Outside the Beltway

AG Monday

· Monday, February 16, 2026 · 1 comment

The Terminator was a surprise hit. We knew something good was coming with the sequel, but we had no idea what. T2 exceeded expectations, with sympathetic characters (including a friendly Terminator), a solid script, practically non-stop action, and breathtaking special effects. Yeah, we liked it then, and we still like it. What makes it a great movie, but not a perfect movie?

Come with us back to the premiere of T2, when everything was unexpected. Catch phrases! Scary Sarah! A nice guy who’s responsible for an apocalypse! Amazing (for the time) CGI! A closed time loop! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

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Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter and/or BlueSky.

Comments

  1. Kathy says:
    Monday, 16 February 2026 at 09:41

    IMO, the virtue of the second movie (spoiler alert for a 35 year old movie), is that it logically finishes the story, and fixes the time paradoxes. The Connors, and Arnie and Dyson, don’t so much change time as restore it.

    Really, there was no need for a third movie, and much less for all that followed (though I confess I liked the short lived Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series).

    There’s a narrative trope in Western literature, that foreknowledge of the future does not allow one to change or stop any of the terrible things that will happen*. Oedipus is the clearest example, but it shows up in others. It shows up, after being briefly erased, in the third terminator film and all subsequent ones.

    The latest (and one hopes last before the reboot) one, Dark Fate, takes it further: even if you can prevent the future, there will be another one jus as bad if not worse, and you’ll suffer personally besides.

    *the Back to the Future trilogy is an exception

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