'Terminator Genisys': The

franchise timeline, explained

Lets say that time moves in a straight line.

Yes, this is probably a fallacy of our third-dimensional existence. Yes,

quantum physics tells us that time is flowing forward and backward and
outward and inward. Yes, the universe is just the hologram-projected
deathdream of a turtle falling down the cliff of sorrow beyond The Maw At
The End Of The Universe.

But again, just for the sake of argument, lets say this is how time works.
So, this is how time works in Terminator Genisys.
Let me explain.

In the dark future originally introduced in The Terminator, an

artificial intelligence called Skynet has decimated the worlds population with
an army of machines. After decades of fighting, in the year 2029, humans
launch a successful counter-attack. Led by a man named John Connor, the
Resistance smashes Skynets defense grid. The humans have won but the
machines have a secret plan. Clearly believers in Thomas Carlyles Great
Man theory of history, the machines send a lone robot agentan infiltration
unit known as a Terminatorback in time to kill John Connors mother and
thus, kill John Connor before he is ever born.

The Resistance fighters successfully sends an agent of their own back in time
to stop the Terminator. This implies that Terminator subscribes to the
gradual ripple perspective on time travel, similar to the disappearing
photograph in Back to the Future. Otherwise, the Resistance would blink out
of existence the moment Skynet sends a Terminator backward.

The Resistances agent is Kyle Reese, one of adult John Connors closest
friends. And although Kyle has never met Sarahshe is presumably long
deadhe feels a personal connection to her. John gave Kyle an old Polaroid
picture of his mother. Maybe because his entire world is black, bleak
awfulness, and maybe because James Cameron is a hopeless romantic, Kyle
has fallen in love with the dead woman. (That Polaroid picture burned into
ash sometime before Kyle traveled back in time.)

In 1984, Kyle manages to rescue Sarah Connor. They spend about two days
together, on the run from the Terminator and from the LAPD. They make
love. Kyle dies. The Terminator gets crushednothing left but his robot arm.
And Sarah is now pregnant with Kyles son: John Connor.

The Terminator establishes three key points in the history of the universe:
John Connors birth, which occurs sometime around 1984-85; the machine
apocalypse known as Judgment Day, which occurs at some undisclosed point
in the future; and the victory over the machines in 2029. It also throws a
fourth variable into the equation: time travel. But in The Terminator, this
time travel is a closed loop. And we are given every indication that Skynets
time-travel plot was an absolute hail-mary, last-ditch, doomsday-device,
break-only-in-case-of-absolute-defeat plan.

Now, you may ask yourself: Was there ever an original Terminator timeline,
without time travel? Is it possible that the John Connor who sent Kyle Reese
back in time was the son of a different manRandom 80s Baby Daddyand
Kyles somewhat-rash decision to copulate with his best friends mom created
a new timeline, where John Connor looks a lot more like Kyle Reese?

Possible, but unlikely.

Were told in the first Terminator movie that John gave Kyle that Polaroid
photo, which strongly implies that he was trying to build up a connection
between the two of them. (You could say that The Terminator is just John
Connor pulling a Parent Trap.) And at the end of the first Terminator, Sarah
Connor is recording a series of audiotapes for John, explaining his time-
tossed ancestrywhich implies that John Connor will have prophetic
knowledge of future events. Of course, for John Connor, some of the future is
in the past. God, you can go crazy thinking about all this, Sarah says.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day begins with a simple idea: The machines had a
back-up plan for their back-up plan. They sent one evil robot to 1984 to kill
Sarah Connor; and they sent another evil robot to a different time, 1995, to
kill John Connor himself. (Side note: Terminator 2 came out in 1991, but
it had to take place 10 years after The Terminator to explain the 10-year-old
John Connor. There is some debate about whether that places it in 1994 or
1995. In this and only this, lets not be too pedantic.)

