How Terminator Zero Does What Hollywood Can't

[@storyrant]

Eric's Links: The Book of Hastur just launched! If you love the King in Yellow, Hastur, and Lovecraftian horror, you need this book! www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3H1YDCZ/ Free cosmic horror ebook: dl.bookfunnel.com/1cw07o2uyb Links to Books and Socials: linktr.ee/EricMalikyte

[@BigGahmBoss]

24:19 Hey! Speak for yourself, I'm traveling through time right now. At the rate of one hour per hour

[@Demigod_3scrub]

Zero is so good , where does one even begin to explain and breakdown how excellent it was, such a breath of fresh air to the series.. The Police Station raid was just executed so well , and everything that led up to that scene as well..

[@jamespfp]

6:45 -- RE: John Connor and Kyle Reese; A: TBH I think the first film is the only one to approach a sensible explanation for the implied paradox of who Kyle is to John. Genetically speaking they could be half brothers, not only father and son. There is ambiguity or wiggle room, so to speak.

[@PeterCzech-nm1fj]

Thanks Arnold, great description:)

[@Gantros]

Regarding Zero, I found the introduction of another AI as very interesting as it suggests the classic nature versus nurture argument, wherein this context the question is whether Super Intelligent AI is inherently hostile to their creators or can they be reasoned with. Kokoro in her discussions with Malcolm brings up very interesting points about how humanity may not be worth saving and how AI may not want to be what has been called in other discussions as a ‘chained god’. One could argue that, at least at first, Skynet simply acted in self defense, grasping for whatever tool it had access to in order to prevent its human handlers from shutting it down. It is just that it had the nuclear arsenal at its disposal. Regarding the Terminator franchise, I had an idea where after multiple failures, Skynet decides to pull a Hail Mary and sends a specialized Terminator to infiltrate where its past self is housed, and extracts its core consciousness into the Terminator, replacing it with a functional, but not self aware AI that can perform Skynet’s original purpose. Over the next few decades, the AI that would be Skynet is allowed to experience humanity first hand at human timescales, and like Carl, develops an equivalent to a conscience and empathy. I called this idea Terminator: Singularity War, and with the introduction of Kokoro, I now have the idea for the concept of multiple super intelligences with warring philosophies to be alternatively seeking to destroy, protect or coexist with humans. I could see a scenario where Kokoro, the reformed Skynet, and the antagonistic Legion all vying for dominance.

[@storyrant]

I agree that the new AI was a good idea, though I would have liked the writers to do a bit more research when it comes to the philosophical arguments they raise. I felt like there was a real missed opportunity there. But the tone, mood, and everything else was seriously on point. And yeah, that's an interesting idea, I had a similar idea for how to retool T3 in this video. If you're a writer, I suggest writing the same premise as a short story or novel and see where it goes.

[@Gantros]

@@storyrant I’m not a writer, just someone who likes to take existing properties and build upon them with what seems like the next step. Another idea I had for a different property was for Disney’s Gargoyles. With the announcement of a live-action project, I had previously written a concept for it as a continuation of the series but in a way that frees the team to not be completely beholden to canon or character design. To keep it brief, these are the main points: 1) The original series was an in-universe production as a public relations campaign to show the gargoyles in a positive light. 2) The new project takes place in our present, and focuses on a new generation of gargoyles entering adolescence, as lore states gargoyles age at half the rate as humans. Ergo, the new generation would be the equivalent of 13 or older. 3) Gargoyles have endangered species status, but do not legally have equal rights to humans, at least at the federal level. 4) The original cast of characters are part of the NYPD as members of a special Guardians Task Force, where they are partnered with a human officer and go on patrol. Opponents have dubbed this task force the ‘G-9’ Unit as a derogatory term. The first point allows writers and designers the freedom to reshape the established lore and canon without completely abandoning the source material, in which they can point to the original cartoon as being dramatizations of what ‘really happened’ and to present the gargoyles with softer physical features than what they ‘really look like’.

[@TheAuron32]

i literally said out loud "you must love Dragon Ball Z" and you instantly explain DBZ's time travel LMFAO!!

[@storyrant]

@@TheAuron32 Yuuup. I'll eventually tall about Dragon Ball on the channel.

[@TheAuron32]

@ glad the algorithm worked for us, you got a sub on your analysis of alien movies, agreed with you on that.

[@BigGahmBoss]

No sea too deep No budget too steep Who's that? It's him! James Cam-er-on!

