John Henry, where's your trousers?

[roxybisquaint]

You guys already know that I don't think John Henry time-jumped. I think he used Cameron's chip (or repaired and used the water cooler terminator's chip) and left Zeira Corp to go find his AI brother in present day. This post isn't really about that theory, though. This time, I'm just analyzing the situation.

"You can't bring anything through when you come—not weapons, not clothing, nothing."

If John Henry did jump, where is his clothing? It should've been in a pile on the floor, but it wasn't. Clothing doesn't go through, so it either gets disintegrated by the time bubble or left behind by the time bubble. Since Cameron's clothed body was sitting there in the chair (and the chair and table were there), we can rule out disintegration. She was clearly within the sphere of the time bubble when Weaver and John left, so she would have been within the sphere when John Henry left too. Yet Cameron's body was clothed and intact and John Henry's clothes were not there.

Was that a hint that he didn't actually jump ahead or was it just a gaff?

Comments

[gega-cai.livejournal.com]

Okay.

I guess my opinion is that John Henry's body went through. Which program was in the body is unknown. While I am definitely not ruling out your theory, this is my reasoning on how the clothes are not there: they disintegrated upon John Henry entering the TDE and going through time, since you see people/metal enter the TDE fully clothed and arrive naked.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

they disintegrated upon John Henry entering the TDE and going through time, since you see people/metal enter the TDE fully clothed and arrive naked.

The problem with that is Cameron, her clothes, the knife, the keyboard, the cable, the table and chair did not disintegrate. And we know all of those things would've been within the time bubble when John Henry jumped.

Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.

[trystanknight.livejournal.com]

Gaff. The set was too small to have an area completely set aside for a time-travel bubble, so they left Cameron and the table there when they shouldn't have. That's all it is, I'd lay money on it.

The thing is - This is what I LOVE Cameron (director)'s method of time travel. It solves SO many problems I have with most time travel - What happens to the air where you were standing? What happens if you accidentally time travelled into a rock? All that shit is resolved - if you appear at a truckstop, the time machine *carves* that truck apart as you enter. There's no messy worrying about matter sharing the same space - a molecule-size bubble appears, then rapidly expands, annihilating all matter in its path.

Mind you, that doesn't explain how annihilating matter like that doesn't result in a fission explosion, but I'm letting that go.

Anyway - we've *never* seen the outgoing trip, just the incoming trip. Your friend is right, I own the first draft screenplay to Terminator 2, in which Kyle is naked because he has to be naked, and then he steps into some floating rings and they descend into a tunnel. But you're right, that never made it to screen. Thus, I'm prepared to accept almost any model they want to make for out-going time travel wormholes. In the premiere, I was shocked they could time-travel without concentric rings like in the screenplay, but that's not how it is in TSCC, as you said.

The pseudo-scientist in me finds it objectionable for scientific and utter *hotness* reasons that when the gang walked into the time vortex, the time vortex didn't immediately disintegrate their clothing. "Nothing dead will go," said Kyle - so how is it that they're walking INTO the time vortex and they're not naked? The field should have stripped off their clothing, the outer layer of skin (and hair, Kyle should have been bald, but I'm letting that go too), and then sent them. It makes no sense.

Plus, I think Sarah shooting the Terminator while nude would've been the hottest thing ever done :D

But my point is, the outgoing wormholes in TSCC have *never* made sense by the rules, since the premiere, so I'm prepared to forgive the Cameron-still-exists-instead-of-being-vaped theory.

Re: Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.

[roxybisquaint.livejournal.com]

What happens if you accidentally time travelled into a rock? All that shit is resolved - if you appear at a truckstop, the time machine *carves* that truck apart as you enter. There's no messy worrying about matter sharing the same space - a molecule-size bubble appears, then rapidly expands, annihilating all matter in its path.

Yeah it bothered me we were supposed to accept a completely undamaged room at Zeira as having had a time bubble depart from it when the bank was destroyed by the time bubble departure in the pilot. Was that also a gaff or was it intentional?No way to know, but if it was a gaff, it was a pretty freaking big one. If it was intentional, then the characters were stupid for believing John Henry had time jumped.

