bigger picture
The world of the Terminator.
Listen, and understand… That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be pinned down to one story that will make your head hurt if you to try to square it with the others. And it will not stop morphing into new shapes. Sometimes stabby things, sometimes cops, mostly games, comics and books: worlds of spin-offs that keep on proliferating. As the best cult movies do, James Cameron’s The Terminator left the door open for such variations. The characters’ backstories were up for grabs, the use of time-travel allowed for fresh narrative resets and rejigs and later, after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the Terminator could even assume new forms. What’s more, the challenge to match T1 and T2’ s shock-of-the-new factor would prove tempting.
The only surprise was how long it took the future to start rolling. Horror-hound Shaun Hutson’s gorier, saucier movie tie-in novel aside, it took four years before Now Comics stepped in with a 17-issue The Terminator series in 1988: sadly, it barely resembled Cameron’s vision. The 2031 setting blithely contradicted Kyle Reese’s version of future events, a criticism dismissed sniffily on the letters pages. Many ideas were daffy – Terminators are described as ’Nators, ugh – but a few showed promise. A focus on day-to-day survival among the Resistance retrospectively brings to mind
Battlestar Galactica while new Terminators include a bad wolf and a baby infiltration unit. The “flesh farms” are a nice, nasty notion too, but they were a rare blast of bleak in a series pitched too brightly: no wonder the ’Nators always wear shades.
THE UNKNOWN FUTURE
No such problem with Ron Fortier and slick comic artist Alex Ross’ rain-lashed Terminator:
The Burning Earth (1990). With John Connor driven to near-suicide by war’s horrors, it rests on a last-ditch strike on Skynet after the machines launch their own all-out nuclear hit against humanity. It’s endgame stuff, matched beautifully by Ross’ deep watercolours.
With a better standard set, Dark Horse took over Terminator comics in 1990, sometimes badly but with occasionally smart twists on Terminator lore. Matt Wagner’s One Shot (1991) featured a female Terminator tailing a fourth Sarah Connor in ‘80s San Francisco. Whatever you make of a story about the wrong Sarah, Wagner crafted a tight, twist-y tale with strong, fresh franchise additions, including aged Resistance lug Ellis Ruggles and a monkey named Peanut. So there’s that.
The Dark Knight Returns auteur Frank Miller offered a less furry guest star. Franchise mash-ups can make the skin crawl, real or synthetic, but Miller and artist Walter Simonson’s RoboCop
Versus The Terminator (1991) thrived on the conviction of its attack. The fast, choppy plot plugs in to the idea that RoboCop is, inadvertently, the source of Skynet: a simple, bold conceit but it works. Being a Miller story, it’s also unapologetically violent. It revels in the Terminator’s powers of imitation (a T-boy and his T-dog feature) and uses time travel as both weapon and plot engine, not just as a premise. New Resistance fighter Florence (Florence and the machines...) gets plenty of action too, and it’s good action: the “braka braka” scraps and steroidal splash pages are unstinting. Other crossovers stumbled. Superman Versus
The Terminator (2000) undersells itself – Supergirl, Superboy, Lois Lane and Sarah Connor all fight waves of Terminators in Metropolis. Superman ports into the future wearing an American flag to protect his dignity, but protecting himself from tick-the-boxes storytelling proved a bigger challenge. In an Arnie/Cameron spree of inter-connectivity,
Aliens Versus Predator Versus The Terminator did what it never should have said on the tin. “This can’t really be happening. It’s – it’s too absurd,” says Ripley, speaking for everyone as new-gen Crypto-Terminators hybridise Aliens/Terminators.
Thankfully, other writers thought outside the box. Feted author SM Stirling wrote the
novels Infiltrator, Rising Storm and The Future War in the early 2000s. Set after T2, the trilogy ran with the idea of a new Terminator: the I-950 Infiltrator, an organic T-model capable of self-impregnation. Elsewhere, Dynamite Entertainment issued the confusingly named comic series Terminator 2: Infinity (2007), which followed Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines. Get your head around that. Not surprisingly, the future Skynet launches a T-Infinity Prototype model to tidy up the messy timelines: a nifty idea for a Terminator in a story whose sequel,
Revolution, adds a T-dog, the Dire Wolf. (Not a Westeros crossover – not yet...)
IS IT DEAD?
Talking of dire, Terminator Salvation got lots of spin-offs, some better than the film. Zack Whedon’s brusque Terminator 2029 shades in Kyle Reese’s struggles between events in Salvation and The Terminator. One properly dark bit sees Reese recounting the tale of a legless T-600 dragging itself across a desert for two weeks just to crush a young Resistance fighter’s head: nice. Also worth a look are the well-paced From The
Ashes and Trial By Fire, Salvation sequel/prequel novels from
Star Wars spin-off writer Timothy Zahn.
