John Conner's original father

[Mully]

Who is John Conner's original father in the Terminator stories?

At work, someone is saying Kyle Reese.

I say that it can't be because John Conner sent Reese back in time and Reese was not John Conner's father because in the future John Conner would HAVE to send Reese back to exist.

[Eric]

Err, yes, it's Kyle Reese.

[Blotus]

TIME PARADOX!

[Mully]

before time travel was invited, there was john conner. time travel was invented, then he sent kyle back in time.

who was john conner's father before time travel was invented?

[Julius Seeker]

It's Kyle Reese, he is the protector in Terminator 1, he makes fuck with Sarah Conner and she gets pregnant.

[Shellie]

What Mully is saying is, John wouldn't have existed before Reese sent him back if Reese is his original father.

Most of us are saying that John had another original father that is unknown to us. And when John sent Reese back, the future changed and Reese became John's "new" father.

However, John was a rebel and learned in military ways because(I'm assuming) his mother, after living life on the run after learning about the machines and the war, etc. Where did the original John learn his rebellious attitude and fighting skills from? Sarah was very meek and innocent before meeting Reese.


It's a quiet day at work, and we just saw the trailer for the new Terminator movie.

[Julius Seeker]

I getcha, well, it's Terminator, that's not the only hole in the plotline =P

No one really knows the fabric of time, let alone if a fabric actually exists that can be travelled through. It could be that this loop happens infinitely. It could be that originally someone else sent Reese back and that after many many loops it eventually got to the current story which became a constant; if you catch my drift.

[Mully]

In this original history, Sarah Connor must have had a child. It was not Kyle Reese's child; it might not even have been a boy. All that is certain is that a child was born. It is also certain that someone created something called Skynet, a computer system able to control all of our computerized weapons systems, and that at some point this system became self-aware, and turned against humanity. An unfathomable number of humans died, but Sarah Connor's child survived, and led a resistance of some sort which fought back and prevented Skynet's victory. At some point, however, Skynet decided that it had one good option, to send a machine to the past to destroy Sarah Connor's child. For whatever reason, it determined to do this by destroying Sarah Connor before the child was born. Thus a Terminator was sent back, and history changed completely.

[Shellie]

I getcha, well, it's Terminator, that's not the only hole in the plotline =P

Still fun to argue at work when nothing is going on

[bovine]

skynet made the time machine that sent everyone back in time anyways, so if skynet was destroyed or disrupted in any way, then it would be impossible for it to make the time machine at the same time, and thus it would negate any of the previous time travellers. If you look at time as a set of linear paths instead of one single linear path, then travelling in between these paths (or dimensions) could be considered time travel as well, then time paradoxes would be possible.

[Mully]

if you stop skynet at any point before time travel, you stopped all paradoxes, and the original time line would begin...then who would be Jon Conner's father.

[Julius Seeker]

Perhaps in the original timeline it wasn't even John Conner that started the revolution. There could have been hundreds or hundreds of thousands of previous timelines before the loop eventually came to be what it is in the current series. Flashback to Final Fantasy 8!!!

[Zeus]

In the year 1984, Kyle Reese existed in the world. He humped Sarah Conner, leading to the birth of John Conner. Just because John sent him back don't mean he wasn't there.

That's actually something the 3rd movie, which everyone ignored, was addressing. The first two movies were all about changing the future. The third said "you can't change the future, it is what it is". And if you think back to the original, Kyle had the picture of Sarah that he got from John before being sent back, no? It was even hinted at there.

[Julius Seeker]

The first movie also had Sarah visibly pregnant at the end. The only person she made woopy with was Reese.

[Don]

I don't know if it's a time paradox but more like a logical paradox. Normally you have something like this:

cause: John Conner was a military genius:
effect: So he sent Kyle back in time to make sure he lived.

instead here we have it reversed

cause: Kyle was sent back in time.
effect: John Conner became a military genius.

Basically the cause and the effect are inverted. You also see this in Terminator 2. Had the machines not sent the T-1000 back, John Connor would've thought his mother was a crackpot and not pick up any of the skills needed to be humanity's last hope. So if the Machines didn't try to kill John Connor, they would've won already. You're supposed to just nod and say yep when it comes to stuff like this.

[RentCavalier]

I fucking hate time travel.

[Kupek]

You're supposed to just nod and say yep when it comes to stuff like this.

Pretty much what I was going to say, which is funny, because that's often what I try to tell you when you start talking about videogame and anime plots. The underlying assumption in this kind of question is it has to make sense, when no, in fact, it does not.

[Julius Seeker]

I fucking hate time travel.

What the fuck?! Time travel is awesome!

You've just never been to the future before!

[SineSwiper]

Fucking Back to the Future has killed your sense of the 5th dimension!

Multiple timelines exist. You aren't changing time when you time travel. You're just going to a different timeline. There is no such thing as a "time paradox". And it doesn't blow up the universe.

Timeline 1: John Conner doesn't exist. Somebody travels back in time.
Timeline 2: Some guy travels back in time, gets Sarah pregnant, John is born, meets Kyle, travels back in time.
Timeline 3: Kyle travels back in time, gets Sarah pregnant, John is born, meets Kyle, travels back in time.
Repeat similar timelines to #3

We really don't know what actually happened in Timelines 1 and 2. Skynet and all of that maybe didn't exist. After all, they can't create themselves from some leftover arm that didn't exist in that timeline. At some point, some company created Skynet, a terminator went back in time, and then Skynet created Skynet.

Hell, in T3, they pretty much show that even though the arm was destroyed in T2, Skynet still took over. So, before T2, Skynet was created by the arm. And then after T3, Skynet was actually created by the virus. Both are different versions of alternate timelines.

