That explains why the last act didn't work as well as the rest but I genuinely thought even with these imposed flaws (like The Exorcist 3) it was still a rather good film and for the reasons I explained earlier T2 is more of an annoyance to me than even T3.

It also explains the brain scan things they were loading Reese into.

So in a sense the interweb nutjobs describing T4 as the worst thing in the universe are largely responsible for the film not being as good as it could have been.

Oh for an edit.

Of course Conner should have realised that Reese could never be in peril because without the accidental discovery of the original Terminator chip even this slightly delayed Skynet might never exist. If Skynet was safe and it knows Reese will be Conner's father the trick would be to not invent the time machine thus removing him from the timeline, no Conner no defeat (unless this means no Skynet in which case Reese is the safest man on the planet).

It was (possibly accidentally) interesting that Skynet was aware of the changes in it's own time line.

I wonder if all the Terminators from the previous films came from different futures sharing a common past.

As for Arnie (or faux Arnie and it was scary how well he was blended in) in T3 there was the story about an Arniemator being successfully sent to kill John Conner playing on his childhood bond with that model and it was that model that was sent back in time to save him in the previous sequel.

John now knows about this so it's unlikely to have actually happened but when I saw that Terminator I though that it would play out a bit like that only slightly adjusted.

In the end it was a fan service but a technically interesting one, imagine what they may be able to do in a few more years time, replace Ewan with a young Alec Guinness (or the other way around going by George's track record) at the very least stick Peter Cushing into ROTS.