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alcalexandria · 2 years ago

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The Case for Dani X Grace.

This is a post to lay out the reasons viewers might have to think that, at some point in the development of Terminator: Dark Fate, Dani & Grace were actually meant to be a romantic couple.

Or else, at the very least, that a decision was made to rework the movie specifically to prevent that reading.

We know it was reworked, because we know a lot about the minor tweaks after initial test screenings; in itself that’s not uncommon. But we're specifically looking at how these two and their dynamic changed in the process, and whether that was the whole intention.

Only the purpose of the changes is up for debate - and we'll get to that - but the main effect was definitely to change how Dani & Grace’s relationship can be interpreted.

You can find a more detailed breakdown of Dani & Grace related cuts/changes we’re aware of here, but we'll talk about the key ones below. A bunch of these minor cuts, shot swaps and reshoots add up to take them from a dynamic that might be interpreted as romantic, to something familial; sealing the deal with the last-minute addition of a single scene and line inserted to retcon Dani into a parent figure.

We’ll probably never know the whole story for sure one way or the other, but I think we know enough to speculate that I think would be of interest to franchise fans from a Behind-The-Scenes perspective as well as to would-be shippers.

So I’ll try to go through what we actually know for sure as much as possible first, and how we know it, before getting into my own theories about the whys, so hopefully even if you don’t agree with my conclusions you might find it a worthwhile read.

We'll look at three questions -

i) First, whether Dani & Grace could reasonably be interpreted as a romance in at least one version of the movie, regardless of whether they were meant to be or not,

ii) Whether the late-stage overhaul was done specifically to block that possible reading, regardless of whether it had been an intentional or reasonable one, and lastly,

iii) Whether it was actually initially intended to have a lesbian romantic subtext – and subtext at least - rather than simply an accident of some clueless Action Movie Dudes who didn’t know how it would read, before they panicked and rowed back as seen in ii)

Much of it won't be new to anyone likely to care, but maybe some of it is, and I figure it doesn’t hurt to compile it all in one place for my own purposes as much as anything. There will be some necessary duplication of older posts that I hope you’ll forgive.

Also, I guess some of us didn’t get enough of Book Reports as kids.

Come join the nerd party under the cut.

i) Could Dani & Grace reasonably be interpreted as a romantic couple in at least one version of the movie?

So firstly, let’s think about whether Dani & Grace could reasonably be interpreted as a romantic couple even if only by happy accident, rather than solely imagined in feverish f/f shipper brains like mine.

Well, a good litmus test for that question is always “How would we read these characters if we were looking at a man and a woman?” Regardless of where we’re all coming from, we all learn to view media through the heteronormative lens. We may learn it as a second language, but we learn it.

So the question is just as much “How would we be expected to read these characters, if we were looking at a man and a woman?

Usually, that’s kind of an abstract thought experiment - you have to find other kinda similar stories to try to compare, but they’re never quite exact, so there’s always a level of subjectivity and plausible deniability.

That’s not the case here though, because we have a direct, like-for-like comparison; Grace & Dani are very explicitly and purposefully cast in roles to mirror a man & woman in a preceding movie, and I’ve gone into lots more detail about that here.

Not just any preceding movie, neither - the first one, and the foundation of all the lore after.

The fact Kyle & Sarah were lovers isn’t simply incidental to Terminator, it is the basis of the whole mythology – if they weren’t in love and didn’t have sex, their son would never have been conceived or raised by Sarah to be the lynchpin of that first loop.

In other words - the central pillar of the whole franchise very much depends on the fact those two boned down.

So, we know that if they were a guy + girl, we would be meant to see them as romantic - because when they were, we had to. This whole storytelling universe depends on it.

And pretty much all of the same cues used to tell us Kyle & Sarah were in love are used to tell us what Grace & Dani are to each other too. Most obviously, that Kyle and Grace both came across time for this bodyguard job, and we're told for sure why Kyle did it for Sarah at least - because, he simply says, he is in love with her, and has always been.

