T-800

In 1984, a naked T-800 arrives in Los Angeles, sent by Skynet from 2029 to kill Sarah Connor before she has her son, John. Kyle Reese calls it a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101: living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, a machine that feels no pity or fear and absolutely won't stop.

The Terminator steals clothes, buys guns and kills every Sarah Connor in the phone book, one by one. It repairs its own eye in a motel bathroom. At the police station it says “I'll be back” and returns by driving a car through the front door, killing dozens of officers. To find Sarah, it mimics her mother's voice on the phone. After a tanker truck explodes, only the metal skeleton is left, and it keeps hunting through a factory until it's crushed in a hydraulic press.

In 1995, another T-800 arrives in Los Angeles. This one was reprogrammed and sent back by future John Connor to protect his 10-year-old self from the T-1000. It saves John at the mall and starts following the boy's orders, including a ban on killing. From then on, the cyborg shoots people in the legs.

John teaches the machine slang, including “hasta la vista, baby,” and the T-800 slowly learns how to deal with people. It helps break Sarah out of Pescadero and destroy Cyberdyne with Miles Dyson. At the steel mill it gets impaled on an iron bar, reboots and hits the T-1000 with a grenade launcher, knocking it into the molten steel. Since its own chip could also give rise to Skynet, it asks to be destroyed. It sinks into the steel giving a thumbs-up.

In the Terminator: Dark Fate timeline, one of the T-800s Skynet sent before it was erased completes its mission in 1998: it kills John Connor on a beach in Guatemala. After that, Skynet no longer exists and the machine is left without orders.

Over the years it develops a conscience. It takes the name Carl, builds a family in Laredo, Texas, with Alicia and her son Mateo, and runs a drapery business. It understands what it took from Sarah and decides to give her a purpose: it sends her messages with the time and place of each Terminator's arrival, signed “For John.” In 2020 it helps Sarah, Grace and Dani against the Rev-9. At the dam, together with Grace, it drags the Rev-9 into a turbine and dies in the blast.

In the Terminator 3 timeline, a T-850, a newer version of the same Model 101, arrives in 2004 to protect John Connor and Kate Brewster from the T-X. It reveals that in the future it killed John. Kate captured it, reprogrammed it and sent it back.

The T-850 takes on the T-X in a crane chase and at Sarah's mausoleum. The T-X infects it and turns it against John, but the cyborg fights its own programming and shuts itself down. At Crystal Peak, it jams its last hydrogen power cell into the T-X's mouth and blows up with it, buying John and Kate time to reach the shelter.

In 2018, in the Terminator Salvation timeline, Skynet has just started producing the T-800. At its San Francisco base, John Connor runs into the new model, wearing Arnold Schwarzenegger's face.

The T-800 nearly kills John in a fight through the factory. Marcus Wright joins in, and together they destroy the machine, but John comes out of it with a wound to the heart.

In Terminator Genisys, someone unknown sends a T-800 to 1973 to protect 9-year-old Sarah Connor after a T-1000 kills her parents. It raises and trains the girl, who calls it Pops. Because its living tissue ages, Pops has gray hair. “Old, not obsolete,” he says.

In 1984, Pops destroys the T-800 Skynet sent and, with Sarah, takes out the T-1000. He helps build a time machine and jumps with Sarah and Kyle to 2017. There he shoots John Connor, now a T-3000. At Cyberdyne's headquarters he traps John in the time machine's magnetic field and falls into a vat of liquid metal. He comes out upgraded, with parts like the T-1000's.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is in every film except Terminator Salvation, where his face was recreated in CGI over Roland Kickinger's body because Arnold was Governor of California. Before landing the villain, he was approached to play Kyle Reese.