Terminator 3: Was It Fate or Contrivance?

It turns out that the T-X isn’t looking for John, as we might expect, but for Kate

Last time, we saw that John and Kate had met under rather contentious circumstances. She’d locked John in an animal cage at a veterinary clinic and then gone to deal with a client who was reporting an emergency for her dog. Kate’s fiancé is Scott, a veterinarian, but for some reason, Kate went to deal with the customer instead of the vet himself.

Kate tells the customer to wait till Scott gets there because— even if she wasn’t dealing with the issue of a strange man that she has locked in a cage— she couldn’t do anything about the dog’s issues because she isn’t a vet.

I know it’s a small thing, but Scott not taking care of the animal himself just aggravated me. Then Kate goes to speak with John again and, for some reason, she recognizes him. She mentions an obscure location that John knows nothing about, which understandably confuses him.

Then the T-X, the Terminator of Terminators, shows up.

Multiple coincidences stack up here

First of all, in the scene at the vet clinic, John and Kate meet up just before the customer arrives. It’s convenient that Kate showed up instead of Scott. It’s convenient that the T-X shows up a few minutes after Kate, and it’s convenient that Kate just so happens to remember John from somewhere. All of this happens in a short span of time, and the most obvious question is why is the T-X even there?

It turns out that the T-X isn’t looking for John, as we might expect, but for Kate. However, this makes the situation even harder to understand. Kate is not a vet. She is only living with Scott, so why would the T-X show up at Scott’s clinic when it is closed? And if it weren’t for the customer’s random call, Kate wouldn’t even be there.

The T-X should’ve visited Kate at her home, and then Scott would have gotten an unexpected visitor, thus paying for his laziness. Or better yet, perhaps T-X itself could’ve made the random call— since the terminators have been shown to mimic human voices— and then attacked Kate when she arrived. Then John could’ve recognized something about the robot and saved Kate from termination. Such a plot development would build some badly needed rapport between the two in a fraction of the time.

Instead, the T-X kills the customer for no good reason, plotwise. Kate sees the assassination and flees the building, leaving poor John to fend for himself— thankfully John knows how to pick a lock. Then Kate tries to drive off, but the T-X throws her out of the vehicle.

Just as the T-X is about to terminate Kate, the Terminator shows up in a truck and runs the T-X through the wall of the clinic.

How did he know where Kate was? How did he know the T-X was gunning for Kate instead of John? Why didn’t he visit Scott first? I have no idea.

Anyway, now that the writers have sloppily written our characters into the scene, the Terminator throws Kate into the back of a veterinary truck. He asks her where John is, and she tells him. Then he locks her in the back compartment of the truck and goes to meet John, who’s just seen the hand of the T-X sticking out of a pile of rubble—he doesn’t need any more information than that because — we must suppose — he’s seen this movie before.

John picks the lock to his cage, then meets the Terminator in the hall. He asks the robot if it’s here to kill him. The Terminator tells him no, and the two run to the truck.

The T-X is formidable

But the T-X climbs free of the rubble and shoots the Terminator with her fancy ray gun. John manages to start the truck and take off with Kate, who thinks she’s been kidnapped. The cops show up and start to investigate the body of the Terminator, who looks to be dead but isn’t.

And while all that is going on, the T-X sticks her hand inside one of the squad cars. It is a little hard to follow what happened next. I believe the T-X listens to Kate’s phone call while she’s telling the police that she’s been kidnapped; thus she realizes that Kate is in the back of the truck. Then she hacks all the vehicles in the parking lot— I’m not sure how— and the vehicles begin driving around.

After that, she steals a large truck with a crane on the back and begins following John and Kate. The Terminator wakes up during the chaos and grabs a vehicle as well, joining the pursuit.

What follows is good old-fashioned madness, where the cops, the robots, and Earth’s future heroes all drive around the city, creating carnage. In the end, John, Kate, and the Terminator manage to escape and drive to a gas station. The T-X has lost her prey and must now figure out how to find them.

Of course, it doesn’t take her long to figure out where they are because the second the Terminator opens the back of the truck, Kate leaps out, screaming, which causes the gas station attendant to call the cops. The cops learn about the attendant’s sighting just before locating Scott, and they tell him about Kate’s situation. Unfortunately, the T-X got to Scott first, and she is now impersonating him, which means that poor Scott is no longer among the living.

As for our trio, the Terminator throws Kate back into the rear compartment of the truck, and John joins her to try to explain what’s going on.

Here, the story took an interesting turn. The writers claim that the large stack of contrivances that have taken place are due to fate. As John and Kate are talking, they realize that they’d met in middle school, and John concludes that—had it not been for the events of the second film—they would’ve ended up together because Kate’s dad is a military leader who has detailed knowledge about Skynet. John believes that he was supposed to meet her dad and learn how to resist the robots.

It was a nice try, but I didn’t buy it. The beauty of the second film was that it played on the idea behind the first movie. All the events that took place in Terminators 1 and 2 are inside a time loop, and that loop is self-contained. In the same way Kyle Reese was sent back to become John Connor’s father, the remains of the initial terminator give Miles Dyson what he needs to create the technology that will become Skynet.

So, the whole war with the machines is the result of the initial time jump, and the time jump is the result of the war with the machines. So in order to break the loop and stop Judgment Day, the technology has to be destroyed. This is still Orwellian Doublethink in my opinion, but there is a thread of logic that keeps the franchise from becoming too complicated as the story continues.

In this scene between John and Kate, that thread is disregarded in the name of fate. Where is this fate coming from? How did Skynet make its comeback? Don’t know, don’t care! It seems that all the word “fate” means in this context is that the writers can add any ad hoc explanation they want to keep the franchise going. We’ll cover what happens next, next time.