We know how we’re meant to read Sarah’s plea not to confront the cops, too – she doesn’t want to see him get killed. Just as Dani, fully aware that capture is likely a death sentence for both her and the human race in turn, surrenders to the CBP sooner than watch Grace die fighting them.

We may not get the same explanatory statements in each of the parallel incidents with Grace & Dani, but it seems pretty natural to infer them. And ultimately, Sarah summarises her relationship with Kyle by saying that, in the even shorter time they spent together, they “loved a lifetime’s worth”.

Almost the only major divergence is that Grace & Dani never have sex - but even then, one of their earliest scenes involves Dani watching over the crashed-out Grace in a motel room, a motel room that’s deliberately identical to the one where Sarah and Kyle did. So we’re still asked to see them in that parallel anyway.

And we could interpret them the same way even if we’d never seen T1 at all, because the same language of action movie romance is applied to both cases. Not only can you interpret Grace’s protectiveness towards Dani (and Dani’s tenderness towards her in return) as an intentional reference to that famous, previous love affair, it also comes across as romantic in itself, because that's just the established vocabulary of this kind of movie.

There are plenty of other parallels in the post linked above if you want them. But the point is – if all the stuff T1 used to tell us that Kyle & Sarah are in love is also used to tell us what's going on with Grace & Dani, then it’s both reasonable and predictable that people will interpret them the same way.

And they go further than the stuff in common. Think of Grace dropping to her knees to beg that she be let go back to her death, and Dani openly weeping over the prospect - I think we can take it for granted this is not how John and Kyle’s corresponding interaction played out, even offscreen or in some deleted sequence somewhere.

Think of Dani tearfully apologizing to Grace as she cuts into her. Think of her setting out to change the whole future just to save her. Think of Grace choosing to die with her eyes on Dani, too, something Kyle didn’t get to do with Sarah.

In fact, just think of this scene –

Now, how would you interpret this scene if this was a male and female duo?

More importantly, how would you think you were expected to interpret their relationship, if you saw this play out onscreen?

Over to you, Nick from The New Girl –

"Anytime a man shows a woman how to do something from behind, it's just an excuse for him to get really close and breathe on her neck. Watch any sports movie."

And you, Bridgerton –

In fact, this is such well-established shorthand, it’s got a TV Tropes page.

There is of course a big complication here - the maternal framing they’re given in the last act. But as noted above, we already know this was only inserted after the test screening stage, and at the expense of a very particular deleted scene (more on that below).

We happen to know for a fact it's a reshoot now from Director’s Commentary and such, but the scene in question was so out of synch with the movie as it is that plenty of folks had already taken it for granted before it was confirmed anyway - not only does that future flashback look and feel entirely different to the rest of the movie, it's seated in a scene riddled with weird giveaway continuity issues.

So it just plain feels like it was plugged in at the last minute, as indeed we now know it was. And in that basis, I do think folks can feel justified in simply disregarding it as a “no homo” disclaimer.

It’s not hard then to imagine how differently this movie would play without that line, and to read their dynamic accordingly.

Grace would be a character that we only ever see interact with Dani as an adult, one who devotes both her life and death to her, because…

Because they’re friends? Because Dani’s her heroine?

Because she saved her?

In what way?

I mean, “You saved me” is a pretty powerful figurative line to just toss out there, as the million romance novels with that title can attest. But in the original cut of the movie, without the reshoot, we would never have seen any literal Dani-saving-Grace at all.

So, yeah. In sub-conclusion, I believe it is completely reasonable for a viewer to interpret Dani & Grace's dynamic as romantic.

To do so does require consciously rejecting the idea there’s a foster relationship in play, but the fact that’s so easily done – by mentally nixing one jarringly ADR’d line and scene retcon - kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

ii) Was it specifically changed to stop people interpreting them as romantic?

The next question is whether some or all the changes we know of were specifically to try to head off shippy interpretations – regardless of whether they were an accident – rather than for any other reason we’ve been given.

I’m going to save you scrolling and say I think yes.

I absolutely think this movie was re-edited because somebody panicked that it was going to be interpreted as orbiting an opti-tragic lesbian love story spanning time and space.

