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The T-1000 is a fictional android assassin featured as the main antagonist in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The T-1000 is portrayed primarily by Robert Patrick; however, being a shape-shifter, the T-1000 is played by other actors in some scenes of the film. In Terminator 2, the T-1000 is presented as a technological leap over the "800 Series" Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger); Schwarzenegger's character explains how the T-1000 is a more advanced terminator, composed entirely of a mimetic metal alloy, rendering it capable of rapid shapeshifting, near-perfect mimicry and rapid recovery from damage. Furthermore, it can use its ability to quickly liquify and assume forms in innovative and surprising ways, including fitting through narrow openings, morphing its human arms into solid metal tools or bladed weapons, walking through prison bars, and flattening itself on the ground to hide or ambush targets.

Description

In the Terminator 2 story, the T-1000's major innovation is its "mimetic poly-alloy" construction—an intelligent liquid metal. This gives the T-1000 the ability to change its appearance and emulate virtually anything. It is capable of perfectly copying the shape, color, and texture of anything that it touches that is of similar size or volume. The only restriction is that it cannot form "complex machines", such as "guns and explosives" because they "have chemicals, moving parts." The only weapons it can form are "solid metal shapes," such as "knives and stabbing weapons". It must acquire any vehicles or other weapons it needs.

When physically damaged, the T-1000 is capable of reforming itself in seconds, closing up bullet holes and reattaching limbs; when the Connors and T-800 are escaping the mental hospital, it is shot at close range in the face by the T-800's Winchester Model 1901 10ga lever-action shotgun, which blows its head almost completely in two, yet the "wound" closes up in seconds. The police uniform it is "wearing" also repairs itself when it heals, indicating the T-1000 is actually generating the appearance of clothing, as opposed to actually wearing it. While pursuing the protagonists, the T-1000 is frozen with liquid nitrogen until it becomes brittle and shatters. However, when the pieces melt, it is able to reconstitute itself. At this point in the theatrical cut of the film, the T-1000 has suffered no apparent damage at all, leaving the protagonists wondering if anything will destroy it. In the Special Edition, the freezing and subsequent shattering causes the T-1000 to glitch repeatedly, melding with any metal it touches, such as the catwalks and hand rails, enabling John Connor to see through its ruse when it impersonates his mother.

Though the T-1000 is a formidable killer, it often attempts to accomplish its goals by deception instead of brute force. For example, in Terminator 2, it disguises itself as a police officer to gain trust, access information, and provide a benign appearance. It also imitates family members of its human target to gain that person's confidence.

The T-1000 and T-1001 possess a vastly greater repertoire of emotional expression and interpersonal skills than the earlier models and are able to flawlessly pass as regular humans whenever necessary. They are also more deliberately devious in their behavior and exhibit a well-developed sense of irony, sardonic humor and wanton cruelty. These traits are indicative of a greater sense of self-awareness within these artificial beings which makes them not only more human-like but simply more human than their predecessors, albeit in decidedly diabolical ways.

Examples of the T-1000's emotional expression include the following; it looks shocked when its arm breaks off due to being frozen with liquid nitrogen, wags its finger in a "tsk-tsk" gesture at Sarah after she fails to destroy it in the steel mill, exhibits a shocked expression after being significantly disrupted by a grenade, spares a brief moment of bemusement after seeing a clothing store mannequin that resembles its liquid metal form, and shows genuine agony when it is freezing and when it is dropped into the molten steel.

Film

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the T-1000 is sent by Skynet to go back in time to the year 1994 and kill John Connor (Edward Furlong), future leader of the Human Resistance against the machines. The T-1000 ambushes a police officer on arrival and takes on his identity, tracking down John Connor through the police cruiser's on-board computer and eventually confronting him in a shopping mall, where it meets a T-800 Model 101 like the one from the first Terminator film. As in the first film, two men appear from the future, but in a plot twist, both are Terminators. Patrick's Terminator has been sent to kill John Connor, while Schwarzenegger's - the type from the initial film of the franchise - has been sent to protect him.

