The Terminator begins with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 being sent by Skynet to hunt down Sarah Connor in 1984, despite it being unclear exactly why it decides to travel to this year. The cyborg killer is looking for Sarah Connor because she is the mother of John Connor, who is key in defeating Skynet in 2029. The T-800 finds Sarah Connor remarkably quickly during The Terminator, and although this is dramatically satisfying, it still begs the question of how it knew where to look.
The Terminator, directed by James Cameron, kick-starts the Terminator franchise with a cat and mouse setup between the T-800, sent from 2029 by Skynet and Sarah Connor in 1984 LA. After The Terminator‘s resounding box-office success, Cameron followed it up with Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which explains a little more about the universe and its lore. This time John Connor is a child and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 is sent to defend him in a neat twist against the more ferocious T-1000 (Robert Patrick). Terminator 2 wraps up the story with Sarah Connor successfully destroying Skynet and preventing Judgement Day from happening – though the fact she wasn’t Skynet’s intended nemesis may explain why the T-800 knew to go to 1984, but not how to specifically find her.
The T-800 is able to find Sarah Connor in 1984 thanks to a meager amount of information that Skynet possessed about her in 2029. Skynet’s real target was John Connor, with Sarah appearing to have not featured in the 2029 resistance. During Judgement Day, most records from the past were also destroyed, as Kyle Reese explains in The Terminator. All Skynet knew about John was that his mother was named Sarah Connor and that she lived in LA in 1984. The original Terminator movie even makes it clear that the T-800 doesn’t really know who exactly Sarah Connor is, given that it searches for her in a phone book and then starts systematically killing anyone named Sarah Connor.
How The Terminator Found And Killed John Connor In Guatemala
Although The T-800 fails in its mission to kill Sarah Connor in The Terminator, it doesn’t fail to kill John Connor in 1998 in Terminator: Dark Fate, raising some huge questions. John and Sarah Connor begin Terminator: Dark Fate, enjoying themselves on a beach in Guatemala when a T-800 (also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) appears, killing John. This T-800 is, technically, too late – because the events of Terminator 2 have already occurred, meaning Skynet has been destroyed and Judgement Day averted. Given the challenges the T-800 faces in finding Sarah Connor in 1984, it seems strange that it would so easily find Terminator: Dark Fate‘s John Connor in such a remote location.
The answer to this question is hinted at in Terminator: Dark Fate. As it turns out, the T-800 that kills John Connor develops a conscience after its mission and settles down to start a family, affectionately calling itself Carl. Carl notably senses whenever a cyborg is sent from the future, and has been letting Sarah Connor know their precise locations with a message saying “For John” so that she can exact some sort of vengeance, showing that Skynet sent a number of Terminators. Terminator 2 already states that Skynet sent one assassin to kill Sarah Connor and another to kill John Connor in 1995. With this in mind, the answer may simply be that Carl was one of many cyborgs hunting for John Connor, and who had been searching for him for a long time. With unlimited time and resources and perhaps the possibility of Sarah Connor letting down her guard, the T-800 would be bound to find John Connor eventually. Therefore, in the same way, perhaps in The Terminator the T-800 was sent to 1984, specifically, as part of a larger group of T-800s sent to different timelines to destroy John Connor, in the hope that one would eventually succeed.
