2019’s Terminator franchise installment Terminator: Dark Fate’s opening scene should have been an audacious, daring reset for the series, but here’s why the potentially stellar surprise of John Connor being killed off fell flat for fans. The Terminator franchise has never been entirely clear on how best to use the character of John Connor. The original sci-fi horror movie worked around this by using John Connor as a MacGuffin, an unborn, unseen figure whose potential existence drives the plot, whereas the first Terminator sequel successfully realized him onscreen as a precocious teen.
However, since then the Terminator franchise’s problem with timeline rebooting has doomed John Connor to numerous forgettable incarnations. John Connor has been an under-developed protagonist in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a sort-of co-lead character in Terminator: Salvation, and a villain in 2015’s reboot Terminator: Genisys. Thus, it was almost inevitable that Terminator: Dark Fate’s theoretically daring decision to kill him off made little impact, given how much the character had already been misused throughout the series.
Seeing the young John murdered by Arnie’s unfeeling T-800 could have been a shocking moment that subverted audience expectations, but the scene didn't work for numerous reasons. For one thing, using a CGI-de-aged Edward Furlong to play John Connor in Terminator: Dark Fate’s opening scene meant that no audience member thought he would be around for long. Since CGI characters are famously prohibitively expensive, seeing the actor as he appeared in Terminator 2: Judgement Day was an obvious signpost that he was soon to be doomed. For another, there was no reason for the opening scene to flashback to the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day unless something monumental and canon-shifting was about to happen, which once again spoiled the twist. More than anything, though, the fact that Terminator: Genisys already killed him off only 4 years earlier meant the moment lacked any impact.
The issue with the Terminator franchise rebooting its timeline with 2015’s Terminator: Genisys and again with 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate was that neither retcon held much weight in terms of canon, with the existence of the former undermining the efficacy of the latter. Terminator: Genisys’s evil John Connor had been seen by franchise fans a mere four years before Terminator: Dark Fate killed off his younger self, a fact that deprived both potentially interesting ideas of their impact. While killing off John and turning him evil were both promising conceits, there was an inescapable feeling that the Terminator franchise was running out of ideas and simply intended to put John in every role imaginable with each passing movie.
The constant canon revisions and introduction of new timelines into the Terminator mythos made it increasingly hard for fans to follow the story or care about its myriad twists and turns. While John Connor was killed in Dark Fate, this wasn’t the same version of John Connor who was killed and turned evil in Genisys. As a result, viewers had no reason to believe the characters wouldn’t soon crop up again in another Terminator reboot without any ill effects. Terminator: Dark Fate’s John Connor kill unintentionally highlighted how little consistency mattered in the Terminator franchise, sapping the supposed revelation of any real shock.