There wouldn’t be a ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ if this scene had been left in.
pretends the third, fourth, and fifth movies never took place and imagines a completely different version of its world. The characters inever true within this franchise. Never has fate been more mutable than it is infranchise, at least in terms of the continuing health of the series and enabling all of these sequels, is one that was deleted. If it had been left intact, thecould not exist in the form that is arriving in theaters now.
Removing slugs from the Terminator’s torso prompts John and Sarah to ask the machine questions about its existence. Do the bullets hurt? Will the wounds heal? Can the Terminator learn? The T-800 replies that its CPU is a neural-net processor; a “learning computer.
Interestingly, Cameron says this roughly four-minute chunk is the only deleted scene that he “misses” when he watches the theatrical cut of the film, primarily because it was a “pivotal moment” for the John Connor character; it shows his first steps towards becoming the leader that his mother claims he will grow up to be. But while Cameron also notes that it’s “not an Arnold scene at all,” removing this element had decades-long ramifications for the Terminator character.
Without this scene , it became canon that the longer Terminator robots remain active, the more they learn, and the more human they can become. In , we watch the T-800 learn to look for keys before it tries to hotwire a car and add slang like “Hasta la vista, baby,” to its vocabulary. In the final scene, it quips “I need a vacation.” In a matter of days, this robot has gone from a stone-faced killer to a large piece of metal that makes actual jokes.