John Connor: the Leader the Machines Fear

John Connor is the reason every Terminator gets sent back. In most of the films he's the future leader of the human resistance, and the machines would rather change history than face him. The odd thing is how little of that future we see: he's mostly a rumour, then a teenager, then a man waiting for his destiny. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

The man behind the first film#

John doesn't appear in The Terminator. He's a name that Reese speaks with something like devotion. He has organised the survivors, broken the camps and destroyed Skynet's defence grid. He also knew exactly what he was doing when he gave Reese a photograph of Sarah and sent him back, since that trip is how he comes to exist. (The Terminator)

Terminator 2#

The film's great surprise is what the saviour of humanity actually looks like: a ten-year-old with a talent for hacking cash machines, fostered after his mother's arrest and convinced she's mad. When the T-800 appears and obeys his orders, he uses it to break her out, and spends the film teaching it that you can't just kill people. It's the most human relationship in the series, and the ending, where he loses it, is the one that makes people cry. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

The later Johns#

Terminator 3 has him as a drifter who's afraid of a war he was told had been cancelled. By the end he's in a bunker taking the first radio calls of the resistance. Salvation shows him in 2018, not yet the leader everyone expects. (Terminator Salvation)

Genisys goes the other way. In that film Skynet infects him and turns him into a machine, and the man who saved humanity becomes its enemy. (Terminator Genisys)

Dark Fate ends his story at the start. In 1998 a T-800 catches up with him on a beach in Guatemala, and everything after that happens because he's gone. For the full run of timelines, see the guide. (Terminator: Dark Fate)