WARNING: VERY NERDY RANT ABOUT THE THEORETICAL PHYSICS OF A MOVIE ABOUT KILLER ROBOTS:
No, you're always able to affect the outcome of your own timeline, and any future travellers that enter your timeline are from the future as it will be according to your own timeline up to that point. The fight for the future had meaning.Quote:
Originally Posted by FuryFox
But by that same notion, each individual can only travel into their own past, and as soon as they do, they've changed that past and created an alternate timeline. From there, they can affect the timeline they're in, but not the one they came from.
This is why in T:SCC Derek's memory of the future is subtly different from Jesse's. Derek travelled back in time further, such that Jesse didn't arrive until a month later in our present. Because Derek had already been there for some weeks before that, he had created a subtly different future already, and Jesse came from that future and not the one he originally came from.
There are actually three or four completely different Skynets in the Terminator universe (The original, the one cyberdyne reverse engineered, the one that we saw in T3, and the one hinted at in T:SCC) and two different John Connors (one who sent the original Kyle Reese back, and his half-brother who was fathered by Kyle Reese and named John because of what he had told Sarah).
None of this is really clear in the first movie where they seem to be suggesting a paradoxical/cyclic/fatalist notion of time, but they completely blow apart that implication in the later stories and they stay very consistent in their time travel rules, actually.
