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Notes -
Terminator: Dark Fate
(Disclaimer: I am ONLY discussing T1, T2, and DF here because it fits this trope.)
Sarah Connor fought Skynet’s Terminators, first for her own survival and then her son’s. She prevented Skynet from coming into being. She became a true action hero in T2, a mama bear, right up there with Rambo and Ripley.
But she tried to kill Miles Dyson so he wouldn’t invent the militaristic Singularity. Miles was Black, and he died helping her kill Skynet. Thus, she isn’t allowed a happy ending.
DF picks up after the Los Angeles adventure in T2. Sarah and John flee the country to the tropics. A Terminator, Arnold model, emerges from the water and slaughters John Connor, successful in his mission at last. She saved the world but lost her only son, her motivation for fighting.
Hollow and defeated, she lives her life as a fugitive from the law until one day she gets a message pinpointing where and when a Terminator will emerge from the future. She shows up, kills it. This keeps happening until she saves the life of a Hispanic girl, the newest target.
It turns out Sarah only killed the first militaristic Singularity, Skynet. They’re going to keep happening as long as humans try to make smart machines. This one will be called “Legion” and has time travel and Terminators too.
On the run, they commiserate about being the targets of Terminators and losing family. Sarah waxes angsty about how meaningless it is that this girl will spend her life just trying to keep her son safe. The androgynous augmented woman warrior from the future tells Sarah that no, this girl is herself the future savior of humanity, the future general who takes down Legion.
Sarah Connor, the white waitress-turned-warrior woman who defeated Skynet in a time war, is devastated. She lost her son after he was no longer vital to humanity, and she’s on the run for crimes she committed to keep him safe.
This Hispanic girl, meanwhile, will someday be hailed as conquering hero. If she doesn’t strangle Legion in its crib, she’ll at least put it down with extreme righteous violence. She’s Sarah and John Connor wrapped up in one person.
The cuckolding of old and wrinkled Los Angelina Sarah Connor is made complete when it turns out the T-800 who killed her son became a really chill dude and has been feeding her the coordinates of Legion’s Terminators all along. The cuckoldry is doubled by Arnold’s doofy ass having become stepfather to a gun-loving Texas family.
Sarah gave it all, every ounce of strength and will and legal recourse, and her son besides, and the week she finds out she’s been the sidekick to her son’s slaughterer is also the week she finds out her son’s place in prophecy has been pre-empted by someone nonwhite, non-American, and non-male.
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