Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - 13 questions

Question: At the end of the movie where they lower The Terminator to its death, how come it has stopped obeying John's orders? John orders it not to go, yet it only replies that it now knows why humans cry. It also actually gave John an order, telling him to run earlier in the movie. How can it be able to do these things if it's programmed to listen to John's command?

Answer: There are a couple of possibilities. One, he has "a neural net processor, a learning computer" He become able to resist that programming (a feature he demonstrates again in T3 when he shuts down rather than kill John). Also, his overriding mission is to protect John's past self. Telling John to run while he delays the T1000 and destroying himself to avert Judgment Day both fall under this.

Question: There is a scene where Sarah Connor is pulling out bullets from the back of the T800. My question is how did they achieve this effect? Rubber pliers was my first thought, but you cannot see any bending at all as they are forced in and twisted, plus as the pliers go in, you can see quite a depression in the skin of the T800, it looks rather rubbery and flexible. So the body looks like a fake, but it's Arnie's head on top, but it's difficult to tell. I would love an answer or opinion on this as it has got me stumped.

Answer: They've artificially built out Arnold's back. This allows them to press the pliers into holes the prosthetic and have plenty of room before hitting his back. If you look carefully at the base of his neck and around his shoulders, you can see where they've blended the prosthetic into his normal skin. A good job, but not 100% perfect.

Question: On the bridge after the crash, they take a man's small pickup truck. What is written on the bumper sticker?

Answer: Praise the Lord.

Question: This is about the poker game on the coffee cup the cop gets. Was this an actual contest or something back in the early 90s? Would the cop have actually won something for the "full-house" or were those cups printed just for fun?

Answer: They're just for fun, although it isn't unheard of for coworkers to gamble amongst themselves using the cups.

Question: Instead of fighting the T-1000, why don't John, Sarah and the Terminator lay low for a while, hire a plane and go abroad?

Answer: Because it would be a really dull film. Anyway, they'd know that it's always out there, trying to find them, never sleeping, always searching, relentless. No matter how long it took, it would ultimately locate them. Best to face it now in a proactive fashion than lie low and risk being caught by surprise when it finally catches up with them.

Question: If the T-1000 doesn't have a central processor, then how was it programmed?

Answer: I'm not going to give the whole long answer here. Look up distributed processing and nanobots on Google. Basically millions of tiny processors doing one job each is equally efficient or actually superior to one processor doing multiple jobs.

Question: What was the point of the piece of robot that stuck to the back of the security car? It never served any major purpose in the movie.

Answer: It was just to show that, being composed of a polymimetic alloy (liquid metal), all pieces could be recombined into the whole terminator.

Question: In the hospital scene when Terminator and John rescue Sarah. The T-1000 goes through the bars and then the pistol gets caught in the bars. I don't get it. Could someone explains this to me?

Answer: He is made out of liquid metal, so he can just "walk through" the bars while feeding himself around them (by turning sections of him liquid), most likely to intimidate the people he's after. However, the gun is just a normal gun he'd picked up, and so at the angle he was holding it at, it couldn't get through the bars so it got stuck.

Question: The T-1000 kills the cop at the beginning. He takes his clothes, but he never takes shape of the cop. So why don't other cops get suspicious? After all, they might have heard a news report that Officer Austin died, and they see a completely different looking man in his uniform.

Answer: Why would they? Throughout the film the T-1000 keeps to himself and only once or twice even comes close to meeting the police. The first is when he tells one officer, "Say, thats a nice bike" and the other when he gets rid of the pilot in the helicopter. We don't know if other police even noticed him or even realised that he wasn't an actual policeman. Being that it had no bearing on the films plot line it was never an issue to discuss further in the film.

Question: There was an entry that got deleted for being in the wrong section, but it got me thinking: How did the police officers questioning Sarah know about the foster parents' murder so quickly? First answer is the deleted scene of T-1000 searching John's room (extends time passed). But that won't explain how the police discovered the murder and then told the two officers so fast. In the special edition cut, the police talk to Sarah in between T-800 explaining the T-1000 and when John learns the T-800 does what John says. Not a lot of time, because those two guys the T-800 beats up also have to hang around (they pull up in a car before T-800 & John make the phone call). All I could think of was the T-1000 could have reported it. This might make the police look for John and the T-800, making the T-1000's job easier. He also might have anticipated the police talking to Sarah, he just didn't arrive in time to interview her. However, I'm not sure if the machine is that creative. Anyone else want to take a crack at this?

Answer: The best explanation is that the time passed between scenes isn't minute by minute. In the scene between the detectives and Sarah the detective says "Look I've just sat here and told you that you son is missing..", which would suggest that the scene was taking place a little while after John and T-800 made the phone call. Being that the scenes don't make mention of the time between scenes it could have been any length of time after the phone call that they interviewed Sarah. As for how the police found out, neighbours could have heard the commotion from the dog and reported it to the police and upon inspection of the property found the dead parents. This could have happened pretty quickly if a patrol car was in the area.

Question: I know that the infamous third arm shot in the helicopter can be explained by being able to morph another arm, but has James Cameron or any of the actors from the film ever commented on the extra arm?

Answer: A member of the production team mentions on the Ultimate Edition DVD commentary that this was indeed an intentional effect.

Question: Is it (or was it, as the case may be) really a common practice to put keys in the visor? (And why?)

Answer: It's not really "common" per se, but some surveys indicate that up to one in seventeen people in the US routinely leaves their keys in the car overnight. If you do so, it's only logical to put them in a place where they can't be easily seen yet you will be able to find them. It's just luck that it happens to work out for Arnold in this movie.

Question: In the Ultimate Edition DVD, after the T-1000 has 'regrouped' after the liquid nitrogen death, his hands and feet take on the pattern of whatever he touches, for example to yellow and black stripes on the rail or the floor pattern. Why does happen and why was it left out of the movie? It's actually the reason John recognises the fake Sarah as an illusion.

Answer: It's one of several things that were cut from the original theatrical release for time reasons; James Cameron likes longer movies than studios like to release. The constant morphing indicates that whatever computer mechanism controls the T-1000 has been damaged: it is no longer able to choose what it copies but copies everything it samples to some extent. From a critic's point of view, this isn't necessary for John to recognize his mother because it's more interesting and intuitive if he "just knows".