savannah, looking for Danny Dyson, and battling Kaliba. But whatever she does has already happened at John's end and it failed to stop the apocalypse. John not leading the resistance might not be a failure. Whoever did form it might be doing an awesome job. I really doubt that, though. I think we're likely to find out that this future is hell and the resistance is losing.

Can their failures be erased? Of course. But only if John jumps back. That would free up the path to an unknown future again. In the meantime, we'll be spending time with Sarah doing things that ultimately don't matter and we'll be spending time with John maybe learning things that won't matter until he comes back. So, cool or not, I think it's likely to be a short stay.



Cause and effect

I got deep into time travel once before and settled on multiple timelines (multiverse) in TSCC. I'm still inclined to think that's what we have going on, despite a few discrepancies in the show. Jesse and Derek established the existence of multiple futures, which I translate into multiple timelines. But it's possible the writers are using some sort of single timeline theory in which anything can happen. I hope not because that gets a little Back to the Future hokey. But I do think we've hit a point where we need to know. When you hurtle John Connor into future war, it's time to set some ground rules.

With characters at both ends of the spectrum, we'll see the result of everything that happens in between. From Sarah's perspective, anything can happen, but from John's perspective it's all history. Sarah won't know what became of John after he jumped or know the future effects of her actions. But John may learn a bit about what his mom did after he jumped away in 2009. By giving us both stories, it could be that we'll sort of get a real-time view of Sarah's impact on the future. In other words, we might get to see the cause of what John sees and the effect of what Sarah does. I don't think that's a long-lasting way to tell a story, but it could be interesting in the short term.



One possible future, I don't know tech stuff

I've seen a lot of speculation that John has jumped to a point before he became the leader of the resistance. Also that the out-of-focus teen John behind Derek in the time chamber in "Dungeons & Dragons" was an actual reveal of how old future!John really was. That's incorrect. This is an alternate future, not one that's been hinted at and not a precursor to what we already knew. Here's why:

- In "Dungeons & Dragons", Cameron told John that he spent 6 years in a Skynet work camp with Kyle from 2015-2021. We learned in "What He Beheld" that Kyle was 8 on judgement day (2011), so that would've made him 12 when he and John first got captured. Kyle in this current future is a grown man.

- In "What He Beheld", Derek told John that he celebrated his (John's) 30th birthday with him. That would mean Derek couldn't be sent back on his time travel mission for at least 13 years. And Derek is certainly not 13 years younger right now than what we knew him to be in 2007 (he'd be about 18 years old if he was).

- In "Goodbye to All that", Derek said Martin Bedell helped John form the resistance. Clearly the resistance is already formed.

As for when John is, we can use Allison as a marker. She was probably born in 2008 because her mom was pregnant when Cam called her in "Allison from Palmdale". And she's what, about 18 now? So I'd estimate John to have landed in 2026 or maybe 2027.

John could stay, join the resistance, work his way up the ranks and maybe one day lead the fight. But it would take a long time and it would absolutely be a different story than what we've heard to date. I don't see that happening. Aside from believing Sarah's story is a dead end until John returns, the biggest drawback to him staying in the future is it essentially splits the show into two separate stories: John's and Sarah's. And since she won't have any clue what he's up to, it wouldn't exactly be The Sarah Connor Chronicles anymore. Don't even start with the "it's not about the title character anyway" comments.


I've got lots more to talk about but I'm just going to stop here for now.

Comments

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

Hmm.... I suppose you've got a point about only backward jumping causing changes to the course of events to create a branch point for an alternate timeline. I was still thinking in terms of the (oft-misinterpreted and highly questionable) interpretation of quantum mechanics in which every event creates an alternate universe for every possible outcome. So there would be a universe in which John jumped and one in which he didn't... but that's not really germane, I guess. Yeah, the number of universes should be infinite (or only one... it's been said that nothing in between makes sense), but we're only concerned with the handful that the show actually interacts with.

Anyway... I digress. You're right: going forward in time is easy and just takes a little relativity. It's going backwards that completely goofs up causality and space-time and creates the need for alternate universes to work around paradox. Whoever it was whose going back caused the events that led to John getting into that time bubble (Kaliba? Weaver? Jesse?) was the one who created this new, John-less future.

