Five Reasons The Terminator Would Be A Great Dad

As with every first Sunday in September, offspring all around the country are touching base with their fathers to show their appreciation for a lifetime of familial indentured servitude with the grand gift of perhaps some kind of undergarment, something they saw in a Bunnings catalogue, or maybe a ritzy iTunes gift card (shit — um, spoilers, Dad).

And, as I did with five different characters last year, I want to once again take the opportunity this Father's Day to pay tribute to a man who is so paternally gifted as to arguably stand as the quintessence of fatherhood, despite not actually being anyone's dad, and his complete lack of a functioning sex-nose (I presume): Terminator.

Okay, not just any Terminator, but specifically the re-wired Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in certified hallmark of classic cinema Terminator 2: Judgment Day (and in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, I guess, but I won't be mentioning that movie ever again, so that really doesn't matter).

It was during one of my regular rewatches of this piece of celluloid gold recently that a particular quote struck me, from Linda Hamilton's just-as-parent-of-the-year-worthy Sarah Connor, looking on as the reprogrammed killing unit interacts with her son, future rebellion leader and saviour of humanity John (Edward Furlong):

"Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice."

The crazy thing is that she's absolutely right.

5. he's there when you need him

Talk about your well-timed entrances — pretty much the first thing Terminator does upon locating young John Connor is wreck up a mall in the process of protecting him from walking terror factory Robert Patrick, which isn't exactly a walk in the park.

I know that it might seem stupid to act like physical endurance is an impressive feature for an unstoppable murder robot to possess, but let's not forget that Arnie's old and busted T-800 is kind of shitty in comparison with Patrick's liquid-metal (aka the substance of my nightmares) new hotness, the T-1000, and that the former takes a violent pummelling at the hands of This Year's Model in the process of protecting John, including going through a window and making a red-hot attempt for the world record in being the best at stopping bullets with your spine.

But it's not just the capacity to inflict and absorb violence that counts — it's the fact that he is there every single time the T-1000 comes within a knife-hand's length of killing John, even after taking a pole through the chest and being reduced to running on emergency back-up systems.

Seriously, the only other character I can think of approaching those kinds of preservative lengths is Liam Neeson in Taken, and if I'd seen Taken maybe I'd have written this article about him instead, but the ball's already rolling on this, so deal with it.

4. life skills

During his time with the Connor family, Terminator directly or indirectly demonstrates to John how to use a shotgun, how to really ride a motorcycle, how to use a shotgun while riding a motorcycle, how to take a beating, how to give a beating, how to drive, how to drive like a slaughter machine is chasing you, how to break into and back out of a high-security mental-health facility, how to break into and back out of a high-security super-science facility, how to know when your foster parents have been murdered, and how to break that news to a child.

Okay, maybe not that last one. Still — dude is handy. Way handier than Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, and he had a whole show dedicated to his fatherly misadventures.

3. he is patient 

Emotional capability or not, Terminator hung out with goddamn Edward Furlong for the entirety of the movie, and withstood a barrage of (justifiable, if misdirected) verbal abuse not only from the kid but Sarah Connor, too, when she first sees him in the mental-health facility and for a little whiles after that. And then, actually, pretty much for the whole film, until she understands him at last in her poignant closing voice-over.

Up until then, though, there is, like, zero appreciation for the fact he is not the same cyborg that killed like seven different other Sarah Connors as well as his intended target's time-travelling baby daddy and chased her down in an industrial plant. She and John both treat the T-800 like absolute shit for varying lengths of time, and he still dives on the proverbial grenade for them on several occasions throughout the film. The man-bot clearly has the patience of a saint, and that is an admirable quality any way you slice it. 

2. he tries to relate

It's easy to roll one's eyes at dorky dads trying to get on the same page as their antagonistic children, but a lot of parents don't put in the effort at all, so it's worth appreciating it when someone does. And Terminator, throughout the entirety of T2, tries so hard to get on board with whatever the hell John Connor is talking about like 85% of the time, even with things that are so far beyond his programming capabilities as to make him look like he's suffering a cyber-stroke just attempting to process it.

That's just what happens to Terminator's face when he tries to smile; forget about keeping up with the kid's rapid-fire fucking '90s slang that he casually peppers into gnarly conversation. I to this day do not know what "shine [someone] on" means, which Connor says before the iconic "Hasta la vista, baby", while trying to teach Terminator how to talk like a gibbering maniac. I refuse to look it up at this advent, and if you try to explain it to me, fair warning, I will ignore you.

But, just like Terminator, if my hypothetical kid tried to teach me that, or a similar, phrase, regardless of whether the words leaving their mouth held any kind of meaningful significance to me, I would nonetheless make a note of it and somehow work it into my lexicon to bust out at an appropriate(?) moment, because that's the kind of effort you should put in for those in your charge. Hasta la vista, baby. I think.

1. he understands sacrifice

I admit that this one has kind of a misleading name, because if I were to honestly title it, it would say, "he understands how to tear people's hearts out with little more than a thumbs up", but that seems less like something that I would be inclined to celebrate than the base notion of heroically resigning yourself to a particular fate for the benefit of others.

Aside from the sheer emotional trauma inflicted by this scene (if you, like me, saw this film at way too young an age, and were enamoured by the boy-and-his-robot subplot, then its culmination of robot dies in a fire is probably one of your longest-lived sensitive spots), it points to not only non-evil Terminator's capacity to learn, but to develop empathy and compassion and, well, understanding. When he says, "I know now why you cry," to John Connor before getting on that chain and skull-fucking my heart into a thousand pieces, he's not being completely literal.

He does indeed get that, sure, but he comes to understand a tonne of other things, too, over the course of his stint as Connor Family Bodyguard — not least of all the necessity of his death in order for his family to survive, or whatever measure of a family John and Sarah Connor came to be for T2's Terminator.

That's a conception of sacrifice at an extreme scale, but it nonetheless echoes the daily concessions made not just by fathers but mothers and step-parents and other guardians to ensure the health and happiness of their families, so consider the ways in which your paternal and other parental figures regularly take a bath in molten steel for you (figuratively speaking) and still manage to make you feel like everything will be all right, and maybe consider something other than a gift card next year.