The beginning of T2 also helpfully pins down the precise date of Judgment
Day: Aug. 29, 1997. We can tweak the timeline thus:

This relatively straightforward idea leads to an equally straightforward

question: If Skynet sent back two robots to two different times, why wouldnt
it send back a third robot to a third time? Why not send back 100 different
robots to every single year of the 20th century, aimed at every single person
in John Connors bloodline?

You could argue that Skynet views the John Connor mission as a precision-
targeting assassinationthat the robots are worried about causing too much
of a ripple in the space-time continuum. But actually, Skynet isnt worried at
all about changing the past. Because Terminator 2 makes it clear that
Skynets whole existence is because of a rip in the fabric of typical space-time.
John Connor was created because he sent his own father to the past. This
makes him the Jesus figure in Terminators techno-Biblical cosmology; his
existence is a miracle of time travel.

So its appropriate that his nemesis, Skynet, also owes its existence to a self-
creating paradox. In Terminator 2, Cyberdyne engineer Miles Dyson is in the
process of creating Skynetwith a little help from the robot arm and broken
CPU from the original Terminator from the first movie.

This is not really that crazy in the context of time as Terminator 1 established
it. Time is still a loop. But it does bring up weird fourth-dimensional
questions that you would love to see someone like Grant Morrison tackle.
Namely: Is it possible that John Connors existence somehow creates Skynet?
Because if Skynet didnt send a Terminator back to 1984, then there would be
no robot arm, and Skynet would never create itself? You could argue that
Skynet was always going to get built eventually. But from Terminator
2 forwards, Skynet is always fighting two wars at once: The war with
humanity in the Dark Future across Judgment Day, and the war across time
to create itself.

And in Terminator 2, it loses both wars. Whereas the first movie argued that
the future was set in stonethat Judgment Day had to happen so that the
eventual Victory Over The Machines would happenTerminator 2 argues
that the future can always be changed, and the Dark Future can be avoided.
Sarah Connor and her son blow up Cyberdynewith a little help from Miles
Dyson, who dies in the process and thus presumably erases whatever specific
knowledge he might have had that could have created Skynet without the
robot arm.

Even after Cyberdyne blows up, Sarah and John still need to take care of two
robots from the future: The T-1000 assassin, and the reprogrammed
Terminator sent back in time to teach John the power of love. Both are
dissolved into molten steel; the Terminator actually sacrifices himself,
reasoning that his CPU could be used by someone, sometime, somewhere to
create Skynet.

The unknown future rolls toward us, Sarah says. I face it, for the first time,
with a sense of hope.

Sarah Connor dies a couple of years later. Leukemia. She lives long enough to
watch Judgment Day come and go without any machines launching any
nuclear bombs. In 2004, we pick up with John Connor, in his early 20s,
living off the grid, still apparently concerned that someday, sometime,
somehow, Skynet will rise.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is not a very good movie, but it does have
the last good car chase in the Terminator franchise, and there is something
insanely poignant about the early scenes featuring Nick Stahl as John
Connor, an apocalypse-zealot hobo convinced of his own grand importance in
the world. There was probably an angle where this became the key twist of
Terminator 3that John weirdly starts to wish he could be living in the Dark
Future where he is the most important human being in history, and not just
an aimless drifter in a world that steadfastly refuses to end.

Rise of the Machines is not interested in twisting the Terminator mythos,

though. Quite the opposite: It untwists. Arnold Schwarzenegger explains the
new theory of time travel in a single line: Judgment Day is inevitable. There
is no point in trying to change the future. You can only forestall the inevitable.
So in Terminator 3, two more killer robots arrive from the future. Skynet has
sent back another assassin, the lady-looking T-X. In what is arguably the
single most strategic use of time travel in the Terminator franchise, the T-X
isnt just trying to kill John Connor; shes also trying to kill all of the people
who will become key lieutenants to John.

