Girls and Monsters Trivia Quiz

Answer: He was killed by a T-800 terminator.

Sarah Connor: "Once, I saved three billion lives, but I couldn't save my son. A machine took him from me, and I am terminated".

This movie is a sequel to "Terminator: Judgement Day" (1991). The three Terminator movies between the 1991 movie and "Dark Fate" are explained away as occurring in "an alternate timeline". James Cameron is both a producer and writer on this movie, his first involvement since the 1991 movie. In all other movies, the premise has been to protect John Connor (or his mother in the the first movie) as he leads the Human Resistance to the artificial intelligence Skynet which controls the US nuclear missiles, and hence the world.
This movie reboots the franchise. In the opening minutes, John Connor is killed by a T-800 Terminator. This is the first twist in the movie. In a 2019 interview by Jim Vejvoda of "IGN", an entertainment website, it was James Cameron's idea to kill off John Connor very early in the movie to show this was a very different "Terminator" movie: "It's like, 'Let's just get that right off the table. Let's just pull the carpet out from underneath all of our assumptions of what a Terminator movie is going to be about. Let's just put a bullet in his head at a pizzeria in the first 45 seconds.'" John Connor is gunned down by a T-500 terminator in front of his mother in a cafe in Guatemala three years after Judgement Day was supposed to have occurred. This is told in flashback but at the very start of the movie. The movie then moves onto the present day (which for this movie was the early 2020s).

Answer: No, she is human but "enhanced".

"Come with me or you'll be dead in 30 seconds." (Grace)

Grace (Mackenzie Davis) is sent back from 2042 AD. She was a soldier fighting an artificial Intelligence called Legion after the worldwide holocaust. She is critically injured in performing her duties. She consents to be "enhanced" to ensure she will survive her injuries. If you look closely at Grace's body you can see many fine surgical scars along her arms and torso where mechanicals and electronics replaced human tissue.

She is sent back from the future to protect Dani. Her enhancements give her the strength and skills to fight off Terminators which she does effectively. However as she is human, she can only operate at an "heightened" level for a short period, then she needs a series of medications urgently to recover, underpinning her status as a human rather than a machine.

Answer: Could separate into a carbon skeleton and a liquid metal component which both can operate independently

Rev-9 "Why not just let me have her?"
Sarah Connor "Because we're not machines, you metal mother...!"

The Rev-9 consists of a carbon-based solid endoskeleton surrounded by flesh of "mimetic poly-alloy". Unlike previous movies, this Terminator has the ability to separate these two components into separate, totally autonomous Terminator units. This Terminator is played by Gabriel Luna who said in a 2019 interview with "Den of Geek", "You got an endoskeleton that's carbon-based and liquid that's a carbon substance alloy. And of course I can split, and I can descend on a target from multiple angles which just makes it that much more dangerous.
The Rev-9, (Is it named after the Beatles' song? There is a lot of internet traffic devoted to this assumption), can change into different humans by physical contact. (eg in this movie -it takes on the appearance of Dani's Dad.) It can also "materialize" clothes by merely touching them. The endoskeleton is unique in structure and composition but still resembles the humanoid-like form of the previous T-800. It has numerous cavities and gaps, presumably used to store the liquid metal which facilitates shape shifting. An interesting "advancement" is that with this terminator the arms turn into sharp blades whereas the T-1000's "metal conversion" was to form hooks from arms.
The Rev-9 Terminator has been sent back to terminate Dani Ramos.

Answer: False

Sarah: "The future wants you dead for the same reason it wanted me dead".
Dani: "But I'm nothing, I'm nobody".
Sarah: "Yeah, you're not the threat. It's your womb".

This is the second twist of the movie. Dani is not destined to have a baby that will become the leader of the resistance against the artificial Intelligence of Legion. She herself becomes the leader of the resistance. In the future Dani rescues Grace from being a scavenger in the post-apocalyptic world and gives her purpose. Grace becomes very loyal to Dani and explains her ferocity in protecting her in the present against the Rev-9. The metamorphosis of Dani from an affable Mexican girl into a hard-nosed fighter is one of the strong points of this movie.

