T-3000

T-3000
Known Aliases:	John Connor
Gender:	Male
Portrayed By:	Jason Clarke
First Appearance:	Terminator Genisys

The T-3000 is a fictional cyborg assassin, serving as the primary antagonist in Terminator Genisys, the fifth installment in the Terminator series, portrayed by Jason Clarke. T-3000 also serves as a foil personality to "Guardian" (a reprogrammed T-800 portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger), a protagonist who is somewhat similar to T-3000 but also opposite in many ways.

The T-3000's sole mission is to protect and ensure the ultimate survival of Skynet, which seeks to eliminate the human race with its global machine network. The T-3000 describes itself as neither machine nor human; rather, it is a hybrid nanotechnological cyborg. Producer David Ellison explains that the title Terminator Genisys "it’s in reference to genesis, which is in reference to the singularity and the man-machine hybrid that John Connor ends up being."

Background

• • See also: John Connor

In a desperate effort to ensure its survival, the rogue artificial intelligence Skynet creates an avatar for itself in the form of a T-5000 (Matt Smith). This Terminator travels through many timelines searching for a way to defeat the Human Resistance and ultimately infiltrates it under the guise of a fighter named Alex. "Alex" is present as a soldier when John Connor and Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) discover Skynet's time machine at the end of the war with the machines. As Kyle is being sent back in time to protect John's mother Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from the T-800 Terminator sent to kill her in 1984, "Alex" carries out his attack. He kills all of the other soldiers and infects John Connor with nanomachines, transforming him into a new hybrid Terminator designated as the T-3000. John Connor's conversion into a Terminator as Kyle travels back in time turns out to be such a major event that it leads to a fracturing timeline, completely rewriting the past and the future.

The T-3000 is sent back in time to 2014 and given the mission to assist Cyberdyne Systems in developing a new operating system named Genisys, which is in reality Skynet. When Sarah and Kyle arrive in 2017, he meets them at a hospital and convinces them that he really is John Connor, but his disguise is exposed by the Guardian (a reprogrammed T-800 portrayed by Schwarzenegger). The T-3000 engages the trio in multiple destructive battles before finally being destroyed by the Guardian by having his body disintegrated by a prototype time machine's magnetic field. Before his demise, the T-3000 furiously throws what remained of the Guardian's endoskeleton into a vat of mimetic polyalloy, inadvertently converting the Guardian into a nano-android with abilities similar to those of the T-1000, and saving the Guardian's life.

The Guardian explains during the film that before the final battle between Skynet and the Resistance, the former attempted to create a number of T-3000s, but the human subjects went mad and died; John Connor was the only known subject to survive the infection reasonably mentally intact, albeit now loyal to Skynet as opposed to his previous loyalty to humanity.