Sarah Connor: From Waitress to Soldier

Sarah Connor begins as the last person you'd expect to matter. In 1984 she's a young waitress in Los Angeles having a bad week. By 1991 she's one of the most formidable characters in action cinema. Linda Hamilton plays both, and that change is the real story of the first two films. (The Terminator)

1984#

Sarah has no idea what she's supposed to be. She finds out when women with her name start dying and a man in a nightclub saves her from a machine. Kyle Reese tells her that her unborn son will lead the resistance against Skynet. She doesn't believe it, and then she has no choice. (The Terminator)

The ending is important. Reese is dead, and she's the one who lures the machine into the press and crushes it. In the last scene she's pregnant, recording tapes for her son and driving into the desert with a storm coming. (The Terminator)

Terminator 2#

The second film takes the idea seriously and asks what that knowledge would do to someone. Sarah has spent years learning weapons and survival. She's raised John among mercenaries and guerrillas, and she's been arrested for trying to blow up a computer factory. Her doctors think she's delusional. She's muscular, angry, sleepless and right. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

She breaks out of Pescadero, and when she learns the name of the man who'll build Skynet she goes to kill him. She nearly does it in front of his family and can't finish. That's the moment she stops being the hunter the machines made her into, and it's also the source of the film's message that the future isn't set: no fate but what we make. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

After Terminator 2#

Terminator 3 says she died of leukaemia, years before the bombs fell, having never stopped preparing. In Genisys her life is rewritten: she's raised by a T-800 from childhood. (Terminator Genisys)

Dark Fate is the version most fans care about, since it's Hamilton's return. John was killed in front of her in 1998, and she's lived since then by hunting the Terminators she gets tip-offs about. It's a bleak way to pay off a character who spent her life protecting one boy. (Terminator: Dark Fate)