Timelines would exist forward, however. That's the direction they'd have to exist, since all the changes to the past are creating branches and alternate futures. The future in which J-Day was 1997 and Kyle Reese went back in time to father John must still exist as an alternate timeline or there'd be no logical way for John to exist and Sarah to have been told J-Day was '97. Nor is it really accurate to talk about the future not having happened "yet"... only from our perspective. From the perspective of the people there, it has. There's no "yet" when you look at time as a whole rather than at a particular point.

(Somebody should explain to water cooler Terminator that a water delivery guy doesn't make a very good disguise for approaching a house. It doesn't make a good disguise for a business if it's not the company that normally delivers that business' water, either. And I still want to know why Kaliba sent human mooks to take out the Connors but kept its Terminator in reserve for taking out a little girl.)

[bobmacpharson.livejournal.com]

>>. And I still want to know why Kaliba sent human mooks to take out the Connors but kept its Terminator in reserve for taking out a little girl.)

Gah, I think you just ruined the ending for me.

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

Heh. Sorry. But look at the bright side. Maybe it's supposed to seem off because sending the Terminator after Savannah was actually misdirection on somebody's part, designed to trick the Connors or John Henry into making a mistake. I mean, I can't think of why the Kaliba goons at the lighthouse would have Savannah's picture and info on their phones while on a mission to go after someone else entirely. Bad information security for an A.I. Maybe the Connors were supposed to see it and rush off to save Savannah because it was a trap.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

Oh damn. I forgot all about that Savannah picture on the cell phone. Yeah that makes no sense at all. Why would a human Kaliba goon have that if the machine was sent to take care of Savannah? Wow, if that's part of a set-up to get the Connors to go to Weaver's house that's one hell of a complex plot.

Hmmm.
No, I don't think it could have been a set-up because the kaliba goons were clearly trying to kill John. So putting a picture on a cell phone for John to find would have meant the goon was intending for John to get away and come back and find the cell phone. But that spray of bullets coming at John and Charley when they were running through the sand didn't look like they were intended to miss.

I guess I'll have to go with this Kaliba goons are just plain stooopid.

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

Unless the goons on the ground had no idea that Kaliba expected them to lose (because would they really have gone if the mission briefing read "Get yourself killed and your cell phone taken"?) or putting the info on the phone was just a back-up plan in case the more simplistic "send guys over there to shoot them" plan didn't work.

I've seen stuff like that done before in fiction. Hell, I've participated in crafting plans like that for characters while playing tabletop RPGs.

[bobmacpharson.livejournal.com]

Actually, there's a pretty good explanation for all this. Kaliba sends goons after Connors. Goons screw up badly (die) and don't get to hit the next target. Kaliba just figures "Okay, screw it with stupid fallible humans. Let's send in the big guns."

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

I'll buy that. It's certainly the simplest explanation and it works fine with the order everything happened. The machine was probably being saved for the Zeira attack, but got diverted to Savannah first.

So this Kaliba group, they're really not very successful at attacks, are they? It seems the only target they actually hit was Derek, but he was supposed to be interrogated before, not killed. And killing him was just a chance encounter. Maybe Sarah won't even need Ellison's help to take these incompetent fools out. No drone. No terminator. Piece of cake ;)

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

Well, that explains the Terminator being used even on a small-time op like the Savannah-grab, since the human operatives had managed to botch things repeatedly and a large number of them had been killed.

I guess if the team that went to the lighthouse was supposed to go after Savannah next, that would explain why Savannah's picture was on their phone, but that's pretty sloppy of them. Having them carry their plans for future missions with them while doing a mission is great to... well, to have what happened happen.

If that's the case then I'm starting to think you might be right about these guys really sucking. Failing in their attacks on the Connors was an understandable result of having a poor understanding of what they were up against: they weren't expecting the lighthouse to have been made so defensible as a fallback point and rigged with suicide explosives, they weren't expecting Sarah to find the transmitter and know they were coming for her, and they weren't expecting Cameron to be a robot. Of course, there's definitely some planning problems if they didn't plan around a worst-case scenario in the case of the lighthouse and Sarah, but it's believable that they might underestimate the opposition in that way.

