John Connor sends Kyle Reese's unit to stop Skynet's time
travel experiment.
Kyle Reese's unit fights its way into Skynet's time
displacement complex, just in time to witness a T-800 being
sent back in time. They try to destroy the device before the
time displacement can occur, but it's too late; the machine
is destroyed, but not before the T-800 vanishes in time. The
remaining computer components reveal that the Terminator was
sent to 1984 and Reese realizes its mission is to kill Sarah
Connor before the birth of her son, John.
Human prisoners recovered from Skynet by Connor's group
reveal that a prototype time machine is only a half-klick
away and John sends Reese to it, with a message for Sarah.
Reese is sent back to 1984 to stop the Terminator, while the
remaining resistance fights on to wipe out the machines and
regain control of Earth for humanity.
Lanny, in his narration, remarks that the machines are
nearly defeated, the armies of men closing in on the last of
them. This is roughly what Reese later tells Sarah in 1984
in
The Terminator.
On page 4, Lanny wonders if Skynet would go so far back in
time as to make sure no man was ever born. Of course, if
Skynet did that, Skynet itself would never be born seeing as
how it was created by humans.
On page 6, Reese implies that the time displacement unit is
three levels below ground in the L.A. Skynet complex they've
infiltrated.
In
"All My Futures Past" Part 1,
the humans sometimes refer to Skynet and its machines as "gearjammers".
Here, the term is seen to occasionally be shortened up to
"jammers".
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In this story, we get a glimpse of
Skynet's time displacement platform
(we may be seeing the biaxial node as described in the novelization
of The Terminator, page 170).
It looks a bit different here (left)
than in "One Shot" (right). On page 10, we witness the T-800
being sent back in time to 1984, as
revealed in
The Terminator. |
 |
 |
The monitor screen on page 12 reveals that the T-800 was
sent back in time to October 1984. But, the movie
The Terminator states that the time travelers have
arrived in May 1984. If
The Terminator were to take place in
October of that year, then John Connors' birth would be nine
months later, July 1985. However,
Judgment Day
confirms that the killer T-800 (and Reese) were sent back to
May 12, 1984 and that John was born February 28, 1985.
On page 12, panel 4, Sarah Connor's first name is misspelled
"Sara".
On page 13, John tells Reese they've freed some of Skynet's
human prisoners and one of them told him that humans were
used to test the time machine. What happened to those test
subjects? What time were they sent to? Did they survive the
experience?
After telling his trooper assistant not to send aid
to Reese at the prototype time displacement platform, that
Reese needs to do this on his own, John says to himself, "If
I'm wrong, if she was wrong...well, we'll never
know about it, will we?" By "she" he is referring, of
course, to his mother, Sarah Connor, who told him at some
point what had happened in 1984 and what his destiny was to
be.
As Mathers programs the time displacement machine to send
Reese back to 1984, he tells him he should arrive just after
the Terminator and half a klick to the northwest of it. A
klick is military slang for "kilometer". But, in
The Terminator, the T-800 arrives at Griffith
Observatory and Reese at about 7th Street and Broadway,
about 8 kilometers southwest as the crow flies!
No one ever explains to Reese that the time travel subject
must be organic and naked in order to make the trip back in
time, yet he strips before stepping onto the platform. Sure,
he saw the T-800 make the trip unclothed, but how does he
know all that information about the time travel process
which he later explains to Sarah in
The Terminator?
Reese tells Mathers he's got his reasons for being the one
to go back in time to 1984 to stop the Terminator. He
doesn't elaborate further here, but in
The Terminator, we learn that he was in love with
Sarah Connor from the stories he'd heard of her and the
photo of her given to him by John.
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