Answer: I'll be back.

Grace: "Why do you care what happens to her?" (Dani)
Sarah: "Because I was her, and it sucks".

Make no mistake: This is Sarah Connors' movie. Played by Linda Hamilton, the metamorphosis of Sarah from innocent college-going waitress in the first movie to the physically athletic terminator-hating mother-protector in "T2" to the Terminator bounty hunter in the third installment makes this movie her movie. When she utters the immortal words "I'll be back" early in the piece, you know this is her movie. (Linda Hamilton received top billing over Arnold Schwarzenegger who does not appear until the second half of the movie).
She hates Terminators and has been terminating them for 28 years to avenge her son John's death in 1997. She is battle-hardened, athletic. cynical fighting machine. When she puts on her sunglasses, She becomes a human terminator.

Sarah distrusts Grace at first as he believes she is a machine, though over the arc of the movie, she realises that although she prevented the Judgement Day holocaust and the evolution of the Artificial Intelligence force Skynet, this was 'replaced' in 2042 by another AI force - Legion. Grace had never heard of John Connor nor Skynet and her realisation that Dani, not John, was the head of the "new" Resistance which meant Sarah had to protect Dani like she had done previously for her son. As such he learned to trust Grace and worked together to protect Dani.

Answer: He was the terminator that killed John Connor.

Sarah: "When this is all over, I am going to kill you."
Carl: "I understand."

Sarah's ability to sniff out terminators has a simplistic explanation. She receives text messages from an unknown source stating the coordinates of the location of the terminator. Grace is able to find the coordinates of the origin of the texts by manipulating Sarah's phone. The coordinates match the coordinates tattooed on her right flank. They assume this is a safe place to hide from the terminator until they can work out how to eliminate him completely.

When they arrive at Carl's Drapery, Sarah is horrified to discover Carl is the terminator that killed her son John. She shoots him three times but of course bullets do not harm him. After killing John, Carl had no further purpose, he had no way to get back to Skynet so had no choice but to integrate himself into human society. He agrees to help protect Dani and terminate the Rev-9.

Answer: Carl's contact with humans, allowed Carl to 'grow' the equivalent of a human conscience.

Carl (talking about his drapery business), "There's just more to it than picking the right color. It's the texture, the weight of the material. One wrong choice, it can destroy the look of the entire room. There was this one customer that came to me, he wanted solid colored drapes in a little girl's room. I said 'DON'T DO IT.' - You need butterflies, polka dots, balloons".

Carl at six foot two and over 250 pounds describing the finer detail of the drapery business is one of the funniest parts of the movie. He adopted a family and seems to be leading a normal human life. His compassion for his adopted son gives him some idea of what Sarah must feel like to lose her son. He demonstrates remorse by adding "For John" on the end of his anonymous texts to Sarah (though the texts are encrypted so she cannot trace him). Perhaps the most noticeable way his acceptance into a human lifestyle is how he pats his dog which is pleased to be in his company. In previous movies, dogs hated terminators and would bark incessantly in their presence.

Dani was the first of the three girls to trust Carl. She consoles him when he tells his family to leave for their own safety. Carl knows he is unlikely to return if he protects Dani, (and Sarah and Grace by association) from the single-minded mission of the Rev-9.

Answer: Electromagnetic pulse

Dani: "How do we stop this?" (the Rev-9)
Sarah Connor: "It will take all of us. We choose our weapons, and we take it down".

Because of his liquid metal body, conventional weapons are useless on the Rev-9 but the group agrees an electromagnetic pulse weapon which causes voltage and current surges, would "fry the neural net" of the Rev-9. Both Sarah and Carl know a military base that have these weapons but they are interrupted by the Rev-9 who has tracked them down and they need to escape by air. In the melee, the EMPs are damaged and will no longer terminate the terminator.

