Siskoid Cinema presents… On Borrowed Time, the shows that explores time travel in movies. On this episode, Siskoid and Ryan Blake discuss 1984’s stone-cold time travel classic, The Terminator. Do we even need to say more here?
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Credits:
Bonus clips: “The Terminator” by James Cameron, starring Shawn Schepps, Michael Biehn, Ed Dogans, Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger; Doctor Who’s “Before the Flood” by Stephen Moffat, starring Peter Capaldi; and “The Terminator Main Theme” by Brad Fiedel.
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I always thought that the resistance invented the time machine but that team was attacked and killed before they could use it, which would explain it only working on living things.
It’s interesting how “No fate but what we make” oscillates between noble lie and useful truth between the movies.
Pakita & I listened to three episodes of On Borrowed Time while on a road trip, and she declared Siskoid the best of the podcasters that we played. She favored the Trancers episode, but there’s a clear bias there. Clearly, Skynet used humans to test the time displacement technology, and that’s how they determined that only living tissue could go, and delayed their own usage long enough for the resistance to learn of it (possibly from displaced subjects landing at various points in the timeline.) Oh hey, thanks for revisiting my Terminator NOW promo!
I’ve always wondered on the logic of why Skynet would build a time machine that can only send back living tissue covered things. And really it doesn’t track unless you assume that the time machine wasn’t designed by Skynet and it was designed to thwart them instead. So the Resistance building it make sense but also the concept that after John Conner leads the humans to victory against the machines – far far in the future someone else builds a time machine and then tries to send people back to prevent Skynet killing so many humans – and Skynet figured out there was Time Travel and then built a machine.
But THEN I thought what if that far far future AI invents Time Machines to send humans back because they NEEDED Skynet to wipe off so many humans to prevent something worse – like I dunno Aliens using them as hosts. And after that it started getting silly and I realised I was putting in too much energy into an idea that James Cameron didn’t look beyond the idea of sending a Cyborg killing machine back in time and you can’t tell it’s not human until it’s too late.
I often find it interesting how so many of cast our own version of ideas and motivations and expanded universe thoughts about stories which maybe really didn’t have that much beyond what we already saw on screen. Considering how many re-writes are made of films these days I suspect some of us (myself included) might see thoughts and ideas that weren’t even a fleeting thought in the mind of the script writer.
All that being said I loved this episode of On Borrowed Time. I agree that the First Terminator Film is the best in terms of keeping the time line pure and I really hate how T2 messed that up even if it looked SOOO cool.
Kudos to Siskoid and Ryan for really thought provoking and fun episode.
Fun episode covering a pillar of the time travel movie genre. I wish someone would devote an entire series to Terminator and speak so fast you’d imagine they had 18 cups of espresso.
I was too young for Terminator when it came out. Even on VHS. But, I was able to catch it at a friend’s house. As a pre-teen/early teen I preferred T2, but now I find that the only great Terminator film is the first one. It’s so dark and menacing compared to the other ones.
I loved the deep dive into the bootstrap paradox, new term for me, and how it could inform a different interpretation of Terminator and the entire TU franchise. Thanks for the episode. Can wait for you to hit some more of these.