The Resistance has sent back its own robot: A third Terminator played by
Arnold Schwarzenegger. This Terminator is decidedly less lovable than the
Terminator who protected John in T2. In fact, we learn that this new
Terminator actually killed Johnin 2032, during the Future War, before
getting reprogrammed by Johns wife, Kate, and sent back in time to protect
John in what amounts to a rather elaborate penance ritual. This strongly
implies that the old 2029 Day of Victory has been wiped out of the timeline.
(In the past, the Terminator takes John and Kate, childhood acquaintances
who barely know each other, and locks them in a fallout shelter: Yet
another Parent Trap.)

Rise of the Machines is the first film that demonstrates how Skynets origins
adjust forward according to techno-social-political realities. In the original
timeline, Skynet was created by a defense contractor for the military as what
sounds like a scarier version of Ronald Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative
program, better known as The Star Wars That Wasnt A Movie But Actually A
Policy America Had. When it went online, this Skynet fired Americas nuclear
arsenal at Russia, which apparently counter-attacked by launching its own
nuclear arsenal at everything else.

But because the 1997 Judgment Day was avoided, this new timeline sees the
Bush-era military nationalize the bankrupt Cyberdyne. The military is
creating Skynet to prevent cyber-hacking; Skynet spreads through the World
Wide Web before launching nuclear missiles at everyone. (Short
version: Terminator 1 is to Cold War as Terminator 3 is to Internet.)

Terminator 3 posits that you cannot completely defeat the machines in the
past. You can only ultimately defeat them in the Dark Future. And,
freakishly, Terminator 3 is the only movie that doesnt explicitly state that the
humans will win the Resistance. Quite the opposite: This new
Schwarzenegger-Terminator managed to kill John in 2032, because Skynet
knew that John was emotionally attached to the Schwarzenegger-
Terminator from Terminator 2.

Hold onto that for a moment because it will become important later.

Skynet in this new timelines 2032 not only knows that John Connor is an
important human being who needs to be killed. Skynet in 2032 also knows
that John Connor was saved by a Terminator when he was a kid a
Terminator sent back in time from a different future a future where the war
was ending in 2029.

Let me try again. In the first Terminator, Skynet just wanted to send a
Terminator back in time to kill John. By the third Terminator, the Skynet of
the new future knows that the Skynet of the original timeline failed to kill
John Connor, and knows that it needs to try a different strategy.
But lets hold off on that rabbit hole for a second. Here is the timeline after
three Terminator movies.

Keep in mind: This is still the easy part.

Terminator Salvation could have done some truly insane things to

the Terminator timeline. There are two well-known alternate endings to the
fourth film. In the first alternate ending, John Connor diesbut his face and
voice live on thanks to Marcus Wright, a cyborg, who assumes John Connors
identity to maintain the undefeatable image of John Connor, Savior of the
Humans. This would have been a shockingly clever retcon, flavored with
paranoid propaganda: The human leader was a robot the whole time!

But there was another, totally insane-o ending, revealed to our own Chris
Nashawaty by Terminator Salvation director McG and lead Christian Bale. In
this ending, Marcus Wright would have assumed John Connors identity
and then immediately killed all the leaders of the Resistance, including Kyle
Reese, presumably chopping off all those closed loops and launching the
Earth into a neverending Dark Age.

None of this happened. Instead, Terminator Salvation deserves some weird

credit for just how strenuously it tries to follow the twisted timeline that came
before it and after it. Although the leads have been recast, it appears to honor
the events of Terminator 3. John is now married to Kate (Bryce Dallas
Howard, always trying.) And although pre-release buzz pegged the film as a
Total War action fest, Salvation goes out of its way to continuit-ize the
proceedings. John Connor spends his lonely hours brooding in the shadows,
listening to his moms recorded messages about the future past.

Heres where things get a bit wonky, though. Salvation establishes what
earlier films had hinted atJohn Connor is a kind of Cassandra figure,
completely aware of what is coming in the future thanks to his Moms cheat-
sheet tapes. Those tapes seem to contain information about the Terminators
that Sarah heard from Kyle. (Apparently, their one night of lovemaking had
a lot of pillow talk.)

