The Terminator Conundrum

I like to make it pretty clear how I feel about reboots(which is that I don't think much of them at all), but I don't like to let aesthetics ruin a movie for me. And I have a feeling Terminator Genisys is going to be its own new series, or at least that seems to be the idea. Like it or not, the dang movie happened and can't just unhappen so whatever they've done to the Terminator timeline is done. But it got me thinking.

Everyone knows The Terminator has always had impossible timeloop problems which I like to refer to as "The Terminator Conundrum". Namely, How can Kyle be John's dad if John sent him back in time, et cetera. You know what I'm talking about unless you haven't seen The Terminator in which case, what have you been doing with your life? Of course, the easy answer is "dude, it's a movie, don't think about it too hard" or if you prefer, Dr Who's "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" copout works here, too. But maybe there's a way it can make sense.

Alternate timelines always make things tricky, but the main thing we have to keep in mind is that we are dealing with a reality in which time travel exists, obviously. And if there's one thing I've learned about time travel from the movies, it's that it's just generally a BAD IDEA. Nothing good ever comes of it because once you start interfering with events which have already taken place, you change the way events unfold. Something that's always bothered me about that is if you change events, it seems you wouldn't know the difference because then things happen differently and that's where it gets weird. For example, in Back To The Future, why does Marty McFly's brother start to disappear from the photo? Or more importantly, why does he notice? You'd think he would just never remember having ever had a brother, right? Well, it's a good thing I'm talking about Terminator and not Back to the Future because that would probably be a lot more difficult to explain.

So let me break it down the best I can. When you send people back in time, you just proceed with business as usual, I guess. That includes the people who have gone back in time, except now their business happens at an earlier point in history but for them, it's still a straight line going forward. But when you change things, they happen differently but still follow the same course of time up to the point at which the time travelling happens. So new timelines must be created. The real good question is what happens to the original timeline and everyone in it? Maybe nothing. Does that mean there's an alternate universe that occupies the exact same space as the one we're in? Go ask Michio Kaku, that's a bit too sciency for my little brain to handle

There must have been an original timeline in which time travel didn't exist until the time of its invention and use. That means a lot of things could have happened differently but none of us would know the difference.

Big question: was Kyle Reese always John Conner's father?
So what if he wasn't? That just means that there was some other guy who had sex with Sarah Conner and they had John who grew up to be the leader of a resistance against the machines. Now the machines know thier number is up and the fleshy humans are going to win, so what better strategy than to invent a time machine to stop the human leader from being born?
So...

Timeline 1-
-Sarah meets John's dad and they have sex and perhaps live happily ever after. At least until the machines launch nukes at Russia and all that other stuff happens. Maybe he was never important enough for the machines to know who he was or care, or maybe he wasn't really in the picture much to begin with. Either way, he's not relevant as far as we know.
-Skynet does its Skynetting and the war against the machines happens. The machines realize they are losing to the human resistance because of some asshole named John Conner. Now, Skynet would have probably had access to a lot of public records and other useful information and may have been able to determine the exact date of John's conception(or at least pretty close). Since their plan was just to eradicate John Conner from existence, it probably makes sense to a machine to go to the very beginning of his life and just stop it from happening. Problem solved.
 [This means it's possible that Sarah might have conceved John that very night on which Terminator 1 takes place if the dang T800 hadn't showed up and cockblocked her. Or maybe the morning after, who knows?]
-John finds the time machine and figures out about the plot to send the Terminator back in time to kill Sarah. He presses redial and selects Kyle Reese to go save his mother for no particular reason but he happens to be standing there and also has a picture of John's mom for some reason(I'm sure porn was probably scarce at that point so that's a bit awkward).
[If I remember correctly, Kyle has the polaroid of Sarah with him in Genisys even though it was shown burning in Terminator 1. Alternate timelines, bro. But it may be a clue as to where and when in the time continuum Genisys takes place. Or maybe the director is just an idiot]
Then they all celebrate the victory over the machines and it doesn't really matter for them if the plot to kill Sarah Conner is successful or not because now we're in...