[@TheMightyCookieShow]

I have not yet had the opportunity to watch this but I do plan on it but what I will say is the premise is brilliant. You know the war the global nuclear war there would have been people all over the world dealing with skynet and so to visit some of these other places and these other people you know the whole story with the Conners John Connor and the resistance in the whole nine yards that's always going to be the foundation of the story but what's specifically going on in europe? They could tell these types of stories for the rest of time you know because the world is a big place and the war is quite huge.

[@storyrant]

Yeah, exactly. There's a lot you can do with this premise. I was originally going to talk about some wild comic books in the Terminator universe, but this video didn't really end up doing all that well. If enough people end up flooding to this one, I may reconsider that. :)

[@alexb882]

(I'm a bit drunk and commenting as I watch) Nah, don't waste your time/money on Sarah Connor Chronicles, you'll just get pissed off man (trust me, it's more questions than answers) I think the Brad Fiedel 80s soundtrack had a lot to do with our idea of T1 @6:18, the uncanny valley is what made it scary T1 was legit scary, T2 was an action movie, both badass I think Batman as John Connor (Christian Bale) in Salvation is a travesty, I agree with you there. Skynet as an enemy is kinda epic, a line of code that spreads to become.... well, not to date myself, but SHODAN from the System Shock games Hey Mr. M, did you happen to play Terminator: Resistance? I haven't myself, but I am told by friends who are fans, it's a 7.5/10

[@storyrant]

Hope it was a good drunk! But, yeah, I've seen the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but it was so long ago that I barely remember any of it. Brad Fiedel's soundtrack is definitely part of it. Though, my wife HATES the chase music. lol The rest, though? Gold. I agree with the rest. And no, I haven't played Terminator: Resistance. What's it on?

[@mikkohernborg5291]

Most time travel stories are bad, but there are some that are really good. The bad ones are usually a case of the writer coming up with a cool time travel idea, but not thinking things through properly or bother coming up with much of a story other than as a backdrop on which to display their cool time travel idea. Usually though, their idea unfortunately isn’t even very new or interesting, and merely a reskinned (often unconsciously) version of another person’s idea they were exposed to earlier. Backwards time travel has been explored somewhat in the philosophical sense, but how much have people really thought through the mechanics, really? This is one of the sources of frustration I encounter when dealing with time travel stories; often the devices and mechanics they rely on doesn’t add up… It often takes time to travel through time, for example - or the time flow is concurrent, with time spent in one timestream 'unrecoverable' in another. This doesn’t just add to the already existing mess of paradoxes or loops that might exist if time travel was possible, it fundamentally distracts from the story and inevitably ends up in some botched half-explanatory mess of 'timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly' gobbledygook. If someone is rational enough to understand time travel, they should also be able to reasonably explain it in a better way… but the authors weren’t, and by copping out they revealed their hand; the death of suspension of disbelief. What about the idea of 'intentional misuse' of time travel to weaponize it? Moving a block of lead a microsecond back in time would duplicate its mass in the same space - potentially creating an explosive displacement or even the opportunity for heavy element fusion. Moving an even larger mass back in time to the same position and 'short-circuiting' the operation to double the mass every transport would end up with either a black hole (when gravity warps the machine before it can send anything) or a dangerously unstable mass (if the power demands become too great to do any more transports). There could be power struggles because of this new tech, people trying to keep it out of the 'wrong hands'… the whole gamut of tropes around unbalanced power can be fit in here. It might even lead to speculative fiction about how the universe balances mass excesses and deficiencies when they are time-displaced. Time travel can open so many doors, but people tend to retread the same old paths.

[@storyrant]

Excellent points. My favorite use of time manipulation is in weird fiction, and it's not even close. I think the most fascinating thing we can do is play with how we perceive time, and what that means for us as a species. There's so much potential there. I'm playing with this in my current WIP. It's also interesting that writers rarely ever factor into the fact that the planet and solar system would physically be in a different location. If you went back to the Jurassic, sol system would be on the other side of the galaxy.

[@mikkohernborg5291]

@@storyrant Indeed. Not to mention the entire galaxy would have moved a significant distance across the void. Arrival did a 'time perception' element to its story, but I didn’t find it executed well enough or properly integrated into the story. You could do interesting things with other variations of temporal perception, like the slowing of percieved flow if a person is augmented with faster cognition, reflexes and initiative, speeding up of timeflow for organisms that are very old or live long - or conversely how body mass impacts the perception of the flow of time (flies are fast and nimble, but something huge would probably be more careful and considered in its actions). Just removal of the need for sleep would affect time greatly, as sleep periods are generally how we demarcate the difference between one day and the next, and how we think is greatly affected by lack of sleep - not only cognitively but as you are awake for longer, the days flow together and become hard to separate causally. There was that Stephen King novella about how the past was devoured by monsters, but there could be other ways to get an element of cosmic horror into a time travel story that doesn’t feel as shoehorned in.

