It’s hard to buy that the Terminator would retire to a life as a curtain-selling family man in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate and this installment opens up a major plot hole for the series. Beginning in 1984 with James Cameron’s sparse, brutal sci-fi horror The Terminator, the franchise gradually evolved from a slasher-style chase thriller into a more family-friendly action franchise, and eventually into a post-apocalyptic war movie with 2009’s Terminator: Salvation.
Terminator: Dark Fate brought back both original stars Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger and returned to the original series canon, aiming for more of a small-scale chase thriller than Salvation's immersive war drama. However, despite hiring Deadpool director Tim Miller, the sequel failed to make an impact at the box office. Part of Dark Fate’s failure was down to the movie recasting the Terminator as Carl, an absurd decision that also prompted some viewers to notice a major plot hole.
Early on in Terminator: Dark Fate’s action audiences discover that after successfully killing John Connor, Schwarzenegger’s Terminator retired from Terminating and became Carl, a mild-mannered drape salesman. Outside of how faintly ridiculous the choice of occupation seems, the existence of his family begs the question of how exactly Carl passed as human in the intervening years. Since he's a Terminator, Schwarzenegger's character can’t father children, something the movie explains away with a platonic marriage. But what about the fact he never gets sick, doesn't age in normal human terms, doesn't sleep and doesn’t have the strength limitations of a human?
It’s a bizarre plot hole that led one critic to compare the sight of the Terminator as a suburban retiree to a Rick & Morty riff, and it’s hard to deny how unintentionally comical it is. The audience of Terminator: Dark Fate is presumably expected to believe that at no point during Carl’s life as a husband and father had he obtained so much as a skin-splitting scratch or would, since all it could take is a surface-level cut for his family or neighbors to see he is a killer cyborg underneath his skin disguise. The sequel mostly handwaves these concerns away in the hope viewers wouldn't mull on them too deeply.
This isn’t the only issue with Dark Fate, with the opening scene’s assassination of John Connor itself seeing James Cameron steal the opening of Alien 3 - despite claiming at the time that he hated the scene. Carl’s bizarre existence as an impossibly obvious Terminator slumming it in the suburbs and driving his kid to soccer practice in between brokering drape sales is the most surreal plot hole in the most recent Terminator, and it’s such an odd problem that any subsequent movies should drop the Skynet storyline entirely and focus on how exactly a cyborg assassin managed to remain undetected on the PTA for decades between movies.