Babylon 5 veteran J. Michael Straczynski aspired to stretch franchise boundaries beyond hardware fetishism, “which is what always set this series of movies apart from the imitators: it’s not just about machines,” he said. “It’s about what those machines have to say about us.”
The Final Battle (2013) drew on the idea that wars transform combatants, as John Connor says to Skynet: “To beat us, to survive us, you had to become more like us – in appearance, in thought, in strategy, and in aesthetics. In turn, the only way we could survive you was to become more like you – hard as steel, ruthless, organised, in thought and strategy – and appearance.” A similar theme threads through TV’s
The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9), which struggled due to the Writers Guild strike but reached two seasons. Casting was a trump card. A pre-Cersei Lena Headey is a great Sarah – surly, scrappy, suspicious – while Summer Glau makes nuanced work of Cameron, an enigmatic T-model who zaps back to 1999 to protect John Connor from a T-888 then jumps the Connors to 2007, where 9/11 gets woven into subtexts about human nature. In Season 2, Garbage’s Shirley Manson has a mean-eyed ball as a T-1001 in the
shape of a power-dressing business CEO. In another episode, a T-888 manifests in the ’20s, becomes a realty magnate and wields a mean machine gun: The Terminator Meets Al Capone surely beckons. The climax to Season 2 posed unresolved questions – that’s what happens when you tussle with time-travel’n’TV.
Zapping back to 1990, Terminator gaming worlds have been more fraught still. The first officially licensed game surfaced on DOS in 1990, from publisher Bethesda. As Kyle Reese or the T-800, you collected weapons, dodged the police and tried to save or kill Sarah. Simple but not satisfying, it wasn’t improved much by 1992’s
Terminator 2029, which shunted players into the future war, where you could turn John Connor in four (count ’em) directions. Click’n’shoot was the gist: a crude gist matched by the game’s godawful gender stereotypes. More challenging (read: almost impossible) was the Sega-Genesis 1996 16-bit side-scroller Terminator 2: Judgment
Day, where you do battle with the T-1000. T2 also got Chess Wars, for anyone who ever played the noble game of chess and thought, “Hmm,
what this game needs is a man-mountain in leather and shades blowing shit up.”
The better games deviated from direct movie tie-ins. Bethesda’s Terminator: SkyNET (1996) was a multiplayer first person shooter with strong 3D visuals, spiderbots and live-action briefings, designed to be released as an expansion pack for the almost-as-strong
Terminator: Future Shock (1995) but eventually issued on its tod. Virgin Games rolled out
RoboCop Versus The Terminator, a shooter/ platform hybrid which was bloody hard to play but enjoyably bloody.
2002’s PS2/Xbox game Dawn Of Fate struggled to shake off the shackles of the movies, setting as its departure point Kyle Reese’s struggle to get to his time displacer and travel back to 1984. But direct movie tie-ins were worse. Rise Of The Machines’ rote beat-’em-ups suffered from murky environs and stiff-jointed action. Later, PS3 third-person shooter Terminator Salvation featured HunterKillers, Mototerminators, Aerostats and a final stretch where you could occupy a huge Terminator robot, but not much in the way of varied gameplay – and no Christian Bale among the voices, unsurprisingly.
THAT'S A NICE BIKE
But hope isn’t lost. More games are coming, including Reef Entertainment’s promising sounding but so far mysterious Terminators – see what they did there? – and the comics will continue. Last year saw the release of Dan Jolley’s Enemy Of My Enemy, which tried to stretch the series beyond its core characters. Jolley’s heroine is Farrow Greene, a rogue CIA assassin who hasn’t encountered Terminators before and isn’t helped by anyone who has. “What I wanted to do is pose the question, what happens if the Resistance isn’t able to send anyone back?” Jolley asked. “What if it’s just Terminator versus ‘uninitiated’ humans?
“If Skynet has the capability of utilising time travel to eliminate people who pose a threat to it, do we accept that the only person who ever posed a threat was John Connor?” he added. “If that’s the theory you go with, then I could see the entire franchise revolving around Sarah Connor only. But if you consider that maybe more than one human out of several billion might have been a problem for Skynet, what that means is that there are potentially boatloads of stories about Terminators going after other, unrelated people.”
The idea might be obvious but attempting to recapture the first film’s ‘shock of the new’ by creating new characters is something Terminator spin-offs need. If more writers try, the unknown future is open again. Throw in the tempting/scary challenge of creating something up to Cameron’s standards and one thing is sure: however Genisys pans out, Skynet’s metal-heads have life left in them yet.