But Salvation also establishes that Skynet is also aware of the future, which is
the past. In Terminator Salvation, Skynet is trying to kill Kyle Reese, who in
2018 is just a random teenager. So Skynet knows that Kyle is Johns father.
Because well, unclear. Lets give Salvation the benefit of the doubt
here. Sarah Connor spent much of the early 90s in a mental asylum, claiming
that her baby daddy was a time traveler from the future named Kyle Reese.
Skynet is a supercomputer with access to everything that has ever happened.
This seems like something it could find out.

None of this actually matters. Terminator Salvation was supposed to lead to

two more movies, forming a trilogy set entirely in the future war. That didnt
happen, so we can stitch Salvation into the existing timeline without much
fuss.


I feel the masochistic need to take a brief detour here and

mention Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is notable for a
lot of reasons, not least because it was the first time an actress from Game of
Thrones played Sarah Connor. (Expect the Maisie Williams-fronted reboot
sometime next decade.) Sarah Connor Chronicles ran for two seasons on Fox,
ending its run just a month before Salvation hit theaters. It never quite found
a groove, partially because the plot was built on helium nonsense, but there
was a lot to love in the show. (James Cameron thinks so; he hired
showrunner Josh Friedman as one of his Avatar sequel co-writers.)

Sarah Connor Chronicles begins in 1999. The events of Terminator 2 all

happenedbut for no reason that is ever explained, Sarah Connor is alive and
cancer-free. You could argue that Sarah Connor Chronicles is just
ignoring Terminator 3, like Jaws: The Revengebut it does honor a few key
facts from Rise of the Machines. Sarah will die of cancer at some point. And
Judgment Day does keep happening, forestalled but never prevented.

At the start of Sarah Connor Chronicles, two new killer robots are sent back
in time from the Future War. (Its established that theyre sent back from
2027, I believe, which is a slight change from the original 2029. But this is the
point when you can start arguing that things in the Dark Future happen
differently because of changes in the past.) Theres a Terminator
who isnt Arnold Schwarzenegger, trying to kill Johnand a Terminator
who is Summer Glau, sent to rescue him.

But Summer Glau-Terminator doesnt just rescue John. She takes Sarah and
John to a top-secret locationwhere she reveals a time machine, built by
another time traveler, who was sent back to 1963. And then Summer Glau-
Terminator takes the Connors forward in time, to 2007, with the stated
purpose of preventing the New Judgment Day, which will take place/has
taken place/will have been taking place in 2011.

If that sounds confusing, I hasten to add that Sarah Connor

Chronicles immediately made things even more confusing immediately and
frequently. In the first Terminator, time travel was a last-ditch plan. The
time-travel device was used by Skynet and then immediately used by the
Resistance.

Sarah Connor Chronicles argues that, actually, everyone in the future has
access to time travel, and half the people in the present are actually killer
robots from the future trying to create Skynet in the past or vaguely
untrustworthy Resistance personnel from the future trying to prevent the
creation of Skynet or third-party Cyborg Rebels trying to fight Skynet for
their own weird reasons. Also, the lead singer from Garbage plays a T-1000
who turns Garrett Dillahunt into her Robot Messiah child.

It all looks a bit like this:

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was always hamstrung by
Terminator-ness and Sarah Connor-ness: It looks in hindsight like a
fascinating time-travel show that needed to keep finding reasons for Lena
Headey to fight machine-men. But the show did make a legitimate argument
for Brian Austin Green as a smallscreen action hero. (Badass-wise, Brian
Austin Green makes Jai Courtney look like Anton Yelchin.) Like, the
current 12 Monkeys reboot is basically Sarah Connor Chronicles at
lightspeed.

More importantly, Sarah Connor Chronicles establishes a key idea

that Terminator Genisys runs with: Everything that has ever happened in any
timeline is still happening, all of the time.

