From a Terminator group on Facebook:
Dark Fate: The Carl Problem.
TL;DR: Carl’s very existence destroys multiple aspects of Terminator lore and raises a drastic amount of questions we’ll never get answers to. Like, I didn’t want it this long, but one question led to another
The Context: in Dark Fate, a T-800 is sent back in time just after the events of T2 and assassinates John Connor successfully. After it has killed John, it drops its gun and walks off into the sunset.
From its own account, the T-800 then comes upon a woman in an abusive relationship, defends her and then marries her, while helping to raise her son. Learning the value of human life, it understands what it took from Sarah Connor and secretly guides her towards eliminating other Terminators to give her purpose. It gains the name “Carl” and goes about its life as an interior decorator.
The Problems: the main problem with Carl is that his existence *without further exploration*, invalidates key lore from the franchise. “It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear…”
Well, as it turns out, it absolutely does feel both pity and remorse. Remorse for its actions and pity for an abused woman.
“The more contact I have with humans, the more I learn.”
If we go by the theatrical cut of T2, we need to wonder how it develops this conscience so as to get involved with his future wife in the first place. The other problem is that Carl’s existence completely destroys the extended version of T2’s idea that Terminators have a read/write function on their chip and must be manually put into write mode to learn - as obviously there was nobody to do that for him. I personally prefer the CPU version in the extended cut as it firmly plants the idea that Skynet is incredibly paranoid(the kind of paranoid that nukes all of humanity to protect itself); and doesn’t want the Terminators to “do much thinking”.
The Questions: now, maybe these don’t seem like problems to you. Casually rewriting lore and retcons are common in many franchises. However, Carl’s existence and his actions over the decades raise many questions that harm continuity, existing lore and the very movie’s plot he’s in.
1. Carl met his future wife “a few months after killing John.”; what was he doing during this time?
2. Did Carl learn to become more human BEFORE or DURING his relationship with his future wife?
3. If before, how? If during, how did he have the pity to make contact in the first place?
4. Did he terminate her ex, or did he learn the value of human life? If he did kill him, does she know?
5. He was in Guatemala to kill John, then is found living in Texas with his wife. At what point in his timeline did he settle in the states? His wife has an accent. Where is she from? Did he meet her in the states or abroad and they immigrated to America?
6. At what point did Carl take his name? Yes, yes, we get it… “Karl” means man. Clever movie. But, did he decide it for himself? How? Why? When? He says, “that is what people call me, yes.”
7. Carl has a van and a business. Is it registered? Does he have ID and permits? A set of fingerprints and DNA will match up to his photo that would implicate him in the murders of 17 police officers and the wounding of dozens more as well as millions of dollars in damages related to domestic terrorism. If Sarah Connor got her own episode of America’s Most Wanted, did Carl? Has he taken measures to avoid authorities over the past 23 years? Remember, Carl would have 0 knowledge of the T-101’s sent before him and their actions.
8. Carl has guns. Lots of them. Did he acquire them legally? If so, how? I assume getting guns would require his photo to go through some kind of federal database? If not legally, well… how?
9. Carl has been in a relationship for 23 years and his family does not question the fact he doesn’t use the washroom, eat, sleep or drink? Maybe they know on a subconscious level and accept it. But… what about any of his son’s friends? His wife’s friends? Carl’s business clients. In 23 years, has anybody found anything “off” about him?
10. Carl’s new purpose is to protect and care for this family. How does he interpret that mission? How did he deal with school yard bullies? Was there any normal human scenario that happened in 23 years that a machine could’ve applied logic to and come up with the wrong, inhuman way to deal with the scenario? Furthermore, how does he let them go, now knowing that there is a 100% probability of a NEW judgment day.
11. Carl states that he completed his mission and there were “no new orders” to receive and thus, he lost purpose. This implies that Terminators are programmed with a single purpose and that’s it. Of course, T3 and TSCC shows that Terminators have multiple missions with different levels of priorities. Unfortunately, neither of those are considered canon any longer. So that means that Skynet programmed these robots to do one thing and once that thing is done, they can roam the earth and develop free will? Why wouldn’t Skynet have “Bootstrap Protocols and Subroutines”? Once the termination is complete, go do stuff to ensure the creation of Skynet itself?
12. It’s implied that several Terminators are sent back through time every couple of years. If so, we need to revisit question 11. When one of the new Terminators arrives, what does it do if a previous Terminator accomplished the mission? They really don’t have multiple directives programmed? More importantly, this idea goes against T1/T2 limited time travel resources. In addition, why didn’t the resistance send fighters to all of those coordinates through time? Also, all these Terminators were sent back to coordinates past Judgment Day. This means that Skynet actually couldn’t have been stopped because there’s now multiple T800’s that could theoretically be active all the way up to 2029 and thus unintentionally create Skynet(from the original timeline) - if Skynet didn’t trust the first two and was sending multiple T800s throughout time, it would definitely send them through periods of the future war too as eliminating John at any point before the final 2029 battle is sufficient.
13. Carl states that time travel is measurable, detectable, and thus predictable, somehow? Is this inherent to T800s? Is he detecting this with his own onboard sensors? If so, what’s the range? If not, what contemporary technology is he using? If technology, is it measurable by humans? Are humans also tracking these temporal anomalies and investigating them?
14. Carl is able to measure these shockwaves and track them to exact GPS coordinates and to the second of arrival. He texts this information to Sarah Connor. How does he have her contact info? Also, how did he know that she would pack up enough guns to fight a T800? How did Carl know it was a T800 and not a human or something else? What kind of lead time does he have between the arrival of a time traveller and the predictive calculations being complete? For example, he seems to give Sarah enough time to organize and travel to the coordinates; how?
15. Besides getting a hold of Sarah’s contact info, he also seems to be able to track her across America/Mexico. How? What technology is he using?
16. Carl is destroyed at the end of the film. Who will now track any upcoming temporal anomalies? The movie being set in 2020 means that there are 9 years where more Skynet Terminators can arrive from the original timeline, even overlapping Legion’s creation/Judgment Day.
17. Most IMPORTANT… Why drapes? Art and decor is subjective. Wouldn’t a T800 be more suited to physical labour..?
Dark Fate isn’t as bad as you remember. It’s worse.