Carrying such important intel on their person during a firefight, however, is a pretty big goof.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

and they weren't expecting Cameron to be a robot.

I'd been thinking that they must have known Cameron was a robot because they didn't try to grab her when they grabbed Derek and because they had the electrocution trap set up. The guy had rubber boots and water and a big electrical cable. It doesn't seem like the kind of trap you'd be able to set up spontaneously. I'm also thinking they knew Derek was from the future somehow. Kill John. Kill Sarah. Interrogate resistance fighter from the future. Electrocute the metal and pull her chip to get info.

Now I feel sure they knew something about the Connor team even if the name Connor itself meant nothing to them.

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

We differ a little then, because my initial impression of the electrical trap was that it seemed jury-rigged, like something they'd thrown together in the hour or so they'd had since their first encounter with Cameron. They had no shortage of water, since they were impersonating water-delivery men, their warehouse headquarters would have had electrical cable in its electrical system and boots are pretty common. If they'd actually had time, I would hope they would have had a better method of taking her out prepared.

That plus the fact that they tried to shoot her with 9x19mm when they grabbed Derek (futile) and the surprise of the Kaliba goon when he asks the A.I. "Where'd you get these schematics, anyway?" after electrocuting her make me think that they didn't know before then that she was a machine.

[motoki.livejournal.com]

I agree that I don't think Kaliba knew anything about Cameron or the Connors or any of that. I think Kaliba was flying blind. It initially went after Sarah because it viewed her as a threat, felt she must have had accomplices and that there were others who were onto it and would attack again. I think Kaliba mistakenly attributed the Weaver attack to Sarah or someone she was working with. So it tried to track her down and then systematically take out those who worked with her.

Finding out about John Henry was an accident. I think the three ducks incident and changing the rules caused John Henry to let his defenses down, quite literally, and Kaliba was then able to see beyond his firewall for the first time.

I also think though future Skynet seems to know about John Henry (presumably this is why the Ellisonator and Rosie Pretzelnator were sent) that the first time future Skynet made contact with present day Skynet (Kaliba) was via the Jeffrey Pierce gate removing, silencer loving, creepy smiling hunkanator.

I have a theory that Weaver actually initially thought she was reshaping Skynet, not positioning an alternative to it. I believe she didn't know about the existence of two Turks which came about thanks to the actions of Sarah. If I'm right, then someone salvaged Turk1 and turned that into Kaliba. I think Weaver thought she had the one and only Turk, but it turns out she unded up with Turk2 who, as Andy Goode noted, had a somewhat different personality.


Sarah: (referring to Turk 2) So is this one better or worse?

Andy: Well it's different really. More adaptable, but less predictable. Not as powerful for now, but um, it's quicker on its feet. It has a hunger for learning, but sometimes the lessons it learns...

Sarah: Sounds more human.

Andy: Well if you want an analogy, I'd say that Turk 1 had grown into a brooding teenager, and Turk 2 is still more of a precocious child.


This explains to me why Weaver seemingly knows so little about Kaliba and the existence of the other AI seemed to surprise her. I think in her future there was only ever one Turk and it became Skynet and that's what she thought she was buying from Walsh in Samson and Delilah.

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

I also think Kaliba probably attributed the destruction of the Desert Cantos facility to Sarah and her team. It only makes sense: woman breaks into facility and shoots guard, then later facility explodes. Of course they're connected.

Which reminds me: did we ever get an explanation for how Sarah got to the hospital after being shot? Because I can't help but wonder if maybe Kaliba had her taken there, so that it could see who would come to get her.

And that's a good point that Sarah altered the course of events by destroying the original Turk. That Turk would probably have become something entirely different than John Henry.

[motoki.livejournal.com]

When Good Wound aired I remember reading somewhere (the Fox board or the blog?) that they did film Sarah driving herself to the hospital, but it was cut for time and they figured showing jeep there was enough to make that point.