Remember this?
Terminator Genisys begins there. Its 2029, and the Resistance is launching
a final attack against Skynet. The attack is two-pronged: Most of the army is
taking down the Skynet computer core (or maybe the defense grid?) while
John leads his own unit against the Skynet base in Los Angeles. This is
because John knows about Skynets last-ditch planthe Skynet L.A. Bureau
has the time-traveling unit that will send the original Schwarzenegger-
Terminator back to 1984.

The first 20 minutes of Genisys could have easily been the first twenty
minutes of The Terminator, if James Cameron had been a terrible storyteller.
Its the prologue we never really needed. We see Kyle Reese meet John
Connor. We see them pal around. John jokes about getting a cold beer after
the war, which I think is the first time in any Terminator movie that someone
in the Dark Future isnt Cormac McCarthy-level sad. There is one notable
change from past canonwhich I will talk about in a secondbut everything
leading up to Kyle Reese going back to the future seems to be leading right
into The Terminator.
But then everything changes. (SPOILER ALERT FOR EVERYTHING
THAT CHANGES.) It changes in the future and in the past, simultaneously.
In the future, a new kind of Terminator played by Matt Smith kills all of
Johns lieutenants and transforms John into another new kind of Terminator.

Kyle sees this happen, right as he is getting tossed backward in time. During
his time-jaunt, he experiences a sudden onset of memories he shouldnt have.
Kyle clearly establishes at the start of Terminator Genisys that he was born
after Judgment Day; but in his memories, the year is 2017, and a twelve-year-
old Kyle is hanging out with his happy parents in a non-apocalypsed America.

We soon learn that whatever has happened to John Connor in the future has
caused weird, never-fully-explained ripples in the timeline. In this new 1973,
two killer robots arrived from the future: A T-1000 sent to kill Sarah Connor,
and yet another Schwarzenegger-Terminator sent to rescue her. The fourth
Schwarzenegger-Terminatorhenceforth Popsdoesnt actually know who
sent him back in time. That memory was erased, presumably to make sure
that Skynet could never kill that person, but also maybe because it lets the
sequel to Terminator Genisys twist-explain how Kyle or Sarah sent the
Terminator back.
Pops has raised Sarah Connor for the last 11 years. And, apparently, whoever
programmed Pops to protect her also programmed him with the entire
history of the first Terminator timeline. Pops knows that Kyle Reese is the
father of John Connor, and also knows that Judgment Day is going to happen
in 1997.

Precisely how Pops knows all of this is up for debate. This could be yet
another example of the Parent Trap model of Terminator time
travel; whoever sent this Terminator back to the past knew that Sarah
wouldnt meet and fall in love with Kyle Reese the way she was supposed to,
so it needed this Terminator to get Sarah and Kyle together.

(Aside: One of the weirdest things about the Terminator movies is that, with
regards to humans, the franchise clearly believes that nature is more
important than nurture. John Connor will be the human savior, no matter
how his parents meet, no matter if his mom is alive or dead. But the franchise
believes the precise opposite when it comes to robots. With just a little
nurture, Schwarzenegger-Terminators and Worthington-Terminators can
always learn to disobey their programming and do the right thing. End of
aside.)

Anyhow, Pops and Sarah Connor have been waiting patiently for the arrival of
the original Schwarzenegger-Terminator, because that Terminators CPU is
needed to activate their time-travel device. They are going to time travel to
1997 to stop Judgment Day. So, if youre keeping track, Pops the Terminator
and Sarah Connor are using their knowledge of Terminator 1 to skip ahead
to Terminator 2.

But what they dont knowmaybeis that the original Schwarzenegger-

Terminators CPU and arm invented Skynet in Terminator 2. So what Im
about to say is going to make maybe a bit more sense than it should:

Sarah Connor and Pops the Terminator have spent the last 11 years preparing
to travel to 1997 to stop Judgment Day, and Kyle Reese convinces them that
they should travel to 2017 instead, because he thinks that is when Judgment
Day is going to happen now, because his memories tell him so.

