Sarah Connor (Terminator)

Sarah Connor
Terminator films and Sarah Connor Chronicles character
Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Top) Lena Headey as Sarah Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Bottom)
First appearance	The Terminator
Created by	James Cameron
Portrayed by	Linda Hamilton Lena Headey
Information
Gender	Female
Children	John Connor (son)

Sarah Jeanette^[1] Connor is a fictional character from the Terminator films and the television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. She was played by American actress Linda Hamilton in the films and by English actress Lena Headey in the TV series. The character develops greatly over the course of these productions, from a timid victim of the first film to a hardened warrior on the verge of losing touch with her own humanity.

Fictional character biography

Beginnings

In a deleted scene of the episode "The Demon Hand", details of Sarah's childhood are revealed during a session with Dr. Peter Silberman.^[2][3] When she was seven, her father—a chronically depressed war veteran^[4]—loses his mattress factory job to a machine, which leads to dysfunction within her family and her father's subsequent abandonment of them. Her mother finds a job as a waitress. Even as a child, Sarah has an intense technophobia. After her father leaves, Sarah stops spending her afternoons with her childhood friend whose father is an engineer with IBM. Instead, she takes to visiting the factory where her own father had worked to watch the gears and belts of the machines, knowing something is wrong with what she sees.^[5]

The Terminator film itself never specifies an age or birth date for Sarah Connor, although according to the original script (available on the Special Edition DVD), she was 19 years old. The alternate ending for Terminator 2 (available on the Ultimate Edition DVD) shows Sarah alive and well on August 29, 2029. She is by then an elderly grandmother (and John is a Senator) in a world where Skynet was never able to start its war on humanity. The tombstone shown in Terminator 3 reads 1959–1997. The "Pilot" episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles picks up Sarah and John on the run in 1999. Her FBI file lists her age as 33 on August 24, 1999. Due to the forward time-travel jump in "Pilot", Sarah and John are now eight years younger than their birth-dates would otherwise indicate.

The Terminator

In The Terminator, Sarah Connor is a young Los Angeles college student and waitress who finds herself pursued by a relentless cyborg killer, the Cyberdyne Systems Series 800 Model 101 Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger). She learns she is in danger from a televised report of two other identically-named Los Angeles women who were shot to death earlier that day. She is rescued from the Terminator by time-travelling soldier Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who explains that in the future an artificial intelligence called Skynet will be created by military software developers to make strategic decisions. The program becomes self-aware, seizes control of most of the world's military hardware (including various highly advanced robots), and launches an all-out attack on human beings. However, a man named John Connor eventually leads what remains of the world's military and survivors, The Resistance, to victory, only to discover that in a last-ditch effort, Skynet had invented a means of time travel and sent a robotic killer back in time to destroy John Connor's mother before he is born. John Connor is Sarah's future son, and he sends back a trusted sergeant Kyle Reese to protect his mother at all costs. During their brief time together, Sarah falls in love with Reese. Reese becomes the only thing protecting her from the Terminator, and her only companion as they flee together. Initially, she is unaware that Reese himself had been in love with her from afar. He had been given a picture of her by John Connor and had always admired her legendary strength and resilience. While they are avoiding the Terminator, they share a night of intimacy that results in John's conception. Their relationship is cut short, however, when Reese dies fighting the Terminator in a Cyberdyne factory. Sarah in turn crushes the Terminator in a hydraulic press. Though Reese's death deeply saddens Sarah, his sincerity and courage inspires her to carry on and develop the necessary skills and abilities that would make her a suitable mentor and teacher to John. After these events, Sarah becomes a fugitive from society and begins making a voice recording for John (in which she acknowledges his paternity) to later give to her son at the proper age. While recording the tape, she stops for gas and the aforementioned photograph is taken by a young boy and sold to her. This is the same picture John Connor will give to Kyle Reese in the future.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Sarah Connor next appears in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which occurs ten years after the events of The Terminator. She and John have been separated from each other: John is now a preteen and living in a foster home, and Sarah has been institutionalized in Pescadero State Hospital. In the years between films, she has transformed herself from the mousy, timid woman seen at the beginning of the first movie into a muscled, ferocious warrior. In fact, the first image of her in the film is of her doing chin-ups on her hospital bed. After the death of Kyle Reese, Sarah took his warnings, and the responsibility of raising the hope of mankind, to heart. However, her fixation on the disaster and her fanatical desire to keep John safe has made her slightly mentally unstable and very violent, which is only aggravated by her fear and hatred of the T-800. She dropped off the grid to better protect herself and John. She lived a semi-criminal life among various outlaws and survivalists, and she attempted to teach her son the skills he would need to lead the resistance. Sarah was captured and sent to the hospital after she attempted to destroy a computer factory.