Maybe it will end up on the DVD *shrug*

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

Well, there goes that theory. I will be consoled by knowing that driving herself to the hospital while bleeding to death is another example of Sarah being a total badass, however. Too bad we didn't get to see it.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware that they'd actually filmed Sarah driving herself. My theory (http://roxybisquaint.livejournal.com/59377.html) had been that Kaliba implanted a tracking device, then drove her to the hospital and put her in the driver's seat. But that part of my theory kind of got blown in "To The Lighthouse" when Sarah flashed to Winston when she found out about the tracking device. I still have a hard time believing a woman who was unconscious woke up and drove herself. I guess she's just that much of a badass ;)

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

My theory had been that Kaliba implanted a tracking device, then drove her to the hospital and put her in the driver's seat.
That was my theory, too. Sarah assumed it was Winston, but I figured they'd done it sooner rather than after they already had her in custody and were interrogating her with no intent of ever releasing her. Unless they anticipated the possibility of a heroic escape and lo-jacked her as a back-up plan, Scorpius-style. But if Sarah didn't have a transmitter in her already, then how did Winston know where and when to be to taser and grab her?

I still have a hard time believing a woman who was unconscious woke up and drove herself.
Yeah, I was under the impression that people who pass out from blood loss and are still bleeding don't tend to wake back up on their own.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

I was still thinking in terms of the (oft-misinterpreted and highly questionable) interpretation of quantum mechanics in which every event creates an alternate universe for every possible outcome.

Ah. Gotcha. I don't think the show would ever get that deep into time jumping theoretics anyway.

--

As for who caused the timeline of John jumping forward, I don't know, but...

I blame Derek for everything! Everything traces back to him killing Andy Goode. That created a new timeline that led to Jesse's future and I think it's been time travel/timeline madness ever since.

Jesse and Riley came from a future where John Connor was supposedly way too chummy with Cameron. they came from a future where Weaver was released from the box and sent a reply to John Connor that Cameron intercepted (from Jesse). And I'm going to assume Weaver came to the present from that future, as did Fisher.

Stuff all of those time travelers did led to more backward time jumps... There's been Kaliba goons that could be greys from the future and I'm sure the water cooler terminator is from the future (I don't think Kaliba built him or there would be more).

So with all of that backward time traveling and mucking around in 2007-2009, who knows how many more timelines we detoured into along the way and which one is directly responsible for the series of events that resulted in John Connor standing in a time bubble heading off to find Cameron in the future.

--

And I still want to know why Kaliba sent human mooks to take out the Connors but kept its Terminator in reserve for taking out a little girl.

Yeah me too.

I think it's possible that Kaliba simply didn't know who the Connors were. Kaliba people/machine could have come from the same future John just jumped into where no one knows who John Connor is. But they knew Cameron was a machine, so, Kaliba probably though the Connors were a resistance fighter team from the future. They probably figured that by moving on them while they were scattered it would an easy sneak attack and they'd take them all out. And of course they thought they'd disable Cameron easily with the electrocution trap.

Kaliba must have only had the one terminator, so maybe they wanted to save it for the more important mission of stopping Weaver. That terminator seemed to be after both Savannah and Weaver and I'd guess it's next mission was to destroy (or maybe capture?) John Henry since the worm infiltration didn't work.

It still would have made more sense to send the machine to take out the Connors first. The attack on Weaver's house wasn't happening simultaneously anyway. But that's the best reasoning I can come up with for why they used humans for the Connors.

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

Derek did the classic thing for a time travel story: he tried to change the past to make it better and wound up spawning a number of unintended consequences that may have made things worse. But then, Future!John may have inadverdently screwed up his own past many a time by sending back "Uncle Bob" (which may have completely altered his younger self's outlook on machines resulting in the mixed human/metal resistance of the series' future) and Cameron (who caused John to be eight years younger for all subsequent events plus addition confusing feelings re: machines). Jesse stuck her nose in, as well, and so have any number of SkyNet provacateurs.