Answer: Dani and Sarah

Dani: "I'm done running. I'm going to stand and fight!"

The final scene shows how far the characters have come over the course of the time since they met:
Grace perhaps changes the least. She is forever grateful for what Dani did for her as her commanding officer in the future she will do anything for Dani in the present. She is mortally wounded and tells Dani to use her internal power source to kill off the Rev-9 endoskeleton knowing full well that its removal will kill her.

Dani perhaps has the biggest change. In the course of two days she goes from having a normal life to demonstrating effective leadership skills and courage. She does this in two ways: she is the one who decides how the killbox is to be set up including using herself as bait to attract the Rev-9. She also knows she will kill Grace to whom she has become very close, if she does remove the power source. She does it anyway and it is Dani who stabs and kills the Rev-9's endoskeleton.
Carl had attained a peaceful life and had assimilated himself into a human community. He knows he won't be coming back to his family and he feels his life purpose is to protect Dani and put her life before his own. And that is exactly what he does. He is strong enough to push the Rev-9's liquid metal component into a turbine, permanently destroying it, then he holds down the Rev-9 endoskeleton while Dani strikes with the power source. Carl, as
he's holding the Rev-9 is also mortally wounded by the power source but lives long enough to mouth "For John" at Sarah.

Sarah changes the most. She is a hate driven human 'terminator' at the start of the movie fueled by the grief of the loss of her son. When she learned that Dani was being protected not because she was capable of bearing children but she was the future resistance leader, she embraced the protection of Dani as if she were her daughter. Dani gives Sarah her humanity back. She worked well with Grace and in the end had a grudging respect for Carl.
In the closing scenes we see, in the present, Sarah and Dani watching Grace who has a child playing with her family and Sarah advising Dani maternally to be prepared for the future.

Answer: Carl says "I'll be back".

There are so many Easter eggs in this movie it is hard to keep up.

The saddest line in the movie is Carl telling his family, "I won't be back". This was Sarah Connor's movie - she got to say the line that has become a "Terminator" classic, early in the movie. The line Carl says shows he has (human) insight about what is about to happen to him, perhaps out of guilt for killing John, perhaps out of fear for going up against a technologically superior terminator. At that moment, the audience has forgiven Carl for his deed, even if Sarah has not (yet).

When Dani and her brother's Dad comes to the factory, looking for them, if you have not seen the previous movies you take this on face value but as a nod to the first two movies, a terminator can imitate other people (but this means the original person is dead). In this scene Dani's Dad is a disguised Rev-9.

Karl loses an arm in the final battle as do the other T-800s in the first two movies.

When the Rev-9 falls out of the sky onto a man's shed, the man is in the garden enjoying a barbecue. The song playing on the radio is "Guitars, Cadillacs" by Dwight Yoakam. This is the same song that was playing in "T2" when the nude T-800 demanded clothes from bikers in a bar. That bar was actually the Galleria in Sherman Oaks which is where Dwight Yoakham played regularly before his career took off.

There are biblical references as well: The new AI force is called Legion. whose name is a reference to Mark 5:9 in which Jesus meets a man possessed by demons. Jesus asks him his name. The man replies, "My name is Legion, for we are many."

Legion's biblical references include the names of its terminator models, the Rev-7s that attack Grace's troop, and Gabriel Luna's Rev-9. These models are a reference to the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, This book predicts the Apocalypse. The opening verse of Revelation 9 - "I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the Earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss" predicts the falling to present-day earth by the Rev-9 from 2042 AD.

When the trio of girl arrive at Carl's place, his van displays the phone number as 512-1984. The number is also a reference to the date that Kyle Reese is sent back to protect Sarah to in "The Terminator": May 12th, 1984. The start of the number, the area code, 888, in addition to being a toll-free number, is also the number of one of the Terminator models featured in The "Sarah Connor Chronicles". In the US if you dial 888-512-1984 you'll get to hear a special message from Carl.