The main reason I believe this is that the rationale given for the anti-“tactile” edit pass and cuts makes no fucking sense, so quite frankly I think it’s a lie, and I’ll explain why.

In the commentary, Director and Editor tell us they did an entire editing pass - essentially revising the movie from top to bottom, no small task - relatively late in production, to make cuts and swap takes, purely so that Dani & Grace would look less "tactile", less physically close. They say these changes were important to prevent the audience working out that Grace knows Dani, at all. That surprise was apparently so important it was worth the considerable extra time and money it would take to rearrange and recut scenes that had already cost time and money to film. This in a movie that was already going way over budget, due to flood-damaged sets, a production shift from Mexico to Spain/ Hungary, multiple forced location changes mid shoot, and asbestos being discovered in a studio (!).

And yet, in the flashback - we are straight up shown Dani on the rescue stretcher, after very pointedly seeing Grace personally attend to her, the VIP, during the rescue flight, even though this adds nothing to the reveal we’ve been told was all-important to preserve.

How is this less of a giveaway than Grace & Dani standing too close sometimes or whatever?

And we would also have been shown “The Commander” again, in the alternate version of the volunteering scene –

The sight of her is what directly prompts Grace to volunteer for surgery - this shot is literally her POV, looking at Dani, and it makes her insist on the surgery to her reluctant medic. If we're supposed to think the Commander is just some rando, this scene would have a really strange emphasis.

And if we're not supposed to know or guess it's Dani, why risk this at all?

We know from Miller that the Future War battle was cut short; the longer original version showed us Hadrell/Quinn having a glorious last stand against the Rev-7s until they killed him. This presumably influences Grace’s decision to be Augmented, because she wants to be able to do what she saw Hadrell do, for Dani. And according to confirmed test screening reviews on Reddit, the scene was still intact by the time they saw it.

These Future War scenes all need a ton of VFX, bespoke sets, props and wardrobe that can’t be bought off the rack or recycled anywhere else in the movie’s main storyline, so they’re very expensive. Whatever else you might do as a just-in-case, you would not shoot more of this than you had to.

Given she’s bundled up on a stretcher, it would have been trivial to conceal the identity of the injured VIP completely – simply by not shooting her clearly or covering her head. Natalia Reyes wouldn’t even need to be on set.

But she was - they went to the lengths of having her, having her face visible, putting her in injury makeup, and showing us Grace is uniquely, personally affected by her condition.

Why bother with any of that if were never meant to be able to infer that it’s her? If it was in fact important for us not to know that it’s her? Considering how innocuous some of the scenes they supposedly cut for that reason, isn’t this a pretty glaring contradiction?

I don’t believe these scenes are shot as if it’s a secret Grace knows Dani, or that Dani is the Commander. But I do believe they’re edited to try to make it a secret Grace knows Dani.

I think it was shot as if we could take it for granted Dani’s the Commander, and then after the fact, someone chose to cut it down as much as they could afford to. The fact Dani’s face is plainly visible is because there was only so much they could cut without losing coherence completely.

But let’s take them at their word for now to have a look at another scene change.

There’s a notable swap from the version of this sequence we see in early trailers –

Source: Booasaur

- to what we actually see in the movie:

In the commentary, the guys explain this scene (what’s left of it) and Sarah’s reaction is intended to show us she knows that, quote, "Grace is not telling the whole truth, there's something more to their relationship that Grace is not telling her".

But… hold on.

That makes no sense at all in light of their explanation for the rest of the cuts, which were supposedly to prevent us inferring precisely that. And if this is the moment we are supposed to be clued in after all, then why is even this swapped out for a less touchy shot?

Why spend money recutting the whole movie, and even reshooting some of it so that we won’t speculate Grace might know her, while also incorporating this scene to… tell us Grace might know her?

And why change the shot used in all the initial trailers to the one we see above if this scene is meant to flag they’re close anyway?

