The Terminator franchise is extremely good at making subtle references to itself — so much so that fans are just picking apart the details on rewatches today. Many have documented the development of the various Terminator models and how their experiences shape them or drive their evolution, but it’s still remarkable to see for yourself when the movies pay off a change that has been more than a decade in the making. Just last week, many fans had a eureka moment when they noticed subtle hints in Terminator 2: Judgement Day which set up major plot points in the latest movie, Terminator: Dark Fate.
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WARNING: There are spoilers for the Terminator franchise ahead!
The Terminator movies center around different cyborgs with the same design — Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, T-800, T-101, or simply The Terminator — usually played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Judgement Day, John Connor gives him the alias Uncle Bob, which is how fans often refer to this particular individual, to distinguish him from the Terminators in other movies or other models created by Skynet with the same appearance.
These cyborgs go back and forth between fighting on the side of humans or against them from movie to movie, depending on their programming and their experiences while traveling through time. In Dark Fate, Schwarzenegger plays a seasoned T-800 that has already traveled back in time and killed John Connor in 1998. With its mission complete, the cyborg continued to blend in with humans, taking on a normal life and gradually developing a very human-like personality. It gained a form of self-awareness, and took on the name “Carl.”
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The movie shows that these artificial creatures can become very human with time, displaying compassion, repentance, and honor. It’s a poignant new twist on the Terminator template for the sake of Dark Fate, but Redditor u/Spongebobgolf just pointed out that it’s not a new concept. They noted that Carl’s gradual adoption of human-like traits is just the logical extrapolation of Uncle Bob’s character development in Judgement Day.
Commenters’ minds were also blown by this revelation — the famous half-robotic, stilted line deliveries in T2 show how Uncle Bob has been changed by his time with young John Connor, and his self-sacrifice at the end shows that the changes went deeper than his dialect. Over time, he actually developed the capacity to ignore direct orders and override his own programming, essentially making him a sentient being in his own right. Seeing how that idea carried over into Dark Fate gave many fans a fresh appreciation for the film.
Small references like this are a testament to the creators’ reverence for the material that came before, and their trust in fans to see the small details without being guided by the hand. It’s the real strength of long-lived franchises like this, and a great example of how collaborative the whole process can really be. For those interested in looking for themselves, Terminator 2: Judgement Day is streaming now on Pluto TV, while Dark Fate is available on Hulu + Live TV. The whole franchise can also be found on PVOD stores, or on Blu-ray and DVD.
