John tells Terminator that they have to go break his mom out of the mental hospital before T-1000 gets there and kills her or takes her hostage. “Negative,” says Arnold. “This does not help our mission.” Then John discovers that since technically he built the Terminator and sent it into the past to rescue himself, he is the Terminator’s boss and the Terminator has to do what he says! It’s PIZZA PARTY TIME! He immediately abuses this power, and has Terminator “prank” a couple of jocks by almost murdering them.
John Connor: Jesus, you were going to kill that guy!
Best line in the movie: Of course. I’m a Terminator.
T-1000 disguises himself as the floor so he can sneak into the hospital and get Sarah Connor, braless icon. He becomes a security guard and pokes the real security guard to death, and I know, I know, let the plumber fix the sink, as my president Sam Irby would say, but that really doesn’t seem the best way to terminate someone during a stealth infiltration of a hospital! It’s really conspicuous!2 Just keep being the floor!
Sarah kills her molestery nurse and steals his keys and nightstick, and then runs into Arnold in the hall, who she understandably assumes is there to kill her, since he is purpose-built for that one single exact thing and the last time she saw him he was unbelievably uncool. Instead, he’s like, “Come with me if you want to live,” and her kid’s like, “Ditto, cowabunga,” which has to have been a lot to process for her! They run away from T-1000 and manage to escape into the elevator, but then T-1000 turns his finger knife into an elevator spreader! Shit! Terminator shoots him right in the head,3 which takes him a second. They escape.
Now that they have some downtime, John Connor decompresses a little and starts to cry. “What’s wrong with your eyes?” says Terminator. “Why do you cry?”
John: It’s when there’s nothing wrong with you, but you hurt anyways. Get it?
Terminator: No.
Then, like literally the next second, Terminator starts sewing up Sarah’s wound, and she asks, “Do you know what you’re doing?” and he’s like, “I have detailed files on human anatomy.”
Oh my god, then why don’t you know what crying is???????????????????????
To kill time, John teaches Terminator the traditional human rituals of thumbs-up, down low/too slow, plus some slang so he can be “not such a dork all the time.” They cover the five most vital English phrases:
“Eat it.”
“Later, dickwad.”
“Chill out.”
“No problem.”
And, most important, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Watching them, Sarah Connor realizes that the Terminator is the perfect dad. “This machine was the only one that measured up.” Wow, horny!
Sarah Connor has a nightmare about everyone burning up on Judgment Day, so she abandons John and Terminator and drives off to blow away Miles Dyson, who was just about to invent the microprocessor that would become Skynet—which, incidentally, he reverse engineered from dead evil Arnold’s severed arm from the end of Terminator 1, which seems like the kind of logical loop that would melt space-time? Having to think about time travel should be the punishment we give to criminals instead of prison.
Terminator thinks blowing Dyson away is a pretty good idea, but John explains that you can’t just go around killing people even if it’s to prevent a nuclear holocaust that you know is definitely going to kill three billion people.
COUNTERPOINT: MAYBE YOU CAN!
They chase Sarah to Dyson’s house, where she’s absolutely torturing this poor man and his wife and child but not killing anyone because it turns out it’s actually hard to just blow someone away in front of their kid when they haven’t even invented Skynet yet.
Arnold deescalates the situation, but then instantly reescalates it by cutting some of his flesh off to show Dyson his metal bones and explain that he needs to stop building evil robots. Dyson is like, “EXCUSE ME?” But he agrees to take them over to Cyberdyne Headquarters and obliterate his life’s work. (Hey, do you have to have the only Black guy in the movie be responsible for three BILLION deaths??) Man, it would have been way harder to prevent Judgment Day if they had had the cloud in 1991. Instead, they just have to go down to the office and smush all the floppies. Easy, right? Not really!
They break in and plant explosives to destroy all of Dyson’s research, but the cops arrive and there’s a very big gun battle. (Another thing everyone liked in the ’90s was saying, “We’ve got company.”) While Dyson sets up the bombs, Terminator uses his big guns to terminate all the cop cars in the parking lot. He has a little counter on his Terminator Google Glass that tells him “Human casualties: 0.0,” so he can make sure he doesn’t violate John’s no-murdering rule. But why is there a decimal, though? In case you kill 0.25 of a person? In case you kill a person’s spirit and leave their body alive but depressed? In case you terminate the kid from Two and a Half Men?
The cops enter the building and are shooting everyone real bad. A badly injured Dyson hides behind the office equipment like, “WOW, I’m glad we bought these bulletproof fax machines! People said I was crazy!” With his dying breath, he manages to detonate the bombs and fireball the lab. Man, can you imagine if you sacrificed your life and legacy to save humanity, and then just twenty-five years later, they elected motherfucking Donald Trump to be the president? The 2016 election was disrespectful to Miles Dyson most of all, IMO!
T-1000 FINALLY shows up at the lab and rides his motorcycle up the stairs???? There’s no way that’s the fastest way! Arnold zooms away in a police car, so T-1000 rides his motorcycle onto a helicopter and then turns into a
