Upon its film debut, the T-800 Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the most fearsome and terrifying Sci-Fi monsters to ever exist as it had a Michael Myers-like disposition in that it won’t stop until its target is eliminated. As the Terminator films progressed, however, so did the development of Arnie’s T-800 until the same model that was a feared villain became the hero of the franchise. However, it seems the T-800’s villain status was replaced by something far worse after Skynet introduced its exact opposite.
In James Cameron’s 1984 movie The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s titular character travels back in time to the 1980s to kill Sarah Connor, the woman who would become the mother of John Connor. However, in the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that same model android was sent back in time by humanity to protect John Connor after the android from the first movie failed. The T-800's switch from villain to hero between Terminator movies represents growth in the T-800s. Throughout T2, Arnie’s character is becoming more and more human-like after spending time with John and learning all the ways humans operate.
In the twelve-part Dark Horse Comics series Terminator Salvation: The Final Battle by J. Michael Straczynski and Pete Woods, Skynet is working with a human doctor, Helena Bonham Carter's Dr. Serena Kogan (the movie's original villain), to create first-gen cyborgs–people with Terminator bodies and human brains–in order to defeat the humans once and for all. This process was in development sometime before Judgment Day (the day Skynet dropped nuclear bombs all over the world) and Dr. Kogan only had access to people on death row. As it seems, people with a history of committing atrocious crimes were exactly what Skynet had in mind for its project as they needed someone who could think like a human but had no hang-ups about killing them. So, Dr. Kogan turned convicted serial killer Thomas Parnell into a Terminator cyborg, and while he became the very thing Skynet hoped he would be, Parnell accepted his role as a human/Terminator hybrid way too enthusiastically. In fact, Parnell descended so fully from man into machine that he was able to override Skynet itself in order to bring about even more chaos and destruction upon the Earth.
The stories of Arnold’s T-800 and Parnell share a number of striking similarities that play out as almost exact opposites. Though some feel the T-800 works better as a Terminator villain, the one from T2 is a Terminator on the side of the humans who learns the ways of humanity and slowly becomes more like the humans he was programmed to protect. Parnell, on the other hand, is a human on the side of the Terminators who becomes so indoctrinated into life as a machine that he is able to completely overtake the A.I. that created him, becoming the ultimate Terminator in the process.
The T-800’s development in T2 proves that the one from the first movie was also capable of such a metamorphosis, making its progression into becoming more like a human a natural development. Parnell’s journey, however, is an example of one's humanity being completely lost to the ultimate power that comes with being turned into an unstoppable machine. Arnie’s T-800 was a robot designed to help people that sought to understand and even humanity whereas Parnell was a viciously evil human who wanted to become a powerful machine–proving that Skynet’s ultimate Terminator was the complete opposite of Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800.