There's a good YouTube video on dimensional physics that might make it easy to understand.

[Don]

What Sine described is more like Doraemon's theory of inevitabilty. Nobita's great great great son came from the future to help his ancestor so he can have a better life 200 years later, and by the doctrine of inevitability, it doesn't even matter if his ancestor marries someone else, he exists because he must.

Of course if you really believe in that then everything that was done in the Terminator would be meaningful because it's all inevitable anyway. Not that either of these makes an attempt as a serious attempt to understand time travel, which is why there's no need to think very much about it. On the other hand there are plenty of game/manga/Anime plot that do not make sense, that the story DOES depend on.

For example in the latest arc in Naruto, Jiraiya wrote some encrypted message that can only be deciphered by Naruto, even though the message was not in danger of being intercepted (and if it was, it'd be lost anyway). Why did he do this? Well the real explanation is that it's because it takes 4 weeks of manga time to decipher the code (which is probably 1 year in Anime time when it gets here) which means more money for the author without actually having to do anything meaningful. However if you're going to take a month to decipher some code, it better have some reason to do it, and people are quick to call this out as a shameless attempt to drag the series on even further, and quite justified.

[Kupek]

a whole hell of a lot

I don't even know where to start.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

What Sine described is more like Doraemon's theory of inevitabilty.

Only you could deliver this line straight, Don. You are a legend.

For those of you that don't know, this is Doraemon:



That this cat-type robot from the future could have a theory of inevitability is the greatest thing ever.

[Flip]

What Sine described is more like Doraemon's theory of inevitabilty.

Only you could deliver this line straight, Don. You are a legend.

For those of you that don't know, this is Doraemon:



That this cat-type robot from the future could have a theory of inevitability is the greatest thing ever.

Gotta give kudos to this... lol.

[Don]

Am I the only one that read the very first arc where they explained how it's okay they're basically changing the past however they want it with no reprecussion to the future due to the doctrine of inevitability? That sets the rules for the universe because Doraemon pretty much has something that involves time travel every other arc so they must have a stable universe where using the time machines do not create a time paradox.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

If anybody else here has read any Doraemon at all I would be surprised, Don, heh!

[Eric]

Even I have never read up on Doraemon.

[Don]

And you guys watch Anime???

[SineSwiper]

Not starting cat-robots. I've started to avoid such disasters since Milk Chan.

[SineSwiper]

I don't even know where to start.

Dazzle us with your fancy college degrees, Kupek.

[Zeus]

And you guys watch Anime???

Until the advent of torrents, it's not like we had extreme exposure to a whole shitload of anime. I mean, you could grab stuff off of Kazaa and mIRC, but it wasn't nearly as widespread and without nearly the selection like now. Some of the older stuff that's huge in Asia we never got or got much later.

[Mully]

We really don't know what actually happened in Timelines 1 and 2. Skynet and all of that maybe didn't exist. After all, they can't create themselves from some leftover arm that didn't exist in that timeline. At some point, some company created Skynet, a terminator went back in time, and then Skynet created Skynet.

TRUE!

Kyle and Sarah jump-start the Skynet program by destroying the Terminator in the first movie, Terminators existed before the first time travel "jump point." FACT: In the original timeline, someone created Skynet, which created terminators, then they sent one back in time to kill Sarah Connor. FACT: They killed the Terminator and left a CPU/chip and an arm behind ("Reese's Prices" if you will.) Cyberdyne used this arm to steal research from the original creator. Someone else created Skynet before Cyberdyne, they only did because they "cheated" and reverse engineered the final product. Who ever created skynet first, did it the old fashion way, honest research plus time.

[Kupek]

I don't even know where to start.

Dazzle us with your fancy college degrees, Kupek.

I'm not kidding, Sine. I don't know where to start. That you are taking this guy's book at face value, and are assuming that his explanation of time travel must be true, is absurd.

Remember that wacky cult you got hooked on many years ago? The one where you thought there was no way one guy could come up with this document on his own? Similar thing. Just because something makes intuitive sense to you, doesn't make it true.

[RentCavalier]

Is the plot of the Terminator movies really worthy of all this discussion? I mean...its Terminator...

[SineSwiper]

I don't even know where to start.

Dazzle us with your fancy college degrees, Kupek.

I'm not kidding, Sine. I don't know where to start. That you are taking this guy's book at face value, and are assuming that his explanation of time travel must be true, is absurd.

Well, okay, then explain to us how the different dimensions work.

[bovine]

Is the plot of the Terminator movies really worthy of all this discussion? I mean...its Terminator...

the first two movies had some pretty amazing continuity considering that they're based on time travel.

[Mully]

Dazzle us with your fancy college degrees, Kupek.

I'm not kidding, Sine. I don't know where to start. That you are taking this guy's book at face value, and are assuming that his explanation of time travel must be true, is absurd.

Well, okay, then explain to us how the different dimensions work.

Well, since no one has done it, it's just theory, like the big bang, but people take it to heart and actually believe it.

[SineSwiper]

Well, since no one has done it, it's just theory, like the big bang, but people take it to heart and actually believe it.

Well, just because something is theory doesn't mean that there isn't a large amount of evidence for it. Take evolution, for example. There is so much science behind evolution that many branches of science were born from it, and just about every medical branch has had benefits from it. However, because of its nature, it cannot be considered a fact.

Also consider that Newton's theory of universal gravitation (ie: gravity) is also a theory.

[Zeus]

Is the plot of the Terminator movies really worthy of all this discussion? I mean...its Terminator...

Yeah, that's what made them awesome action flicks as opposed to just good ones.

[Don]

There is evidence that support stuff like the Big Bang theory. I'm not aware of any evidence that a parallel timeline/universe exists.