John Connor

John hadn't been born yet in 1984: Kyle Reese, the soldier he himself sent back to protect Sarah, is his father. By 1995, 10-year-old John lives with foster parents, hacks ATMs with a laptop and thinks his mother, locked up at Pescadero, is crazy.

At a mall, the T-1000 tries to kill him and a T-800 saves him. John realizes the machine follows his orders. He tells it to break Sarah out and forbids it to kill. The T-1000 murders his foster parents, and John goes on the run with his mother and the T-800, teaching it slang and a bit of humanity. He convinces Miles Dyson to destroy his own research at Cyberdyne. At the steel mill, after the T-1000 is gone, he begs the T-800 to stay. The machine explains it has to be destroyed and says it now knows why people cry.

In the Terminator: Dark Fate timeline, the win over Cyberdyne doesn't last. In 1998, John and Sarah are living in Livingston, Guatemala. A T-800 sent by Skynet before it was erased walks into a beach bar and kills John, still a teenager, in front of his mother.

His death drives everything that follows: Sarah starts hunting Terminators, and the messages she gets are signed “For John.”

In the Terminator 3 timeline, Judgment Day didn't come in 1997 and Sarah died of leukemia. John, now played by Nick Stahl, has no home, no phone and no papers in his name. After a motorcycle crash, he breaks into a veterinary clinic for meds and runs into Kate Brewster, someone he knew as a kid.

The T-X arrives to kill them both, and a T-850 shows up to protect them. The machine reveals that in the future it killed John, and that Kate, who would become his wife, reprogrammed it and sent it back. John learns Judgment Day can't be stopped. With Kate, he races to Crystal Peak thinking he can shut Skynet down. All he finds is an old shelter. As the bombs fall, he answers the radio and takes command.

In 2018, in the Terminator Salvation timeline, John, played by Christian Bale, is a Resistance soldier, not its supreme commander. But he speaks to survivors over the radio and listens to the tapes his mother recorded. His wife, Kate, is pregnant.

John learns Skynet has a kill list and that the top name is teenage Kyle Reese, who has to survive to become his father. He distrusts Marcus Wright, a man who is part machine, but ends up taking his help. Against orders, he breaks into Skynet's San Francisco base. He frees Kyle and a girl named Star, fights a T-800 and is stabbed through the heart. Marcus gives up his own heart to save him.

In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which follows T2, John, played by Thomas Dekker, is a teenager on the run in 1999. Cameron, a reprogrammed Terminator who looks like a girl, saves him from the Terminator Cromartie, and a time jump takes John, Sarah and Cameron to 2007.

John tries to live like a high schooler while helping hunt Skynet. He learns Derek Reese is his uncle and grows more and more attached to Cameron. He dates Riley, a girl he later learns was sent from the future. At the end of season 2, he travels to the future with Catherine Weaver to go after Cameron's chip. There, Derek, Kyle and Allison have no idea who he is.

In 2029, in the Terminator Genisys timeline, John, played by Jason Clarke, leads the final assault on Skynet and sends Kyle Reese to 1984. At that same moment he's attacked by a soldier who is really the T-5000, Skynet's physical form. Nanomachines turn John into a T-3000.

Now serving Skynet, John goes back in time to help Cyberdyne build Genisys. In 2017 he appears to Sarah and Kyle as their savior son, until Pops shoots him. John tries to win his parents over to his side. At Cyberdyne's headquarters, Pops traps him in the time machine's magnetic field, and John is destroyed.

John Connor has been played by Edward Furlong, Nick Stahl, Thomas Dekker, Christian Bale and Jason Clarke. In the 1984 film he only exists in Kyle Reese's words and in the photo of Sarah that Kyle carries.