Warning: this article contains spoilers for The Terminator franchise.Since the early ’80s, James Cameron’s Terminator franchise has presented audiences with a flurry of plot holes, paradoxes, and shifting timelines that contradict the series canon and have left fans disoriented by the various retcons over the years. However, despite these narrative twists and turns, the films haven’t shied away from the messiness of their continuity—they’ve addressed it head on.

With a franchise as large as The Terminator featuring nearly as many plot holes as the X-Men films, it only makes sense that it would seek to correct some of its more glaring inconsistencies. Furthermore, the plot points that haven’t been tackled through retcons aren’t necessarily an issue, since their paradoxical nature has become central to the series’ overall continuity.

Whether it’s time travel’s inconsistent rules, the machines’ backwards reason, or Judgment Day’s omnipresent threat, The Terminator has no shortage of messy plot holes to pick from, making the filmmakers’ efforts to explain these discrepancies all the more impressive. It’s incredible that the logic of this franchise hasn’t completely unraveled after 41 years—even if it’s come quite close at times.

How The T-1000 Time Travels

One of the franchise’s first plot holes came in Terminator 2: Judgment Day with the arrival of the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), an upgraded Terminator made entirely of a liquid metal “mimetic polyalloy” that allows it to shapeshift and form bladed weapons. The only problem? According to Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator, only living tissue can survive time travel.

Although the films have never directly addressed this discrepancy, there have been a number of explanations as to how the franchise’s greatest villain traveled back in time. One of the more popular theories aligns with the T-1000’s stated ability, arguing that if mimetic polyalloy can perfectly imitate flesh, then it should also be able to fool Skynet’s “Time Displacement Equipment.”

Another theory maintains that Skynet found a way to circumnavigate the strict rules of time travel in the years between The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, thereby choosing to send their most advanced Terminator model to kill the teen-aged John Connor. Either way, there’s enough wiggle room for the films to explain the T-1000’s implausible trip back in time.

Why The Machines Don’t Kill Sarah Connor Earlier

One of the more confusing aspects of The Terminator lies in the machines’ decision not to kill Sarah Connor in the years before she has the chance to birth John Connor—a perfectly rational move for an emotionless AI. After all, following the T-800’s failure in 1984, Skynet’s next logical step would invariably be to try again in a previous year.

The answer? They have, as seen in Terminator: Genisys, when a T-1000 sent back in time to kill young Sarah Connor was thwarted by a T-800—whom Sarah labels “Pops“—reprogrammed by John Connor to protect his mother in the past. This follows, as for every Terminator Skynet sends back in time, the Resistance will always be there to counter it.

Moreover, people often forget that Skynet’s decision to travel back in time originally came as a last-ditch effort to prevent their defeat by the Resistance, who’d destroyed the machines’ defense grid under the leadership of John Connor. Thus, with every Terminator sent back to the past, Skynet temporarily postpones their extinction by creating a new timeline in their desperate endgame.

Skynet’s Creation Paradox

The Terminator franchise is no stranger to paradoxes, as is evidenced by the famous plot twist of Kyle Reese being John Connor’s father from the future. However, the series’ all-time paradox was first introduced in 1991 with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which revealed that Cyberdyne Systems—the company behind Skynet—began developing their advanced technology from the futuristic hand of the T-800.

As a result, a mind-splitting paradox emerged in the franchise as to how Cyberdyne Systems could possibly begin creating the revolutionary machinery behind Skynet if its inception came from their own future technology, creating an impossible loop that’s left Terminator fans scratching their heads for over 30 years. In reality, however, there are several explanations that answer this brain-scrambling paradox.

First, there’s the presence of different timelines in The Terminator that could explain how, in one universe, Skynet was a result of natural technological progression, and in another, it came about from salvaged T-800 parts. However, Terminator: Dark Fate also introduced another explanation for the machines’ rise with “Legion,” an AI that’s created even after Sarah Connor destroys Cyberdyne Systems.

Why The Machines Keep Sending Terminators

For this entry, I’m drawn to the apocryphal Albert Einstein phrase “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” For a cold, logical AI, Skynet is quite single-minded, falling similarly under the definition of a “one-trick pony”—that pony, of course, coming as various different shapes, sizes, and models of Terminators.

However, the question of why Skynet keeps sending singular cybernetic organisms to kill John and Sarah Connor—instead of, say, a platoon of these mindless killing Terminators—comes down to simple desperation on the part of the machines, who once again found themselves on the backfoot of the war in the future and made a play that once almost worked for them.

Beyond Terminator 2: Judgment Day, however, the answer to why Skynet insists on sending Terminators into the past lies in the different timelines it birthed into existence. As intelligent as Skynet is, it can’t access the data from the universes it creates. Thus, for Skynet, the most logical choice in each timeline is to send a Terminator back in time.

Plus, if Skynet could access said relevant data from The Terminator‘s multiple timelines, it would likely change its approach toward wiping out humanity in the war against the Resistance after discovering how ineffective its Terminators are at carrying out their ᴀssigned missions, thereby setting the course for the AI to pursue a different avenue toward hunting and eliminating John Connor.

Why Judgment Day Is Inevitable

Finally, the most puzzling plot point for some viewers is the inevitability of The Terminator‘s “Judgment Day,” which is the moment Skynet launched the entirety of America’s nuclear arsenal, killing 3 billion people. Throughout the franchise, there have been numerous Judgment Days, with the last two movies changing the date in between films. However, the original occurred August 29th, 1997.

Despite Terminator 2: Judgment Day‘s ending, which sees the Connors and the T-800 prevent the apocalypse by destroying Cyberdyne Systems and all of its technology, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines showed that Judgment Day isn’t something that can be prevented—only postponed, with the delay originally falling in the early 2000s and then in the 2020s by Terminator: Dark Fate.

In short, the answer as to why the Resistance can never prevent Judgment Day has everything to do with the certainty of AI’s turn against humanity, since, as long as Skynet views the human race as a threat, they will continue to send Terminators into the past to kill both John and Sarah Connor, thereby creating new Terminator timelines.