The popular fanwank seemed to be that time bubbles don't carve anything away from their point of departure, only from their point of arrival (to prevent landing in a wall or something, like you said). And the reason the bank blew up was because it had been rigged with explosives by the engineer so that there would be no evidence of the TDE after it was used.

Leaving explosives sitting in a bank vault for a few decades probably isn't the safest thing to do, so I think it's a stretch. It's the best only explanation we've got, though. It's either explosives at the bank or total fail at Zeira.



The pseudo-scientist in me finds it objectionable for scientific and utter *hotness* reasons that when the gang walked into the time vortex, the time vortex didn't immediately disintegrate their clothing. "Nothing dead will go," said Kyle - so how is it that they're walking INTO the time vortex and they're not naked? The field should have stripped off their clothing, the outer layer of skin (and hair, Kyle should have been bald, but I'm letting that go too), and then sent them. It makes no sense.

Since the departure doesn't happen the second the bubble appears (it seems like it sort of powers up to full strength first), I just figure nothing really happens until it leaves. That's when it carries the living things through time, leaving behind the non-living things. And I think it has to leave them behind as opposed to disintegrate them because of what's implied by the Zeira jump. Even after they arrive in the future, Weaver tells John "it doesn't go through" about Cameron's body. She doesn't say it gets destroyed.



Plus, I think Sarah shooting the Terminator while nude would've been the hottest thing ever done :D


If they'd done that in Born to Run, we might've had better ratings and gotten a third season ;)

Re: Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.

[trystanknight.livejournal.com]

>And the reason the bank blew up was because it had been rigged with explosives by the engineer so that there would be no evidence of the TDE after it was used.

Yeah, that... doesn't seem right. Also, what really bothered me about that scenario was, why did Cromartie's flesh peel off? Because it exited the bubble before completion? I don't understand. Much about that 2nd episode really did not make much sense to me.

And as for Cameron, yes, I don't think that scene was thought through. To hear Josh write on his blog, I think by the time Season 2 ended, he was under so much stress from impending cancellation and the network execs, he wasn't really focussed. I think that entire ending was ... weird. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it didn't come off right.

And yes, nude!sarah should have equalled ratings. Curse those network execs! :D

Re: Bit of an essay, but I like to think about these things.

[datan0de.livejournal.com]

This is a bit of a red herring, but in the first draft for the script to T1 there were actually two soldiers who went back to 1984. Kyle appeared in mid air above the floor of the alley, and his unfortunate companion appeared intertwined with the nearby fire escape. He's mortally injured by the metal bars that are now running through his body, and after a very brief dialog Kyle smothers him as an act of mercy. Even having just read the script the idea gives me the willies.

Of course, Cameron removed the second soldier entirely from the story in later revisions, and what's shown in T2 (with the bubble annihilating everything in its path) makes it pretty clear that the TDE physics has also changed. But I think it's interesting to note that the idea was at least considered, even if it didn't make it into canon.

I think that it's not unreasonable to assume, as Roxy mentions below, that the annihilation only happens at the destination point. I love the extended future war scenes from T2 script (they're in the novelization, BTW), and don't see a conflict. It's doubtful that the humans in the future would've known everything there is to know about time displacement physics. IIRC, in that scene they also had Kyle slather himself with conductive jelly in addition to simply disrobing, but it's been years since I read it and I could be mistaken. But between that and the fact that they set his destination point above the alley rather than risking him merging with the ground could indicate that they were just playing it safe.

The matter displaced doesn't undergo fission- it simply ceases to exist. This leaves open the question of what happens to the individual atoms whose nuclei are stuck right on the boundary of the bubble. I'd love for a nuclear physicist to tackle this question, but my seat-of-the-pants guess would be that nuclei are so small (even compared to atoms) that it would be statistically unlikely for a critical number of them to be split by the bubble, and brownian motion would cause most of the atoms along the edge to be completely annihilated in the few seconds that the bubble is in existence. You could however wind up with quite a bit of ionization due to annihilated electrons, which would provide at least a weak explanation for the electrical disturbance (at least while the bubble exists, though not before). The handful of atoms that did get split wouldn't be near any fissile isotope, so you'd get a flash of light and a burst of radiation, but no chain reaction.

Wow. Did I really just geek out that much? I'll stop now before someone calls the authorities. :-)