Terminator Genisys film informatics Part 03: The Guardian

The Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 "Guardian" was sent from the future by an unknown Resistance member. Its mission was to protect young Sarah Connor from harm and damage. Having rescued young Sarah from an attack by the T-1000 which resulted in the deaths of her parents, he raised her like a parent woul raise a child, and spent over a decade training her to face her destiny, which she adamantly tried to reject. His personality is similar to the T-800 model in Terminator 2, and the T-850 model in Terminator 3.

Series type
The Series 800 Terminator is a type of Terminator mass-produced by Skynet. Individual Terminators within the series are often referred to as T-800s. The T-800 was Skynet's first cybernetic organism, with living tissue over a hyperalloy endoskeleton. This made it Skynet's first successful Infiltrator unit, capable of infiltrating the Resistance.


In this film, a T-800 is reprogrammed by an unknown party - it is speculated that knowledge of who sent it back was deliberately erased so that Skynet couldn't track them down later- and sent back in time to 1973 when Sarah Connor was a child, rescuing her from a T-1000 sent to kill her and her parents. The now-orphaned Sarah Connor is subsequently raised by the Terminator to prepare for her future destiny, becoming her surrogate father. Throughout the film, the aging Terminator struggles with its physical limitations- stating at least twice that it is "Old, not obsolete"- include needing Sarah's assistance in destroying the Terminator from the first film before it can begin its search for her. However, the Terminator's knowledge about Skynet and its technology in addition to the training and emotional support it provides are invaluable to Sarah, and its decade of raising her provides it with an unprecedented level of emotional development, to the extent that it keeps her childhood drawings and photographs in its base. After Kyle Reese's arrival, the trio defeat the T-1000 together but later find themselves battling John Connor himself, who has been transformed into a nano-hybrid Terminator T-3000 tasked to ensure Skynet's rise in 2017. During the battle with the T-3000, the Guardian is thrown into a vat of liquid metal before the T-3000's defeat, and as a result gains shape-shifting ability similar to the T-1000, as well as repairing earlier damage such as its lost left arm.