Edward Fur­long will return to the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise for Dark Fate

The Ter­mi­na­tor series has begun to feel a bit like Shake­speare, though only in the respect that actors con­tin­u­al­ly hand down the same roles from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion for a new re-inter­pre­ta­tion. The posi­tion of John Con­nor, for instance, was orig­i­nat­ed in the sequel T2: Judge­ment Day by Edward Fur­long as a 10-year-old kid, then bequeathed to the likes of Chris­t­ian Bale, Jason Clarke and Nick Stahl when future install­ments required the char­ac­ter to be remold­ed as an action hero.

Still, it’s high­ly unusu­al for an actor to reclaim a char­ac­ter they orig­i­nat­ed decades ear­li­er, after hav­ing already left it to oth­er per­form­ers. But that’s pre­cise­ly what was announced at San Diego Com­ic-Con, as has report­ed­ly Fur­long signed on to appear in the upcom­ing Ter­mi­na­tor sequel Dark Fate in his star-mak­ing role of John Connor.

It’s an appro­pri­ate move for a film angling to wipe clean the slate of its franchise’s thor­ough­ly mixed-up mythol­o­gy; Dark Fate sit­u­ates itself as a direct fol­low-up to T2 and the orig­i­nal Ter­mi­na­tor, eras­ing the exis­tence of Genisys and Sal­va­tion in what can only be described as a con­ces­sion to the will of the peo­ple. The hilar­i­ous­ly con­vo­lut­ed mythos of Ter­mi­na­tor, sec­ond only to that of the X‑Men in its time-trav­el­ing pret­zel twists, is prob­a­bly best served with a reset.

Dark Fate will act as some­thing of a cast reunion, not only bring­ing back Fur­long but also reunit­ing orig­i­nal stars Lin­da Hamil­ton and Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger as sur­vivor Sarah Con­nor and the unstop­pable T‑800 mod­el, respec­tive­ly. How­ev­er, with Macken­zie Davis‘ mys­te­ri­ous new­com­er Grace tak­ing the lead, the func­tion that these lega­cy cas­es will serve in the film remains cloudy.

At any rate, it seems like a back-to-basics approach for this sequel: back to the orig­i­nal con­ti­nu­ity, back to the orig­i­nal cast, and back to the orig­i­nal plot schemat­ic of ​‘killer robot comes back from the future to destroy the cho­sen one’. Good news for those of us cap­ti­vat­ed by the sight of twist­ing CGI liq­uid metal.

Ter­mi­na­tor: Dark Fate arrives in the UK on 23 Octo­ber, and then the US on 1 November.