The T-1000 confronts the protagonists at the psychiatric institution where Sarah Connor is being held, demonstrating impressive abilities, such as flattening itself into a thin 'carpet' of metal or oozing through prison-style bars while maintaining the shape of a walking man. It then predicts that the Connors will try to prevent Skynet from being invented, and confronts them at Cyberdyne Systems Corporation headquarters. It hijacks a helicopter and gives chase. While flying, it sprouts two more hands, two to fly the helicopter and two to reload and fire the submachine gun. The chase ends when it crashes a liquid nitrogen truck into a steel mill.

When it exits the truck, the T-1000 is frozen solid by liquid nitrogen. The T-800 shatters the T-1000 with a gunshot, but it reforms itself due to high temperatures of spilled molten steel. After a short hunt, it tracks down John, who is confronted by two seemingly identical versions of his mother – one of which is the T-1000 in disguise. Finally, The T-800 fires a grenade at the T-1000, causing enough damage to disrupt it significantly. Although it attempts to reform itself, it stumbles and falls backwards into a vat of molten steel, and the T-1000, unable to stand the high temperature of the steel corrupting its alloy and design, screams before finally being dissolved away into the molten steel.

McG, the director of Terminator Salvation, said that the T-1000 will be reintroduced in the fifth film: "I like the idea and the perspective for the next picture that you meet Robert Patrick the way he looks today, and he's a scientist that's working on, you know, improving cell replication so we can stay healthier and we can cure diabetes and do all these things that sound like good ideas, and to once again live as idealized expressions as ourselves. He also said the origin story they had in mind for the T-1000 would satirize the world's "obsession" with youth and aging.

Television

An advancement of the T-1000, a "T-1001", is introduced in the 2008 television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (though sometimes misidentified as a T-1000 by reviewers)), masquerading as Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson), the co-founder and current CEO of ZeiraCorp. "Weaver" often has mixed results when socially interacting both with subordinates at ZeiraCorp and Weaver's daughter Savannah (portrayed by Mackenzie Smith), but was written with an improved ability to adapt to and sustain itself in changing situations more adeptly than prior Terminators.

The T-1001's mission remains unclear throughout the television series, but diverts from the single-minded attempts to assassinate the Connors, as seen in the prior films. As the head of ZeiraCorp, the T-1001 diverts that company's resources into developing an artificial intelligence sufficient to combat SkyNet's development. Towards this end, Weaver recruits FBI Special Agent James Ellison to find and capture a Terminator in order to reverse engineer it using a variety of deceptions; until the end of the series, Ellison is never aware of Weaver's true nature. Ellison delivers a T-888 Terminator's body to Weaver after it was critically damaged by Connor's Terminator bodyguard. The 1001 advocates learning more about the 'robots' ironically in order to prevent Judgment Day. With Ellison's initial mission complete, it assigns him to act as tutor/mentor to the now incapacitated (and rebooted) T-888, nicknamed "John Henry".

John Henry quickly identifies Weaver as a machine, albeit different from itself, but obeys Weaver's instruction not to share that information with anyone, assuring him that everything done at ZeiraCorp is for John Henry's benefit. At one point, Weaver reveals a clue to the nature of its mission when it tells Ellison that Savannah's future safety is dependent upon John Henry, but that the reverse is not the case. This appears to be in contradiction to assumption that Weaver was coordinating the efforts to develop SkyNet to eradicate humanity.

In the series, the true nature of the T-1001's entire mission is never revealed, and much of what Weaver does in furtherance of it seems contradictory. In one of the episodes that shifts between the present day and post-Judgment Day, it is learned that leader of the resistance, John Connor, asked a liquid metal Terminator to join him, and the Terminator refused. In the second season (and series) finale, by way of introduction, the T-1001 ask the same of Connor (and his bodyguard Cameron, who was privy to the aforementioned events in the future) through Ellison, sent as intermediary.

