The T-800: the Terminator Everyone Thinks Of

When people say Terminator, this is what they mean. The T-800 is Skynet's infiltration unit: a combat machine built to look like a large, quiet man. Played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's the villain of the first film and, in the same performance, the hero of the second. (The Terminator)

What it is#

Kyle Reese's explanation in the first film is still the best one. Older machines were easy to spot, and this one isn't. It has real skin, hair and breath over a metal endoskeleton, and it can't be reasoned with or stopped. Its living covering is also what lets it use Skynet's time machine, since only living tissue will pass through. (The Terminator)

Terminator 2 adds that the machine has a neural net processor, a learning computer. With the right setting it can learn from the people around it, which is how John Connor teaches it to stop killing and to talk like a teenager. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

The hunter of 1984#

The first T-800 works through the phone book, killing every Sarah Connor in Los Angeles. It's slow and methodical, with very few lines. Fire strips away its skin, an explosion cuts it in half, and it keeps crawling after Sarah until she crushes it in a hydraulic press. What's left of it starts the cycle that leads to Skynet. (The Terminator)

The protector of Terminator 2#

The twist of the second film depends on audiences expecting the same machine to be the threat. It's been captured and reprogrammed by the future John and sent back to protect his younger self. It obeys him, promises not to kill anybody, and defends him against the T-1000, a more advanced machine of liquid metal. At the end it asks Sarah to lower it into the steel, because its chip must not survive. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

The later machines#

The face keeps returning. In Terminator 3 a T-850 protects John and Kate Brewster, and reveals that in its own future it killed John. In Genisys a T-800 called Pops raises Sarah from childhood. In Dark Fate, the T-800 that killed John in 1998 has spent the years since living as Carl, with a family of his own and something like a conscience. (Terminator: Dark Fate)