Cult animated series The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the series has struggled to settle on a definitive tone.
This inconsistency makes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eponymous android assassin ripe for parody, with the character moving between ruthless killer and well-meaning protector in the space of two movies. The Adult Swim comedy series Robot Chicken has enjoyed a lot of jokes at the expense of the Terminator movies and their attendant lore, but one sketch managed to accidentally guess the twist of the most recent entry in the franchise.
In a season 3, episode 7 sketch, Robot Chicken imagined how the Terminator’s life would have panned out if he stuck around after the poignant ending of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and became John’s stepdad. It’s a humdrum suburban existence where the bored Terminator proves to be a terrible father figure, but bizarrely, it is also pretty much exactly what the original assassin ended up doing in Dark Fate. After killing John Connor in the opening scene, “Carl,” the retired Terminator of Dark Fate, became an average suburban stepdad in a surprisingly similar twist.
In fairness to the creators of Terminator: Dark Fate, Carl did save his wife and adopted kids from an abusive dad, where Robot Chicken’s Terminator is out to “Terminate” John’s self-esteem. However, the parallels between the sketch’s premise and the 2019 movie are still striking, with both turning the Terminator into a mild-mannered dad figure despite his ferocious reputation for violence. Unfortunately, for the team behind Dark Fate (including Rick & Morty joke, a comment that was close to correct but name-dropped the wrong Adult Swim series.
It is unclear whether Carl will resurface in the proposed Terminator reboot, but odds are viewers have seen the last of this version of the character given the critical mauling and underwhelming box office Terminator: Dark Fate received upon release. Robot Chicken, however, is still going strong in its tenth season and even pointed out a plot hole in another one of Terminator creator James Cameron’s most famous films when the show parodied the Xenomorph’s acid blood and the many plot holes this produced.