Also in the season/series finale, Ellison, Sarah Connor and John Connor all discover Weaver's true nature when it uses its Terminator abilities to form a shield to protect them from a flying Skynet drone which crash-dives into the ZeiraCorp building. When Sarah Connor discovers that ZeiraCorp possesses Andy Goode's Turk, she assumes that Weaver is constructing Skynet but Weaver corrects her by stating that it is "building something to fight it." Upon entering the basement, the four discover that John Henry has transported himself to the future with Cameron's chip, leaving Cameron's empty body. When Ellison and Sarah Connor decline to jump forward in time with Weaver and John Connor, Weaver instructs Ellison to pick up Savannah from school.

Weaver then transports itself and John Connor to a post-Judgment Day future in which John Connor is not known to the human resistance. Though Connor and the T-1001 arrived naked, the T-1001 forms "clothing" a moment later. After briefly talking to John, the Terminator slips away when the human resistance come across John.

Comics

In the Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Nuclear Twilight comic published by Malibu Comics in 1996, an injured Tech-Com soldier named "Griff" is abducted by a troop of T-800 Terminators and brought back to Skynet. He is drugged and, while in a delirious state (believing he has died and gone to Heaven), questioned by Skynet about Tech-Com's acquisition of a T-800 unit. After he has supplied all the information he is aware of, two T-1000 Terminators enter the room, both assuming his appearance before killing him. One of these T-1000 units is then sent to infiltrate the human resistance, the other sent through time to kill John Connor as outlined in the Terminator 2 movie. In the simultaneously published Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Cybernetic Dawn, set just after the film, a female T-1000 and two T-800s come to the present to make sure the creation of Skynet happens as planned.

Creation

Teaser trailers for Terminator 2 deliberately withheld the notion that the T-1000 character was the villain. A tagline for the film was "This time there are two. Terminator 2."

Director James Cameron had originally chosen rock musician Billy Idol to play the T-1000 and had drawn storyboards to resemble him, but a serious automobile accident prevented Idol from accepting the role. On the Terminator 2 DVD, writer/director James Cameron describes his casting of Robert Patrick as a deliberate contrast to the original Terminator character portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger: "I wanted to find someone who would be a good contrast to Arnold. If the 800 series is a kind of human Panzer tank, then the 1000 series had to be a Porsche." Originally, he thought of casting actor Michael Biehn, who played Kyle Reese in The Terminator, in the role with the explanation that Skynet managed to clone Reese's body and use it for a new Terminator. Cameron ultimately dropped this idea after deciding the audience would find it too confusing.

The visual effects used in Terminator 2 to create the T-1000 won the Academy Award for Visual Effects. The development of computer-generated imagery (CGI) by Industrial Light & Magic to manipulate, re-create, and "morph" the image of an actor was used in the creation of the T-1000 character in the film. According to the book The Winston Effect: The Art & History of Stan Winston Studio, however, of the 15 minutes that the T-1000 displays its morphing and healing abilities, only 6 of those minutes were accomplished with pure computer graphics. The other 9 were achieved in camera with the use of advanced puppets and prosthetic effects created by the Stan Winston studio, who were also responsible for the metal skeleton effects of the T-800.

Entity FX, Inc. is responsible of the visual effects of the T-1001 on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, along with the digital animation of endoskeletons, Hunter-Killers, and the future war sequences on the second season of the show. The company also contributed the digital imagery of feature films James Cameron's True Lies and Titanic.

