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Of Skynet and N-Jumps

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 am by Jami

Terminators, Terminators Everywhere

My brother, Mat, sent me this website on Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies which explains how the timeline isn’t completely fubar every time Skynet sends a tinker toy back in time to kill the Connors. It’s quite complicated and very thorough, but if I tried to par it down to a sentence, basically anytime anyone jumps back in time, they start a new timeline. This first part analyzes the first two films. The follow up analyzes the time anomalies of the third movie. I’d love to see how the television series fits into this reasoning.

It’s quite thorough so make sure you give yourself some time to go through the site. Also, give yourself plenty of physical space around you for when your brains start to ooze out of your nose, you’ll want something comfortable close by to brace your fall when you collapse in a quivering puddle of nerd goo.

Thanks Mat. Your brother is no officially brain dead.

[Via Temporal Anamolies in Time Travel Movies]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 am and is filed under Movies, Remix, Sci Fi, Skynet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Responses to “Of Skynet and N-Jumps”

  1. AvatarJMSharp
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 am
    1

    Heh, that website belongs to my friend’s dad. If you link around it takes you to all of his sites.

  2. AvatarJami
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 10:14 am
    2
    Author Comment

    HAHA! Friggin’ awesome! He’s got a lot of great stuff there.

  3. Avatargreg
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 3:40 pm
    3

    Very cool site. Time travel is perhaps the single coolest concept in science fiction. With regard to actual possibility, I don’t think that changing the past is possible, and in the multi-worlds theories in which it is, it doesn’t matter because you aren’t changing anything, as that split time line already existed as well.

  4. Avatargreg
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
    4

    Also, I’ve always thought that in the Terminator universe that Skynet was responsible for the development of time travel, so without Skynet, John Connor can’t send people back in time to prevent Skynet from being created. But without Skynet being created, there is no time travel. An effort in futility.

  5. Avatargreg
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 3:49 pm
    5

    Even more, the Terminator timeline can be considered consistent without the need for the multiverse theory. Assuming, of course, that Skynet is never actually prevented from being created. Until that is shown to be true, there is no reason to believe that the sending of various good and bad terminators is anything other than what has already happened, and nothing could have been done otherwise.

    Part of the problem with this is that we tend to work from the assumption that we are the present. The people in our future very much consider themselves to be in the present, and it is perfectly logical to accept that Connor is sending terminators back to protect himself because he knows that those terminators showed up to help him in his own past (the present time of T1, T2 and T3)

  6. AvatarCharmCityShinobi
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 4:27 pm
    6

    The whole divergent timeline theory is also what Dragonball Z uses. Though I haven’t taken the time to read the article yet, based on your synopsis it sounds like a similar situation as when Trunks comes from the future to give Goku the heart medicine and help fight the Androids and ultimately defeat them, yet when he returns to his timeline they still exist and nothing is changed (except he’s more badass and beats them without much effort.)

    Oh, and great job on Sunday night. I was indeed in attendance and it was actually I who drew the “Walking boombox carrying an R&B singer on its shoulder” card, which you dealt with quite handily.

  7. AvatarBartoneus
    Posted: Jun 3rd, 2008 at 8:15 pm
    7

    I think it’s really interesting that pretty much everything he mentions was consistent with what was done in Terminator 3, and that hopefully the next movie can capitalize on the ideas he presents as possible for the third movie (before it was made).

    Plus Christian Bale can make anything good, even Little Women.

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