Did you know there are six films within the Terminator universe? That’s a lot of time traveling crisscrossing to keep track of when you think about it. After all, even the first two movies, considered classics, overlapped one another enough to create a plate of spaghetti paradoxes that not only make no sense, birthed this description of the plot for Terminator 3 (Courtesy of Wikipedia):
As a result of the destruction of Cyberdyne, the Skynet takeover has been postponed, not averted. In an attempt to ensure a victory by the robots, a new Terminator, the T-X, is sent back to terminate as many of John Connor's future lieutenants as possible, including his future wife Kate Brewster and also John himself. Kate's father, General Robert Brewster (David Andrews), who is supervising Skynet's development, is also targeted for termination by the T-X. After Connor's future self is terminated by a doppelgänger of his previous protector, Kate reprograms him and sends him back to save them both from the T-X. It was released on July 2, 2003 to generally favorable reviews and grossed $433.4 million worldwide.
Also, take a guess how many of these had Arnold Schwarzenegger in them? I’ll give you a hint - I’m not counting the one that only had his digital likeness.
FIVE.
I would have guessed three at the most. Somehow, the Terminator franchise has slithered along, much like Skynet (or Cyberdyne, or both?… the continuity of these movies feel like the congealed surface of a high school cafeteria soup) trying to keep the idea of a robot war going. I of course have seen the first two of these, but after that, it gets fuzzy. I think I’ve seen bits and pieces of the others, and have been vaguely aware of most of their existence, but also not really? And that, to me is fascinating. I think at its core, scope probably has a lot to do with it. The first two movies have a lore but the lore takes a back seat to what essentially is a really cool chase movie, with iconic performances. After those two, the lore gets pushed up to the front and honestly… just go back and read that plot description for the third movie.
Regardless, the reason I bring all this up is we’re getting ANOTHER chapter in the Terminator universe…
Terminator Zero is a Netflix animated series that takes the story away from the Connors and America and puts it in Japan.
Bouncing tomorrow (Three A.M. if you want to stay up) I have no idea whether it’s good or not. It looks as though it’s filled with robots and violence which, is kinda the backbone of the Terminator universe so I have high hopes.
What else to watch
I guess the reboot of Frasier worked because we’ve got a second season thrust upon us…
If you’re an armchair adventure seeker, meaning you love the idea of adventure but maybe don’t have the means or ambitious drive to go out there into the extreme, this adventure of kayaking into the arctic looking for waterfalls may just scratch your itch:
What to Read
Don’t dive too deep into comic book stuff, but the idea of Jimi Hendrix being some type of space wizard is enough to pique my curiosity.
Sure, an Altoids survival kit sounds rather silly in the here and now, but knee deep in freezing mud in the Canadian outback trying to light a fire and it’s a lifesaver. Well, probably can’t say lifesaver because of trademark infringement, but you get the idea.
Perhaps I’m in the minority and it’s inevitable that eventually, because Amazon has oodles of time to wait us out, we will all pay for Alexa and it will become commonplace. But I haven’t gotten any packages delivered by drones yet so I hold out hope that we do not need to become dependent on machines telling us how many quarts are in a gallon; we can survive blissfully unaware of accurate volume measurements.
What to Listen To
New to me but maybe not you, still… I enjoy stumbling over bands/albums/songs and so I pass this along to you. Take a listen to Pinball by Brian Protheroe. It’s hard to pin “the most 70s of sound” to any one specific thing, but if you’re having a circled, late night, joint talking session and the subject comes up, you can throw this ol album on the fire and no one is going to challenge you.
There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than going through the original Woodstock’s music sets.