So, this happens:

Taking a page from the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Kyle and Sarah leap
forward in timejust forward enough to prevent the creation of Skynet. But
simultaneously, the now-Evil Cyborg John Connor travels backward in time
(to roughly 2014) so that he can be the one to create Skynet.

If I follow this correctlyand I admit that my nose is bleeding while I type

thishere is the sequence of events:

1. In the future, Skynet sends the original Schwarzenegger-Terminator back

to 1984. Kyle Reese follows it.

2. John Connor gets turned into an evil cyborg by Skynet.

3. Skynet sends a T-1000 back to the past to kill Sarah Connor, even though
they now control John Connor in the future.

4. Someone else in the futurelets say Moon Bloodgoodsends Pops back to

the past, to save Sarah.

5. Skynet also sends Evil Cyborg John Connor to roughly 2014 as a

preventative measure, because John Connor will need to invent Skynet in
case Skynet ever gets dis-invented.

6. The ramifications of all this time travel occur simultaneously across the
fourth dimension. Pops saves Sarah in 1973. In 1984, they eliminate the
Original Schwarzenegger-Terminator, and because Cyberdyne never finds his
CPU and arm, they accidentally destroy Skynet. Which means Evil Cyborg
John Connor arrives in a new 2014, without Skynet, and needs
to invent Skynet.

This means that, by the time Sarah and Kyle and John all meet up in 2017,
they are all impossible paradox beings, their existence only making sense in
the context of a timeline that no longer exists. John Connor actually says this,
more or less. When someone points out that he cant kill Sarah and Kyle
without killing himself, John announces (paraphrasing here): I can do
anything I want to, because we are now exiles outside of the timestream, so
all rules of causality have been broken, BANG BANG BANG!
There is actually a simpler explanation for what happens in Terminator
Genisys, though:

We are actually seeing the very end of a cycle that has been going on for
untold decades, centuries, maybe even millenia, on an eternal loop. Every
time someone time traveled backwards, it left some residual mark of history
history that either John Connor or Skynet carried forward into the next time
loop. This goes back to what I was saying earlier, about how Skynet is aware
of its previous timelines Skynets. We actually seem to get confirmation of
this later in Genisys, when the hologram that will become Skynet keeps
popping up. At one point, Kyle tells this hologramwhich is called Genisys,
but its also Skynet, I thinkthat they turned John into a bad guy, and
Genisys/Skynet says that it turned John into something better than a human.
Keep in mind: When Genisys/Skynet says this, it is referring to something it
will do in the future, which is the movies past. Genisys/Skynet in 2017 has
the memories of Genisys/Skynet in 2029.

And that explains what Matt Smiths plan is in Terminator Genisys. The first
time John sent Kyle back to the past (in The Terminator) Skynet was
defeated. But in the new timeline, Skynet KNEW it was going to be defeated,
and so it changed its plan from Kill John Connor to bring John Connor
into the Borg Skynet collective.

Imagine that, when Kyle Reese first traveled back in time in Terminator 1, he
was wearing a GoPro with infinite space and infinite battery. Imagine that
when he died, Sarah Connor kept that GoPro, and handed it off to John
before she diedand then imagine that John handed that GoPro to Kyle, in
the future again, so he could take it back to the past. This theoretical GoPro
would have 45 years of video footagestarting in 2029 and ending in 2029.
And when 2029 rolled around again, it would have 90 years of video footage.
Imagine what Skynet could do, knowing what happens during one turn of the
wheel, and knowing they can always spin it back to the beginning.

And in turn, imagine how there would be tiny differences in every timeline.
For instance: In the first Terminator, Kyle remembers a Polaroid of Sarah,
but the picture burns long before he travels to the past. In Terminator
Genisys, Kyle looks at that Polaroid right before the big final battle. (Emilia
Clarke even rocks that fierce 80s headband.)