Pop culture references

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• Robert Patrick has cameos in several films as the T-1000 in police disguise, including Last Action Hero, also a Schwarzenegger film, and Wayne's World, where he pulls Wayne over and asks, "Have you seen this boy?". Patrick also reprises his role in Universal Studios's theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time.
• T-1000 was spoofed in movies like Hot Shots! Part Deux (Saddam Hussein freezes, melts, and rebuilds himself, but winds up fused with his similarly-shattered Yorkshire terrier).
• In an episode of Celebrity Deathmatch a match pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone against each other, Arnold fires a RPG at Stallone and blows him to pieces, but he reforms himself in the style of the T-1000.
• In Stargate SG-1, the villainous human-form Replicator known as RepliCarter kills its foes in a similar manner to the T-1000 by stabbing them with a large blade formed from its own body; the producers have stated that this was intended as an homage to the T-1000.
• An episode of Smallville from its fourth season "Gone", introduces Lionel Luthor's assassin, Trent McGowen, who has kryptonite-enhanced abilities that are identical to the T-1000. Trent's powers included morphing into liquid metal and forming objects like blades and compactors from his hands. Even the episode's climax with its protagonists Clark Kent and Lois Lane is somewhat mirroring T2, specifically the final battle between the T-1000, (Terminator) T-101, and Sarah Connor. Entity FX, Inc., which is responsible for the visual effects on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is also responsible for the digital effects on Smallville.
• In the movie, Hot Fuzz, Simon Pegg mimicks the T-1000's arm movements when running. On the commentary track, he describes it as "The T-1000 run".
• In the zombie horror series Dead Set, Davina McCall claimed she based her zombie-running style on the T-1000.
• In a DirecTV commercial, a clip from Terminator 2 with the T-1000 is shown with him talking about how he did not want to kill John Connor. He just wanted to check out his DirecTV.
• In the Simpsons episode Homer Loves Flanders, the scene where Homer chases Flanders's car is a parallel of the sequence in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which Robert Patrick's character T-1000 chases the heroes in the police car after escaping from the hospital.

See also

• Nanomorph

References

1. Trailer of Terminator 2 has the Schwarzenegger character identified as 800 Series Model 101"
2. Jake Rico (2009-01-12). "Terminator Salvation - First Review". ShowBizCafe.com. Retrieved 2009-01-13.
3. Randy Jennings (2009-02-28). "Wonder Con T4 Exclusive: CG Arnold Approved! McG Shares Big Exclusives with TheArnoldFans!". TheArnoldFans.com. Retrieved 2009-03-01.
4. Jonathan Dean (June 2009). "Beyond Salvation". Total Film. p. 65.
5. Jami Philbrick (2009-04-21). "McG talks Terminator Salvation". Comic Book Resources. Retrieved 2009-04-25.
6. "feedback". Fox.com official blog. 2008-09-09. Retrieved 2008-09-10.
7. Jennifer Vineyard (2008-09-15). "How Billy Idol And Lance Henriksen Were Nearly James Cameron's Terminators". MTV Movies Blog. Retrieved 2008-09-15.
8. "Academy Awards Database". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 2007-07-14.
9. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles End Credits

External links

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v t e Terminator
Films	The Terminator Terminator 2: Judgment Day Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Terminator Salvation Terminator Genisys Terminator: Dark Fate
Television series	Live-action The Sarah Connor Chronicles characters episodes "Pilot" "Heavy Metal" "Self Made Man" "Born to Run" Animated Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series Terminator Zero
Characters	Sarah Connor John Connor Miles Dyson Kyle Reese Skynet Terminators Terminator/Model 101/T-800 T-1000 T-X Cameron Catherine Weaver T-3000 Rev-9
Music	The Terminator Terminator 2: Judgment Day "You Could Be Mine" "The Current" The Sarah Connor Chronicles Terminator Genisys Terminator: Dark Fate
Video games	Film-based The Terminator DOS Sega Sega CD Terminator 2 arcade computer 8-bit 16-bit Game Boy Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines War of the Machines The Redemption Salvation Genisys: Future War Non-film based The Terminator 2029 RoboCop Versus The Terminator Rampage Future Shock Skynet Dawn of Fate Resistance Survivors
Print	Comics Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator RoboCop Versus The Terminator Superman vs. The Terminator: Death to the Future The Burning Earth Infinity Transformers vs. The Terminator T2 novels
Attractions	T2-3D: Battle Across Time X: A Laser Battle for Salvation Terminator Salvation: The Ride
Quotes	"I'll be back" "Hasta la vista, baby"
Related	"Soldier" (The Outer Limits) Lady Terminator Shocking Dark Rottweiler The Terminators Light & Magic Special effects of Terminator 2: Judgment Day
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