Timeline 2-
Terminator shows up and tries to kill Sarah which already changes events so that she might not have ever had John anyway since who wants to have a kid when killer robots are coming from the future to kill you? But they're machines, so they probably didn't think of that. So what happens instead is Kyle Reese fucks Sarah(ok fine, he makes love to her) then John happens and now he's Kyle Reese's son which may possibly be an upgrade. But more importantly, now Sarah knows how important it is that she has this baby because he will one day lead us against the machines. Plus now he's going to be prepared to fight the machines and lead the resistance. So it seems the machines just keep making their own enemy more difficult to kill. Nice going, machines.
-The same things happen. Skynet is built and launches missiles, et cetera, the humans fight and are winning the war again. Since they're machines, it stands to reason that they would come to the same conclusions and have the idea to build a time machine and send a Terminator back in time to eliminate their enemy. As previously mentioned, Skynet most likely has access to public records and other useful information. It's not unlikely that they could have deduced from police and news reports about the events of Terminator 1(also knowing they just invented time travel) that they had already tried this. Since there is still a John Conner and a human resistance, obviously the plan failed, so they change the details. They upgrade to the T1000 and send him instead. It's possible they even came up the idea for the T1000 because the resistance was more prepared and efficient at destroying their earlier models, given that John would have had foreknowledge of their existence and what it takes to destroy them. So making your enemy better goes both ways.
-John Conner knows a human is no match for a T1000, or maybe now he knows Kyle Reese is his dad and doesn't want to send him back in time to die. But then he wouldn't be born, right? But he was already born so it doesn't actually matter[Did she ever actually tell him about his dad?]. Instead, he finds a perfectly good T800 which is no longer under Skynet's control since Skynet has assumably been destroyed or deactivated. He programs the Terminator to go back and protect his younger self from the T1000, hits redial on the time machine, then pops the cork on the champagne to celebrate the victory all over again. Although for him, it's the first time this has happened.
[Conjecture: The T800 may have at one point been part of the plan until Skynet decided to upgrade to the T1000 and then set it aside. So it's not inconceivable that the Terminator in T2 is actually the exact same one from Terminator 1 but reprogrammed]
Timeline 3, starting from 1995-
-T1000 goes back to 1995 to kill John Conner. They may have chosen this particular date because they knew that Sarah was in the mental institution and therefore unable to protect John from Terminators. Then the Austrian model shows up and everything gets awesome.
-John, Sarah, and the T800 try to stop Miles Dyson from creating Skynet and destroy as much stuff as they can to prevent Judgement Day. Miles Dyson also dies, so we're meant to assume Skynet doesn't get created. But we are wrong.
Somebody else continues Dyson's work and creates Skynet, but it happens differently and probably later so the date of Judgement day is changed.
-The same events occur including the machines having the idea to invent a time machine and also figuring out that it isn't the first time that's happened. Maybe instead of sending the T1000, they create the TX and send it to the time just before Judgement Day to make sure John doesn't survive. I suppose after that, there wouldn't be much point in time travelling to kill John since they were already sending Terminators to kill him in their present.
[I kind of get lost here, but I always thought t3 was a bit superfluous anyway]

So basically, every time there's a Terminator movie, a new timeline is created except with Terminator: Salvation since there is no time travel. But at some point in Terminator Genisys, A Terminator is sent all the way back to Sarah's childhood which begins an entirely new timeline that overrides all the others we've seen so far since it started before the events of all other timelines occurred.

We could figure the beginning of Terminator Genisys to be the end of timeline 3. But since Genisys(Matt Smith) is present, something must have happened that changed the whole game. From what I've read, it's been stated or hinted by the creators that some kind of inter-dimensional travel is involved, so we'll probably just have to wait to see where they go with that. But as far as we can tell, the reason for the new timeline is the Terminator getting sent to kill young Sarah, resulting in her going off the grid and changing all events that would have led up to John getting born and everything else that happens in the first 3 timelines. But Pops is very keen to ensure that John Conner is still born. But what we want to know is who sent Pops.
[With the timelines overlapping, Pops could still be the same T800 from the first Terminator]
 
We could speculate that the T1000 was sent back in the same vein as the other 3, with the machines realizing they've already had the time travel idea and changing their tack again. So the obvious answer is John did the same thing he did in the T2 timeline and sent the T800 he just found lying around after reprogramming it. But that can't have happened, can it? We saw Genisys grab John just as Kyle was being sent to the 1984. More interesting question: Why would Kyle have been sent to 1984 unless this was meant to have taken place at the end of Timeline 1? Keep in mind, I only call it Timeline 1 because we don't know enough to imagine any others before that. There could be many timelines that we don't even know about. Just a thought in case none of this complicated timeline stuff is challenging enough for you.

We know that Pops knows when the T800(maybe even a different version of himself?) is supposed to appear and it still happens just like in what we call Timeline 2. But going back as far as he did should have prevented the other timelines from happening since Skynet wouldn't have had any reason to send a Sarah Conner killer back to that exact same date.

It seems there must be some kind of inter-timeline dimensional warping or something going on here. I can't tell if I'm way off with all this or if the movie is just poorly conceived. Either way, I'm just going to have to wait until they make a sequel and hope they do some splainin'. Unfortunately, it sounds like it might be up in the air at this point whether they will even make one or not. I think I may be the only person who actually wants to even see it happen and I'm the one who keeps saying how sick to death I am of all the god damn reboots.
But I need more information for my hypothesis. Personally, I wish the Hollywood film makers would just let old movies just be what they are and make something new, but I want this trainwreck to happen for movie science.