This would also explain certain elements of reality drift that reappear across
different, apparently unconnected timelines; in Terminator Salvation, the
main Skynet headquarters is in San Francisco, but in Terminator Genisys,
Skynet-Genisys first emerges out of a corporate headquarters a few miles
down the Peninsula. In Terminator 3, Judgment Day is caused by the
military-industrial complex. In Genisys, its caused by Silicon Valley;
apparently, the Cyberdyne of this timelinecomplete with a living Miles
Dyson!has transitioned away from robotic military stuff into
the FaceGoogleChat of the Terminator universe. Except Judgment Day gets
averted this time around, just like in Terminator 2. And just like
in Terminator 2, the Schwarzenegger-Terminator sacrifices himself, because
if there are any Terminator CPUs lying around then someone like Miles
Dyson could invent Skynet

wait, never mind, in this movie, the Schwarzenegger-Terminator falls into

liquid metal and gets upgraded, because shut up. So Kyle, Sarah, and Pops
drive off together, with the promise of maybe solving some mysteries (even
though none of the mysteries matter anymore, because the timelines they
originate from have been erased).

And also, as the post-credits scene makes clear, Genisys-Skynet still lives in
this new timeline. This reframes the future of the Terminator universe as,
basically, the saga of a superhero team (the Terminavengers) and their world-
conquering supervillain nemesis (literally just Ultron with Matt Smiths face).
And the nemesis can depend on the fact that it can always get new
reinforcements from the Dark Future.
Actually, Genisys-Skynet doesnt even need to cause Judgment Day: It can
just move things into place for Judgment Day, which will send a ripple effect
down the timestream creating the Dark Future. Like, keep in mind: Genisys-
Skynet sent John Connor back to 2017 from a future where John Connor was
born in 1984. That future was wiped out of existence when Sarah and Kyle
jumped forward in time, but John was still there.

On some level, the Terminavengers must know that they are doomed to
repeat this cycle. Thats the only reason I can figure that, at the end of
Terminator Genisys, Kyle Reese from the Dark Future That No Longer Exists
finds young Kyle Reese circa 2017 and tells him Genisys is Skynet.

There is no reason for Adult Kyle to tell this to Young Kyle, unless Adult Kyle
knows that Young Kyle will someday be in a Dark Future, from which he
will travel back in time. And if Adult Kyle does think that is going to happen,
he should be copulating like mad with Sarah to create John Connor, who will
be just 12 years old in 2029 if hes born in 2017. Or maybe Kyle and Sarah and
Pops want to cut John Connor out of the equation and just run the Human
Resistance themselves. Or maybe Pops was programmed by Skynet-Genisys
in the future as an embedded double agent, purposefully guiding Sarah and
Kyle away from the version of history where they produce the human savior
in 1984. Or maybe the Skynet-Genisys of 2017 will operate in secret, creating
a time travel device and sending new enemy agents back in time before
Judgment Day even happens.

If you think about it, the Skynet-Genisys of 2017 could be responsible for the
time travel event that killed Sarahs parents. After all, why would the Skynet-
Genisys of 2029which had Evil Cyborg John Connor under its control
want to kill his mother? It makes more sense that the Evil Hologram Matt
Smith from the Genisys post-credits stinger would want to kill Sarah. Which
means that Terminator Genisys requires both the closed-loop system
of Terminator 1Sarahs parents are only killed because Evil Matt Smith is
seeking vengeance for Sarah destroying the Genisys facilitybut also requires
the future-changing system of Terminator 2Evil Matt Smith was only
invented because Sarah Connor and Pops destroyed the Terminator from
Terminator 1. It all looks kind of like this:

In conclusion, this is what happens in the classic comic book series RoboCop
Versus the Terminator, when because of various RoboCop-related
circumstances, Skynet is forced to send a small robot dog back in time to
invent Skynet: