10 Helpful Suggestions for Killing John Connor

By Shaun Clayton

Skynet, the evil artificial intelligence featured as the nemesis in the Terminator franchise, really does a bad job of killing John Connor. It’s just about the only thing these evil robots want to do, and need to do to rule the world — and yet through three movies and a TV series, none of these highly advanced, insanely powerful, thinking and killing machines from the future has been able to pull it off, whether John is a whiny teen, a whiny tween, or even a zygot. Thus, John keeps on growing up and turning into the savior of humanity against the robots. We doubt that Skynet really wants to hear suggestions from a pile of miserable meatbags such as ourselves, but clearly, they aren’t able to kill him on their own. Here are 10 helpful hints on how our future robot oppressors can become our future robot killers.

10) Send All the Terminators Back In Time

If John Connor dies and the Skynet wins, then it would make sense to have every Terminator available sent back with a primary mission to kill John Connor. Instead there are Terminators on missions with killing John Connor as a side objective. That makes as much sense as if you got a flat tire but purchased a jump-starting kit. Another example would be, hypothetically, terrorists from Saudi Arabia attacked your country, and you went and bombed Iraq. Skynet should really take the direct route and focus on killing its primary enemy, John Connor. If there were about forty Terminators showing up all at once to kill John Connor, it’s pretty certain that he’s a dead guy. Plus, all those Terminators ganging up on John and killing him in a mob would be highly entertaining to watch. Especially if they just used their bare robotic hands, and maybe tossed him around a bit first.

9) Send the Newest Terminators

So, computers are really good at calculating things like bullet trajectories. So what kind of crappy programming system or shoddy hardware is Skynet using for these terminators that can’t seem to hit John, Sarah, or the broadside of a barn? Seriously, if a Reaper Quake Bot from 1997 can shoot the crap out of people using the awesome power of a 200 MHz Pentium tower, then surely a robot working of the hardware from decades in the future can hit John Connor in the back of the head from fifty feet away with a semi-automatic. Also, throughout the show, John and Sarah seem to outrun the Terminators fairly easily. Since the Terminator models don’t require muscle and bone to move they should be moving a lot faster. They should be able to move at the speed of a car, like in Terminator 2, where the T-1000 manages to catch up to a car that is speeding away. What dumbass robot decide to put the brakes on? Also, since Bruce Lee was fast enough to kill you before you could even run, I believe that the non-flesh future-kill-bots should be able to do the same. But they don’t.

8) Stop Sending Such Fragile Terminators

In the Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Terminators are about as easy to kill as your average body-builder on PCP — difficult, but hardly impossible. Wow, that’s a heck of a killing machine there, Skynet. In the first Terminator movie, the T-800 could take hundred of rounds of bullets, car crashes, pipe bombs, the explosion of an entire gasoline tanker, and still keep going, eventually needing an industrial-strength machine press to finally take it out. In the Sarah Connor Chronicles, apparently a falling elevator can take one out. Or a few of gunshots to the head. Or popping open it’s head with a screwdriver and taking out the chip after giving the terminator a shock. Maybe Skynet is thinking, “You know, I think I was too hard on the humans with the previous Terminators. I want to give them a fighting chance, because that’s just the kind of maniacal life-destroying artificial intelligence that I am. Oh, wait, that’s a contradiction. Oh well.”

7) Make More Sexy Young Terminators

Forget sending creepy hulking dudes to kill John Connor; Skynet should really be making as many hot young female Terminators as possible to torment the obviously sexually frustrated young John Connor. Since the future, forty-something John Connor felt it would be a good idea to send a hot Summer Glau girl robot back in time to protect him, I think we can safely say that there are perhaps more issues with John and hot teen sex than there are issues of National Geographic wasting away in your grandparent’s attic. All it would take is a Terminator with a D-cup, wearing a shirt three sizes too smal,l walking up to him, and before John can bring his eyes up from her cleavage to look her in the eye, the Terminator has his spine tied in a fisherman’s knot.

6) Build Terminators in Disguise

Or Skynet could go the other way and build something that nobody would suspect to be a Terminator. Skynet could build say, a Terminator that looks like a mailbox, but then there’s the problem of drawing too much attention when mailbox gets up and starts chasing people down the street. Skynet should build a terminator that looks like a pug dog. Nobody would even suspect a pug. They would see the pug going down the street, think “Oh, what a cute little pug” and before they knew it, the pug has torn out their jugular. In fact, the Terminator pug could probably take out a whole bus full of people before people caught on. Pugs are very good at taking down human defenses.

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5) Use a Goddamn Nuclear Bomb

What’s with all this using “bullets” and “guns” to try to take out John Connor? Why not just use a nuclear weapon? It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Skynet could get a nuke, as already we’ve seen on the show that Skynet can build a Terminator to get into highly sensitive areas like a nuclear power plant. Surely Skynet can build a Terminator to get into a secure army base and get a hold of a nuclear warhead, or just send a nuke back from the future inside a really fat Terminator — maybe even a Terminator that looks like Santa Claus that detonates the nuke when he puts a finger aside of his nose. In any case, it’s just a matter of getting it into a position that’s somewhat near where John Connor lives. No longer worrying about getting his exact location, just get in the ballpark. Also, considering Skynet starts a full scale-nuclear war anyway, it’s not like one nuke in Los Angeles is going to make a whole lot of difference. Actually, for some areas of Los Angeles, it may be an improvement.

4) Try Sending a Terminator Back to 1880

Since it’s been shown in the television series that a Terminator can be sent back in time to the 1920s, there’s no reason that a Terminator can’t be sent back further when they don’t have automatic machine guns, thermite grenades or the concept of electricity — you know, those things that seem to take Terminators out very easily. The 17th century seems like a good place to go, where a Terminator might find the great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather of John Connor and kill him. Maybe he’ll fire a flintlock that barely puts a dent in a Terminator, and in the five minutes it takes him to reload it, the Terminator can kill him with a wooden hammer.

3) Use the Time Machine to Cheat

Considering the world of Terminator has rules of time travel that would make even Phillip K. Dick say blush, there’s no reason why Skynet can’t send a Terminator back in time to correct a mistake another Terminator made. Say a Terminator almost gets John Connor in the past, but Connor escapes in a car. Simply send a Terminator back to plant a bomb in that car. John tries to escape, boom. Skynet wins. Perhaps Skynet has watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and thinks as soon as he has John cornered with a Terminator, John will say “Well, Terminator, I’ll just make sure my future self sends someone back in time to set up a bucket to drop on your head!” Then the Terminator has a bucket dropped on it’s head with the words “Wild Stallyns Rule” written on it, and oh, isn’t Skynet embarrassed! Excellent!

2) Have the Terminators Step in Front of his Lighting

John Connor hates that shit. Do it 30, 40 times, and his heart will explode on its own.

1) Wait

Perhaps the best think Skynet could do is to not try and kill John Connor. seriously! After all, whenever John gets nearly killed by a Termi
nator, it only seems to scare him into being serious about this whole “savior of the world” thing. Left alone, he seems to fall back into a very unimpressive whiny teenager. Skynet needs to stop going after him, leave him alone, let him think the threat is gone, then John will let his guard down, join an Emo band, start playing too much World of Warcraft, continue to date suicidal girls and end up out of shape and managing a Pizza Hut when the apocalypse hits. Actually,now that we think of it, Skynet could send some Terminators back with instructions to build Skynet once John Connor dies of old age. That’s a much easier way to destroy humanity.