Seamless Branching

Seamless Branching of 

The Theatrical Version, 

Special Edition Version and 

Extended Special Edition Version

“That’s the movie’s main plot, but let’s observe here that one of T2’s subplots actually echoes Cameron’s Schwarzenegger dilemma and creates a kind of weird metacinematic irony. 

Whereas T1 had argued for a certain kind of metaphysical passivity (i.e., Fate is unavoidable, and Skynet’s attempts to alter History serve only to bring it about), Terminator 2’s metaphysics are more active. 

In T2, The Connors take a page from Skynet’s book and try to head off the foreordained nuclear holocaust, first by trying to Kill Skynet’s inventor and then by destroying Cyberdyne’s labs and the first Terminator’s CPU (though why John Connor spends half the movie carrying the deadly CPU chip around in his pocket instead of just throwing it under the first available steamroller remains unclear and irksome). 

The Point here is that the protagonists’ attempts to revise The “Script” of History in T2 parallel The Director’s having to muck around with T2’s own script in order to get Schwarzenegger to be in the movie. 

Multivalent ironies like this — which require that film audiences know all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff from watching Entertainment Tonight and reading (umm) certain magazines — are not commercial PostModernism at its finest.” 

— David Foster Wallace