Come With Me If You Want To Live

So I watched the second episode of the new Terminator series tonight. The show is good popcorn entertainment (even though I didn't have any popcorn and had ice cream pie instead). Plus it's nice to see River from Firefly with regular work again. The only problem I have with the show is it makes my head hurt. Time travel stories are generally bad in my opinion, because they always end up with some stranded alternate future that's impossible to get to. That's one of the reasons I liked the first Terminator movie so much, even though it had the time travel paradox in it the time line overall remained consistent. Then they destroyed that with Terminator 2, where they create an alternate future. Those always bug me because if none of that future happens, what ended up sending the stuff back in time in the first place. So after watching the first episode of the new Terminator television series I thought it had just ignored the third Terminator movie. I mean that movie was so bad most everyone else has ignored it, why not the television show. Thing is what we learn in the second episode is that apparently that Terminator 3 may have happened, but they've they managed to undo it (does that make Terminator 3 the world's most expensive mulligan). At the same time the same way they undo Terminator 3 that also keeps John's age consistent with activation occurring at a later date that originally thought.

So where the heck does that leave the time stream? Does the show deal with a predestined future? I would say no since the future represented in the first Terminator movie now no longer seems to have existed since according to Terminator one the Skynet activation date (August 4, 1997) has already come and gone and we're still here (although this begs the question of how did Reese go back in time then). So this sort of implies that every time someone sends something back in time it's creating an alternate time line from the point of the objects reentry into the time stream. Believe it or not I can buy that explanation, but then one has to make the assumption that you can only travel backwards in time along your branch, and if you travel backward in time you won't end up in the past further up a different time line. But then that begs the questions of why do all these things coming back in time always end up going to the same time stream. So as you can see, it's best not tot think about the logic of the show too much. I treat it kind of like a Dr Who episode where time operates in whatever way is convenient for the plot at any given time.

Aside from that the only other issue I have is it seems everyone and their brother in the future must have a time machine considering how many people and Terminators have been sent back. Oh yea, and in the second episode we see some non organic material make a time trip, which I didn't think was allowed given the time travel rules established in the movies. And the actress playing Sarah Connor is way too thin. No way would Sarah Connor be a toothpick like that. Aside from all that, I kind of like the show. Did anyone else notice that the address of the computer store in the second episode was 1337? I found that highly amusing. I wonder if they're going to continue to have little easter eggs like that in the show (although it was so obvious that it did interrupt my suspension of disbelief.