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In Terminator Genisys, Kyle Reese goes back in time and we find out that Kyle is Sarah Connor's "mate" and John Connor's father even though Kyle was born 30 or 40 years after Sarah Connor.

A similar trip by Kyle to the past caused the birth of John Connor in an earlier movie. So there is a paradox. Kyle Reese goes back in time to protect the mother of John Connor but in that very same act Kyle himself becomes the father of John Connor. So that John Connor would not even exist in the first place if this recursive loop in time were not repeating.

So how did this loop begin?

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We could speculate on the existence of a bootstrap timeline in which Sarah is never pursued by the Terminator, never visited by Kyle Reese, but has a casual hookup with someone else - perhaps met in the same bar in which the Terminator first draws a bead on her. The anonymous hookup results in impregnation and the birth of a son she names John Connor. The timelines converge with John's maturity into the resistance leader targeted by Skynet for erasure from history. And as we all know, the attempt fails; John gets a different father (Kyle Reese), but otherwise fulfills the same destiny.

The interesting part of all this is:

Information about Skynet is fed back to the past in a way that could potentially have averted Skynet's very existence, eliminating the Terminator/Kyle Reese time loop altogether. Of course, its creation can't be prevented...

  • No Skynet => no Terminator to go back in time;
  • No time travelling Terminator, no pursuit by Kyle Reese;
  • No Kyle Reese in the "past" => no foreknowledge of Skynet, so the creation of Skynet is inevitable.

Arguably, a stable time loop once bootstrapped.

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