Terminator's Biggest Plot Hole Is Fixed By One John Connor Revelation

Welcome to "Fanon Fixing Canon," a weekly column where we investigate infamous plot holes or terrible storyline decisions. Through a combo of detective work and meticulous fan theorizing, we fix these problems so they no longer exist — and canon is immaculate once again.

The Terminator franchise gets plenty of confusing moments as its installments pile up, but even the two first and best Terminator movies have their share of plot hole weirdness. In fact, the very events of "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" are a paradoxical mess: The first movie runs on the premise that Skynet is destined to take over no matter what, and the second movie establishes that the future can very much be influenced.  

However, there's one clear but overlooked throughline in the untold truth of "The Terminator" that proves that the future can ultimately be changed. Funnily enough, it's the single biggest paradox in the movie: the way the time-traveling Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) becomes the father of John Connor (most prominently played by Edward Furlong) after he and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) sleep together. 

Seriously, there's no way this was always the case. John Connor had to be alive in the future to send Kyle back in time in the first place. So how can he create himself? Let's take a look at how the nature of John Connor shows how the causality loop in "The Terminator" really works, and how it proves that the movie's allegedly unbreakable chain of events can indeed be broken. And it all starts with one mind-blowing revelation ...

Yes, we're going there. Kyle wasn't John's dad.

Kyle Reese, the sole human time traveler in "The Terminator" and therefore the most likely culprit to change things, specifically goes back in time to save Sarah from the murderous Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). However, Kyle also happens to be a lifelong Sarah Connor fanboy who specifically volunteered for the mission, and the two end up sleeping together. 

This leaves Sarah pregnant with the child who's predestined to become John Connor, the savior of humanity. As such, the film suggests, Kyle has always been John's father. Or has he? The thing is, everything has to start somewhere, including time loops. Once, there was a John Connor who first sent Kyle to meet Sarah and save her. This John can't have been Kyle's kid, because this was the first time this happened and Kyle had not been in the past yet. Thus, Kyle never fathered that original John. Instead, he accidentally usurps the role of the rebel leader's original dad when he hooks up with Sarah.

Some characters realize parts of the Connor-Reese time loop. In "The Terminator," Kyle seems to realize the likely implications of him and Sarah sleeping together. Sarah, of course, is very much in the know. In the "Terminator: Genisys" timeline at least, the adult John (Jason Clarke) is aware of Kyle's identity as his father and deliberately goes through the motions to send Kyle back to 1984, which must get pretty awkward at times. However, things get so muddy post-"Judgment Day" that it's hard to say which timeline is the correct one — or if they all are. Ah, time travel.

Since the John Connor whose father is Kyle would be the "newer" version of the character, what happens to the John who was there first? Well, he'd basically have snapped out of existence when Kyle and Sarah's kid assumes his mantle in the timeline, simply because the original person was never born. After all, John is categorically portrayed as Sarah Connor's only child, and it's now a different John. 

The old version of John wasn't related to Kyle in any way, and was likely conceived without any dashing time travelers. That person is someone we never meet. We have no idea what John the First was like beyond what Kyle tells Sarah, despite the fact that he's the original centerpiece of the whole franchise. 

Ironically, this means that Kyle Reese inadvertently does in "The Terminator" what Skynet has tried to do for ages: He kills John Connor. Unfortunately for Skynet, Kyle also replaces the guy with another, equally capable John Connor — but still, point to humanity, right?

The notion that Kyle Reese at some point took over the role of John Connor's father is interesting, but equally interesting is the fact that Kyle also manages to provide Sarah all the tools for making John the big heroic leader he'll eventually grow into. Kyle doesn't really hold back when he hypes up John to Sarah. In doing so, he just so happens to hand her the manual for shaping her kid into a guerrilla-leader-slash-savior of humanity.

From John's first name to the approximate skillset he needs to lead humanity through this particular flavor of the apocalypse, Sarah learns it all from Kyle. As we learn in "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," things don't exactly go smoothly and John takes his time to learn his lessons, but he still eventually acquires all the information to get there and believes his mother.

This is all the more fascinating because it begs the question: How did the original John Connor fill the sizable shoes of mankind's leader and last hope? Without the events of "The Terminator," Sarah likely wouldn't have become the survivalist educator of "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." So, what made the eternally unseen first John so good at surviving? Did he have a sort of opposite rebel phase with the Edward Furlong one, and lash out at his mom by joining a militia or something? That might be a plot hole discussion for another day ...