While the The Terminator timeline is a mess thanks to endless revisions, reboots, and outright retcons. Few blockbuster franchises have been rewritten as aggressively as James Cameron’s killer robot saga, with every Terminator project after the first two movies offering another different version of the franchise’s timeline.

No matter what order viewers watch the Terminator movies in, it can be hard to understand the fate of Resistance leader John Connor and his action heroine mother Sarah Connor. In 1984’s The Terminator, Sarah is an unassuming heroine who is saved from the titular android assassin so she can someday bring John into the world. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, she is a battle-hardened survivor doing everything she can to ensure that John survives until after the eponymous event so he can save the world. Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s ending is where things get confusing.

Sarah Connor Originally Died Of Leukemia At Some Point Between 1997 And 2003

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Originally Explained Sarah Connor’s Death

Terminator 2: Judgment Day ends with Sarah driving John Connor down the highway, unsure of her future fate. The T-1000 has been destroyed and John has survived, but this came at the cost of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s now-heroic T-800 sacrificing himself too. While a version of the Terminator series without John Connor is harder to imagine, 2003’s sequel Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines offered viewers the first installment in the series that dropped its original heroine, Sarah.

In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Nick Stahl’s older version of John Connor is the movie’s hero. In this timeline, John’s mother died of leukemia somewhere between 1997 and 2003, and he is alone in the world. Although he does pair up with Claire Danes’ Kate Brewster, John is unable to stop Skynet from taking over in this sequel’s bleak ending. After Skynet launches a nuclear attack that wipes out much of the human world, John begins the hard work of leading the Resistance from an underground bunker.

Sarah Connor Was Still Alive In 2027 In An Alternate Terminator 2 Timeline

Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s Ending Depicted An Older Sarah Connor

Shockingly, Sarah Connor survives well into the future in Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s alternative ending, with the director’s cut completely changing her canonical fate. While the later Terminator movies explained Schwarzenegger’s aging Terminator with an excuse about organic exteriors on T-800 models, Cameron needed to do the opposite to make the young Linda Hamilton look like a grandmother in the director's cut of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In the deleted ending of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Sarah is seen as an elderly woman watching her grandchild playing in the park.

When The Sarah Connor Chronicles jumped to 2007, Sarah’s death was postponed.

This ending takes place 30 years after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it completely rewrites the franchise’s broader canon. Here, Skynet never began its war on humanity, John became a Senator, and Sarah is living happily as a seemingly healthy grandmother. Sadly, none of the other spins of her canonical fate were so unambiguously positive, as evidenced by The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Sarah Had A Few More Years To Live During The Sarah Connor Chronicles

The Sarah Connor Chronicles Stuck To Sarah Connor’s Original Cause of Death

Although TV’s The Sarah Connor Chronicles did recast Sarah Connor, the show still stayed relatively close to the original story established in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. According to the version of events seen in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah had cancer and was going to die in 2005. The show’s story started in 1997, meaning this made sense for a while. However, when The Sarah Connor Chronicles jumped ahead to 2007, Sarah’s death was postponed. That said, her cancer was still there and her time was implied to still be limited.

Terminator: Dark Fate Rewrote Sarah Connor’s Story After Terminator 2

Terminator: Dark Fate Completely Changed Sarah Connor’s Fate

While Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and The Sarah Connor Chronicles still share a relatively cohesive timeline, Terminator: Dark Fate offered viewers the worst of both worlds. The reboot refused to recast Schwarzenegger’s original T-800, bringing him back for the umpteenth time, but brutally killed off John Connor and totally rewrote the story of the series as a result. Here, John was killed shortly after Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s ending, so Sarah kept fighting for revenge in this take on the timeline.

Sarah Connor doesn’t die of leukemia in Terminator: Dark Fate, but her young son is mercilessly gunned down in front of her in his early teens. Since he is both her only child and the last hope for humanity, it is hard to say which timeline Sarah herself would prefer to be in. Although ’s story offered yet another version of the franchise’s timeline that spun off in a new direction altogether, this anime’s plot mercifully didn’t involve Sarah. However, there are more versions of her storyline to recount within the canonical timelines.

Other Versions Of Sarah Connor In The Terminator Universe

Terminator 2’s Novelisation and Terminator Genisys Feature Completely Different Sarah Connors

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In the Terminator 2: Judgment Day novelization, Sarah dies during a car ambush when John is a young adult. Readers can assume that this event takes place around the time of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines or earlier, so although the mechanics of her demise are different, it is at least consistent with the rough timeline of both Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Terminator: Rise of the Machines align relatively well, while Terminator 2: Judgment Day's novelization slightly alters Sarah's death but keeps the same timeline.

In contrast, Terminator Genisys recast Sarah Connor and introduced an entirely new version of her story to justify this change. Here, a whole different version of the character played by Emilia Clarke has been protected by a T-800 since her childhood, and she ends up traveling through time with a similarly recast Kyle Reese and trying to stop a now-evil John Connor from helping Skynet take over the world. Terminator Genisys’ version of Sarah Connor doesn’t die, but her story radically reshapes the fate of John Connor.

Similarly, Terminator: Dark Fate’s surviving Sarah Connor effectively ends up taking over John’s role in stopping Skynet. In contrast, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Terminator: Rise of the Machines align relatively well in their versions of her sad fate, while Terminator 2: Judgment Day's novelization slightly alters her death but keeps the same timeline. Thus, it is only Terminator 2: Judgment Day's alternate ending offers a totally different, and uniquely upbeat, ending to the Terminator franchise heroine’s story.

Terminator 2

R

Action

Sci-Fi

Thriller

8.4/10

Release Date

July 3, 1991

Runtime

137 minutes

Director

James Cameron

Writers

James Cameron, William Wisher Jr.

Cast

• 
  Arnold Schwarzenegger
• 
  Linda Hamilton

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