Several times at the hospital, she has tried to improve her behavior in hope of getting to see her son, but her caregivers do not believe her. Her activities and claims of fighting evil robots from the future led to her being deemed incurable. Sarah only seemed to confirm the judgment of psychiatrists by committing acts of violence against hospital staff (including Dr. Peter Silberman, whom Sarah stabbed in the knee with his pen) and attempting to escape multiple times. During her final escape attempt, Sarah encounters two different Terminator models. One is the T-1000, a liquid metal cyborg sent back to kill her son. The other is a T-800 (the same model which had previously tried to murder her) that was sent back to protect them. When she initially encounters the T-800, she flees in terror, but she goes with him when he utters the first thing Reese had said to her: "Come with me if you want to live."

Sarah finds it nearly impossible to accept that the T-800 is benevolent; throughout the film, she remains hostile towards it and what it represents, while her own son develops a bond with it, resembling a father-son relationship. In the director's cut of the movie, it is revealed that Sarah has an opportunity to destroy the machine's CPU, which would "kill" it. She nearly does so, but John stops her, managing to convince her that they need its help and that no one would listen to his leadership ideas if she did not do so.^[6] While in Mexico, watching John do a high-five with the Terminator, Sarah loses her hostility towards the machine and begins to see it as the closest thing John has to a father.

In a moment of desperation, Sarah attempts to murder Miles Dyson, one of the computer researchers who works at Cyberdyne Systems and is destined to build the revolutionary microprocessor that eventually becomes Skynet. In doing this, she loses touch with her humanity, becoming eerily similar to the Terminator itself. Ultimately, she cannot bear to kill Dyson in front of his wife and kids, because he wasn't responsible for anything yet. Shortly afterwards, John and the T-800 arrive and, together, they succeed in persuading Dyson to stop his research and destroy all recovered remnants of the first Terminator. Then the T-800 lets himself be destroyed with the help of Sarah Connor, despite the protests of the young John. It is at this point that Sarah fully respects the T-800 and offers her hand in friendship to a comrade and brother warrior before his final sacrifice, which he takes. She is last seen holding her son and comforting him upon the T-800's destruction. Because of this event, Sarah looks to the future with renewed hope, believing that if a Terminator can learn the value of human life, then perhaps humanity is not doomed to self-destruction.

In the first Terminator movie, it is mentioned that Sarah was a legend among members of the resistance, teaching her son to fight and organize while they were still in hiding prior to the war. An alternate epilogue to Terminator 2 shows her living to become a grandmother. That ending, however, was not included in the theatrical release.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Sarah Connor has died, having succumbed to acute myeloid leukemia in 1997 (after the events of Terminator 2) after a three-year battle with the disease (see note below). As a result, she is not seen on-screen during the film but is mentioned by both John and the T-850 multiple times. She lived long enough to see the original 1997 "Judgment Day" pass without incident, and she was cremated in Mexico. Her ashes were spread at sea. Never truly believing that they had beaten Skynet, her friends, in accordance with her will, store a cache of weapons in a casket for John to find at a false grave site in the event that Judgment Day was not averted and the Terminators returned. The epitaph on her mausoleum niche reads, "No fate but what we make", which ultimately proves to be wrong when Skynet goes online and starts the war at the end of the film.

Terminator 3 follows a different storyline to the events in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (see below). In particular, while Sarah Connor died from terminal leukemia in 1997 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, she is still alive in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (See also Birth and death, which mentions that Sarah would have died in 2005, if they had not jumped forward in time).

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

In November 2005, 20th Century Fox announced that it would produce a television series called Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles featuring the adventures of the title character and her son in the years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day.^[7] This was followed by a November 2006 announcement that Lena Headey had been chosen to play Sarah Connor.^[8] The choice to cast Headey was criticized by several fans and critics who argued that she bore no resemblance to the athletic, muscular woman established by Hamilton, who transformed her body into that of a muscled warrior for Terminator 2.^[9] The controversy was covered by the Los Angeles Times^[9] The Boston Herald,^[10] and The Guardian,^[10] as well as in online forums.^[10]

