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I watched The Terminator (1984) from start to finish for the first time in years last night, and I was amused by the opening title card's declaration that this film would show us "the final battle" in the war between humans and machines. "The final battle"? Tell that to the sequel-makers.

But what really struck me were the deleted scenes, which I don't believe I had watched since I first got the DVD in 2001. And why did they strike me? Because they make it fairly clear that, on some level at least, Sarah Connor is responsible for the war.

That's right, Sarah Connor is responsible for the war.

How can this be, you say?

Well, in one deleted scene, Sarah looks up Cyberdyne in the phone book – just like the Terminator looked up her in the phone book! – and tells Kyle excitedly that they can destroy Cyberdyne and prevent the war from happening. After some arguing, and a bit of an emotional breakdown on Kyle's part, Kyle finally agrees to do this. (So you can see, in this, the seeds of Sarah's later vigilante actions in T2.)

And then, in another deleted scene set a few hours after Sarah has successfully destroyed the Terminator, we see that the Terminator's crushed remains have been noticed by a couple guys, one of whom instructs the other guy to take the Terminator's microcomputer chassis over to the company's R&D department. We then cut to the outside of the building, as Sarah is loaded into an ambulance, and the camera pans up to reveal ... the Cyberdyne logo on the front of the building. (So you can see, in this, the seeds of T2's later revelation that Skynet will grow out of the pieces of the Terminator that survived the original film.)

Is it a coincidence that Sarah, Kyle and the Terminator ended up in the Cyberdyne building? To a point, yes. The car chase that immediately preceded the chase-on-foot in the Cyberdyne factory was pretty crazy, and who could have predicted where the various wrecks and explosions would have ended up? But on the other hand, no, it wasn't all that ...

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