The Terminator VS The Matrix

[Serum]

Okay, so I was thinking about this the other day, in the Terminator movies, why don't the machines simply send a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor as a baby? It seems pretty obvious, right? Without Sarah Connor, there can be no John Connor and without John Connor there can be no resistance against the machines. But then I got to thinking about it, why the machines aren't critical thinkers that act with perfect logic and cold calculation, and then I compared Terminator to The Matrix. In The Matrix, the machines have gone through hundreds, if not thousands of years of trial and error with the enslavement of the human race. Agent Smith says that there was a beta-version of the Matrix which was a perfect world, free of suffering, but that everyone rejected it and 'whole crops were lost.' Then, in the second Matrix movie, that architect guy says that they're actually on the fifth or sixth version of the Matrix, and that the machines had mapped out the entire human mind so well that they could predict everything a person would and could do. Whereas apposed to Terminator, the machines come from the year 2020 or something, not very far in the future, and despite having developed time travel, they aren't very good critical thinkers when it comes to humanity, because they haven't had the time that the Matrix machines have had to work on humans. Comparing the Matrix to the Terminator machines is kind of like comparing a painting by DaVinci to a three year old's scribbles with crayon. If the Terminator machines had been thinking solely about how to destroy humanity for a thousand years, they would be as efficient as the Matrix machines that have been thinking of ways to imprison the human mind for a thousand years. This is my theory as to why the Terminators don't simply do what they should do, because they're fairly new to thinking, fairly new to being self-aware and don't know how to handle it.

[Prime Evil]

Okay, so I was thinking about this the other day, in the Terminator movies, why don't the machines simply send a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor as a baby? It seems pretty obvious, right? Without Sarah Connor, there can be no John Connor and without John Connor there can be no resistance against the machines.

...The Blinovitch Limitation Effect?

(A bit of a geeky Doctor Who reference: within the show, the BLE is a time travel clause that basically stops travelers from doing the same thing in the same place at the same time twice. It's never fully explained, but it might refer to the danger one runs in seeing his or her past selves, like "Back to the Future.")

[Serum]

Okay, so I was thinking about this the other day, in the Terminator movies, why don't the machines simply send a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor as a baby? It seems pretty obvious, right? Without Sarah Connor, there can be no John Connor and without John Connor there can be no resistance against the machines.

...The Blinovitch Limitation Effect?

(A bit of a geeky Doctor Who reference: within the show, the BLE is a time travel clause that basically stops travelers from doing the same thing in the same place at the same time twice. It's never fully explained, but it might refer to the danger one runs in seeing his or her past selves, like "Back to the Future.")

We're not playing time travel by Back to the Future rules, though, we're playing by Terminator rules.
And we're certainly not playing by TimeCop rules, because those are just silly.

[Prime Evil]

We're not playing time travel by Back to the Future rules, though, we're playing by Terminator rules.
And we're certainly not playing by TimeCop rules, because those are just silly.

Never seen TimeCop, so I wouldn't be able to comment on it.

As for "Terminator's" rules, well, Doctor Who got there first anyway..."Day of the Daleks" featured the conceit of rebel guerrillas creating the very future they were trying to prevent (they set off a bomb that they mistakenly thought was detonated by an insane politician, starting World War III and allowing a nightmarish alternate timeline to take place).

One thing I will say is that most if not all time-travel fiction follows the same set of rules, that the decisions you make in the past (or whenever) have bigger consequences for later (earlier?) events. And paradoxes are paradoxes, no matter what happens. Still, I think I should make a note of seeing the original "Terminator" one of these days.