The series opens in 1999, a few years after the events of Terminator 2. Sarah and John Connor seem to be living a peaceful life. Living undercover after being blamed for the murder of Miles Dyson, Sarah is even engaged to paramedic Charley Dixon. However, Sarah, fearing discovery, and perhaps, as John suggests, the certainty of a stable life, forces the two of them to flee again. On his first day in his new school, John is attacked by a T-888 Terminator posing as a substitute teacher called Cromartie. He escapes with the help of Cameron Phillips, a Terminator (in a Skynet-manufactured body that resembles a teenaged girl) sent back in time (by the future John) to protect him. Sarah hears of the shooting and rushes to the school but is captured by Cromartie, who uses her to lure John into a trap. Again with the help of Cameron, they flee to a bank where resistance members have hidden the parts of a time machine. As Cromartie attacks them, the trio disappears into the year 2007.

Cameron suggests to Sarah that their primary mission should be to stop Skynet, estimated to go online in the year 2011. Sarah argues that time traveling was the wrong move and that if she had been allowed to stay in 1999, she would have had longer to prepare John and to prepare to destroy Skynet. It is at this point that Cameron informs her that she would have died from cancer (similar to the film version of Sarah) in 2005. Traveling to the future has served several purposes: it gives Sarah the time she needs to destroy Skynet in its infancy, faking her and John's deaths keeps the authorities from pursuing them, and staying off the grid hides them from Skynet (which is aware that they've travelled through time but doesn't know which year they have been sent). As the three of them attempt to evade discovery and track down the origins of Skynet, Sarah is burdened with the extra knowledge that her own body might betray her. The third episode of the series shows Sarah at a doctor's appointment, where she is informed that she is completely healthy. Nevertheless, she seeks preventative measures from the doctor to avoid cancer altogether. Later episodes show her more intensively training her body, and she is seen taking a handful of vitamins and medications.

Sarah's relationship with Cameron has been repeatedly antagonistic and they share a mutual distrust. As Sarah attempts to teach Cameron the value of a human life, Cameron argues the importance of their mission to thwart Skynet's creation even if killing is necessary. During battles with Terminators programmed to kill the Connors, Sarah and Cameron often find themselves working together. Also, since Cameron is the only other person who knows of her cancer situation, Sarah often approaches her for advice in the matter.

Terminator Salvation

Linda Hamilton reprised her role as Sarah Connor in voiceovers warning of the future war (in the form of taped recordings for John) delivered throughout Terminator Salvation.

Terminator 5

Director McG implied that Sarah Connor could return in future installments of the new trilogy. He revealed that the fifth film would likely be about Connor himself timetravelling to 2011 and be an exploration of a "survivalist creature in our world doing his best to bring the world up to speed on an impending doom... and one could argue he meets his mother. I strongly suspect Linda Hamilton to be the star of the next film."^[11][12]

Reception

See also

• List of female action heroes

References

1. ^ Frakes, Randall; Bill Wisher (November 1985). The Terminator. Bantam Books. ISBN 0-553-25317-4. 
2. ^ Deleted scenes from Fox.com (Windows Media)
3. ^ Terminator Files
4. ^ Stated in narration in "The Tower is Tall But the Fall is Short"
5. ^ Op sit. Deleted scenes from Fox.com (Windows Media).
6. ^ Terminator 2: Judgment Day Transcript
7. ^ "The Terminator Franchise Rises Again". Variety. November 10, 2005. http://www.comingsoon.net/news.php?id=11940. Retrieved 2007-01-16. 
8. ^ "Headey lands 'Connor' role". Variety. November 8, 2006. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117953533.html?categoryid=14&cs=1. Retrieved 2007-05-17. 
9. ^ ^{a b} Collins, Scott (January 11, 2008). "New Sarah Connor needs thick skin". The Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2008-01-25. http://web.archive.org/web/20080125050500/http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-channel12jan12,1,2529711.story?coll=la-entnews-home-topstories%22&ctrack=1&cset=true. Retrieved 2008-01-12. 
10. ^ ^{a b c} Smith, David (January 20, 2008). "Weedy action heroine under fire". The Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/20/television.gender. Retrieved 2008-01-20. "Fans and feminists criticize a British actress for having the wrong physique to play the star role in American TV's hit Terminator spin-off" 
11. ^ Jonathan Dean (June 2009). "Beyond Salvation". Total Film: pp. 65. 
12. ^ Jami Philbrick (2009-04-21). "McG talks Terminator Salvation". Comic Book Resources. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=20895. Retrieved 2009-04-25. 

External links

• Sarah Connor at the Internet Movie Database
• A New Body of Work: Linda Hamilton Gets Tough in Terminator 2