The feeling I got regarding the Kaliba goons was that they were just modern-day mercs hired to do a corporation's dirty work. Winston in "Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep" didn't seem to know anything about J-Day or machines, just that Sarah had messed with his bosses' biz. The one who electrocuted Cameron and tried to remove her chip didn't seem to be familiar with Terminators and was surprised that his boss had the schematics for one.

I'm not sure if it's that the A.I. mastermind behind Kaliba didn't know who the Connors are or didn't know that the people it was going after were the Connors. All Kaliba knew about them was that they'd been poking around Desert Cantos and soon after the place exploded, then they started poking around the employees' families and found way too much about Kaliba's dirty secrets, then Sarah killed the agent sent to grab her. They might have been deniable assets from a rival corp, spies from some government, domestic terrorists or whistleblowers for all Kaliba knew. Still, Kaliba did know they were well-armed, which makes it strange that they wouldn't deploy they Terminator for that op but would for getting Savannah.

Of course, I haven't entirely ruled out the possibility that sending the Terminator to take out Savannah was a misdirection designed to draw out the Connors, since (as I noted in another comment on here) it's awfully convenient that the info on Savannah's assassination would be on the phone of a guy who was on a completely different mission. In the end, we have no proof except her word that Weaver and Kaliba aren't in cahoots to manipulate John Henry and the Connors. I don't think a T-1001 would hesitate to kill any number of human mercenaries and security people in its own employ and destroy a dime-a-dozen T-888 to sell such a con.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

Good point about the Kaliba guys not being familiar with machines. But the fact that the the AI knew Cameron was a machine meant that they'd learned a few things about the Connor crew while tracking them. So by the time they moved on them, they must have known the Connors were more than just people working for a rival company or spies or whatever. So far in this series, machines only come from the future.

[the-narration.livejournal.com]

I could be wrong, but I always got the impression that the Kaliba A.I. realized Cameron was a Terminator from what it learned of her when the goons grabbed Derek. Hence the desperate "dump water, electrocute, remove chip" plan to take her out. If it had known before that, I'd think it would have had a better method of taking her out prepared. We know that .50 BMG and 40mm HE are effective, and I don't doubt that Kaliba could get some if it had some time to prepare.

As for how it realized she was a Terminator, I'm going to go with how fast she ran or something like that. If taking some rounds from an MP-5K to the chest and surviving is all it takes to label somebody a Terminator, then anybody who owns a Level IIIA vest (like me) is in serious danger of mistaken identity.

[motoki.livejournal.com]

Well if the user known as Metroplex at the Allspark forums is to be believed that he's involved with the show (I believe him), he had this to say:

http://www.allspark.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=53735&st=460&p=1176301&#entry1176301

Oh, and I just remembered I owe you guys an explanation about the Jeffrey Pierce terminator (the one that bit the dust last night). There was a lot of back and forth about whether Kaliba could send Terminators or not and at one point, we'd decided they couldn't. Then, in an attempt to cast a big name in the show, for publicity and marketing purposes, we had to insert a Terminator into the show, but we had to find an organic way of doing it. The Jeffrey Pierce terminator was supposed to be that character, but the person we were negotiating with for the role ultimately pulled out at the last minute. Luckily, Jeffrey was available (a tremendous actor in his own right and one of our early choices for Charley) and he stepped into the role. And obviously, having a Terminator in those last two episodes worked out really well for story purposes and for the sake of amping the stakes and the action, but I couldn't remember (because of the back-and-forth) what justifcation we came up with for how Kaliba was sending really advanced Terminators.

*****

Now I'm really curious as to who this big name who backed out at the 11th hour was.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I didn't get the sense that the water cooler terminator was any more advanced than any others except he had the phosphorous covered chip. But we'd already seen that with pretzel girl (the machine that Cameron fought outside Sherman's office).

[motoki.livejournal.com]

Yeah but Kaliba is not future Skynet, it's proto-skynet. It didn't even have the schematics to a T-888 until it got them just a couple of episodes prior by scanning the Cromartie/John Henry body.

It's not a huge stretch to think that A T-888 sent by future Skynet tracked down and coordinated with Kaliba, but it initially did not have access to that level of technology even until very recently.