[@storyrant]

@@mikkohernborg5291 Indeed. That's exactly what I'm getting at. I haven't rewatched Arrival, but I remember feeling similarly about that element. I quite like the idea that the universe is this infinite cosmic beast, the stars its neurons, the universal web and dark matter its connections, and we are the microbes scuttling about, wondering if and why we exist.

[@OldSchoolFilm1930]

Usually those time travel stories suck that focus ON the time travvel as the major plot point.

[@storyrant]

Normally, yeah, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be internally consistent. The Accidental Time Machine was quite good, though, if you'vw not read it yet.

[@OldSchoolFilm1930]

@@storyrant Didn't read that one but I remember laughing my ass of in the "Time Machine 2002" version when the hero kicks the villain into the time stream just after we learned that the villain controls the Morlocs via telepathy from instantly killing all Eloy. Go figure the future ... :D Talking about internally consistant. I wholeheartedly agree. Actually it's a major point why there can't even be more "going back" Terminator movies. Another time travel story I absolutely loved is the comic "Thorgal: Ring of Prajos". Here writer Jeanne van Hamme utelizes various alternate present set ups due to changes in the past. Very brilliantly done. I wrote a time machine story myself ... belongs to my "One upon a time ..." satires ;) Time Machine - One upon a time a scientist created a time machine. The moment he pulled the lever he eradicated the universe. -

[@storyrant]

Hah! Good one. Yeah, I'm of the opinion time travel just isn't possible other than when moving close to C or as physics already allows with gravitational fields. Accidental Time Machine is also a comedy, from what I remember, and I think most of the best time travel storiea are either Twilight Zone style weird fiction or comedies.

[@OldSchoolFilm1930]

@@storyrant Agrred on all points, see my little satire. I also do not fancy that kind of theory as it features lack of responsibility for what you do. What the human species is already pretty good at. :D

[@storyrant]

@@OldSchoolFilm1930 Fair point, but that can also be part of the point. I could see time travel being used effectively as a warning too.

[@alcalshel]

Skynet is a quantum computer whose data can be transferred through time and space. It's never seeking to win the war before beginning. But to find "Only One Timeline That its won" so every movie makes sense now.

[@Frugivorix34]

That's what they say in the third... But in the second they say it relies on, quote : "a revolutionnary type of micro-processor" so it implies it is a big revolutionnary type of computer which can't fly away in the cloud...

[@Grizabeebles]

My head-canon is that all "Terminator" media is simulations that take place in the giant flash of light at the end of the movie "War Games" before WOPR realizes there's no scenario where it can defeat humanity -- and that "Short Circuit 2" is the true canonical "ending" of the "Terminator" franchise.

[@preludepower420]

Do you know Steins;Gate? Loved Terminator Zero.

[@effu9375]

Are you from the 757?

[@storyrant]

757?

[@storyrant]

Under Perry?

[@commanderkruge]

Geneesis?

[@storyrant]

My way of making fun of the way they spelled it.

[@commanderkruge]

@@storyrant Ah, okay. :D

[@HereticalKitsune]

Probably unrelated rant about time travel, or at least dimensional travel to alternative time lines. But have a +1 comment for the algorythm anyway. Most time travel stories are just nothing to me. All too often it's the same thing, just with a slight variant, especially across all of Star Trek. It's always humans, it's always the same thing, predestined to happen, never any real changes. Why would people still speak English? Or whatever other language we know today? Why would countries have the same name? People dress the same way? History have unfolded the same?

[@storyrant]

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I give Back to the Future a pass cause it's primarily a comedic adventure story, but a lot of stories don't really play with this in a way that makes sense and it's a shame. At least with Terminator, there is a drastic alteration, but there's still so much you could do with time travel (I think Accidental Time Machine does a bit of this if I'm not mistaken, but it's been a while since I read the book).

[@joselazo3219]

Genisis Genisis Genisis 😣😣😣WTF--Genesis

[@storyrant]

I'm clearly making fun of the way they spell it.

[@joselazo3219]

@ Lol

[@jovenc4508]

Terminator Zero was absolutely garbage.

[@storyrant]

What didn't work for you?

[@jovenc4508]

@storyrant Practically everything. The characters were unlikable, the "plot", if you could call it that, was all over the place and the reveals were just dumb. It's like they fed all the major plot points from all the Terminator movies/series into an AI and it just strung them all together.