The final moments of Terminator 2: Judgment Day are burned into the brains of fans, but the movie’s novelization alters the T-800’s goodbye. One very cool, interesting feat a good movie can accomplish is to make the viewer feel genuine empathy and sympathy for the plight of a non-human creature. After the carnage the same model wrought in The Terminator, one might imagine it would be hard for viewers to root for Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s T-800 in Terminator 2, but instead, the machine becomes a tragic character.
The T-800 begins its reprogrammed life in 1995 by having to be taught by John Connor why it shouldn’t wantonly slaughter anyone who obstructs its mission. After all, it’s a Terminator, it was literally built to terminate life. Thanks to Sarah and John removing an inhibitor chip placed by Skynet in the T-800’s brain, the machine is then able to learn more about the human condition as it spends time with people. By the end of Terminator 2, the T-800 appears to have genuine affection for John and Sarah, or at least as close as a Terminator could feel to that emotion.
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The sad final scene of Terminator 2, in which the T-800 bids its comrades farewell and asks Sarah to lower him into the molten steel in order to prevent Judgment Day, is truly iconic. However, the official novelization of the sequel actually makes the scene even sadder, perhaps to an excessive extent.
How Terminator 2’s Novelization Changes The Iconic Ending
While the T-800 still has an emotional goodbye with John and Sarah at the end of the Terminator 2 novelization, written by Randall Frakes, the tone of the scene and its resolution is quite different. In the film, the T-800 tells Sarah it cannot self-terminate, and that she must lower it into the steel. In the book, the T-800 has no such restriction. It steps off the edge of the platform itself, landing in the steel below. Before its termination, though, the novel offers a fascinating insight into what the T-800 was thinking before its death.
In the Terminator 2 book, Sarah asks the T-800 if it’s afraid of dying. The T-800 replies in the affirmative, which notably runs contrary to a conversation it has about fear in the film. As the book puts it, the T-800 was afraid “Not because he was going to cease functioning as a terminator, but because he had sensed a vision beyond his programming of a cosmic order vast beyond Skynet’s comprehension. And it gave him a sense of his first feeling. Fear. Of where he was going next, if anywhere.” It doesn’t say that aloud though, only the “yes” part. It’s an interesting turn, as it begs the question of what exactly the T-800’s vision contained. Heaven? Hell? God? Something even more powerful? Sadly, it seems we’ll never know.
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