For this to be true would mean they’re both doing an entire editing pass to prevent the audience knowing Grace knows Dani more than she’s letting on, but also including this scene with the specific intention of suggesting Grace knows Dani more than she’s letting on… but still also making them less tactile... even though we’re now allowed to suspect they’re close anyway?

Which is it?

I think there’s a fib somewhere.

Some of the “anti-tactile” cuts harm the movie in general, too. Cuts around the motel, border wall and cockpit in particular create significant continuity errors, and a huge amount of the movie’s exposition has to come from what are clearly late overdubs pasted onto generic reaction shots.

The cuts in the motel and the CBP centre make the scenes they’re in choppy as hell. The cuts when Dani sees Grace alive again after the drone attack actively hurt the coherence of the scene, and even the story as a whole, IMHO. What made it worthwhile to do that?

Now, to be fair - some of the cuts to the motel room bit were apparently because the audience didn’t respond well to seeing Dani crying again. That makes sense.

But it doesn’t really explain this -

Source: Booasaur

This picture from the tie in card game's "FIRST AID KIT" card shows Dani caring for Grace when she’s unconscious, in a motel room that – as noted – is a recreation of the one where Kyle & Sarah slept together.

Images for the card game are promotional shots that would have been approved for release by the studio, but the manufacturer would have needed to have them as early as possible to design and produce their material in time.

This card's image – and only this one – has no corresponding scene in the movie we see. Dani never gets anywhere near this close to Grace here. And that’s not in itself strange for press shots, okay, but what stands out is that I have searched all over, and nothing like it appears in any of the subsequent press material either, while all the other card images, or at least some from the same scenes, do.

That includes this promo shot, which was widely circulated even though it also comes from a cut scene, and one I'll discuss at length later -

From this we can draw two conclusions.

Firstly, that a scene existed where Dani physically tended to Grace like that while she was out, in a room that Terminator fans will know was the backdrop to Sarah & Kyle’s romance - and that it was cut.

Secondly, that at the relatively early stage in production, when the cards were being designed, the image was approved for promotional use - but that at a later one, when the time came to release promo material to the general press, no longer was - and that it was, curiously, the only such image that happened to.

Once we were all good with it, now we’re not. The scene was important enough to shoot, and the image was approved at one point in the early stages – but then suddenly then it wasn’t.

Then there’s the drone attack itself. Like the truck, this is another change that was made in between the early trailers and the movie itself, and it’s another one that damages the editing and story for no clear reason.

In the movie, Dani, knowing that Grace will be killed fighting the CBP, gives herself up rather than see her die. The Rev-9 then uses the chance to drop a drone on them.

Grace realizes what’s happening, easily breaks her restraints, and then takes the brunt of the blast to save Dani from it.

In other words, having just surrendered to save Grace’s life, Dani has to see her being – for all she knows - killed after all, and we see her look on at Grace’s lifeless body in despair.

Incidentally, doesn’t this echo the shot of Grace seeing the Commander in the stretcher after the Rev 7 attack?

This pays off – or would have – later, in a shot seen in the trailers when Grace finds Dani again, and we see Dani’s clear relief that she’s alive.

YMMV, but to me it also looks like she’s showing concern for Grace’s very conspicuous burns, too.

A subsequent trailer shot, also cut, has Grace & Dani fleeing the Rev-9 hand in hand, in dreamy blockbuster slow motion -

All of these moments are gone from the movie.

From what I’m pretty sure was a rehearsal – but again, check out Dani’s expression.

Leaving aside for a moment the obvious recurring question of how this stuff would be interpreted if they were a straight pairing - it’s still very hard to explain cutting it.

In its place, we get this absolute... mess of cuts, ADR, cuts, Davis barely being in frame, more cuts, and… at any point in this how confident are you of what direction anyone’s facing?

I haven’t recut this, to be clear - this is exactly how this sequence plays out onscreen. It’s a salad of jumbled editing and weird shot choices that make the CBP centre seem about the size of a bus stop, has dialogue dubbed in where people clearly aren’t speaking, suggests a floor plan that somehow overlaps, and struggles to keep the 5’11 Davis in frame with the 5’2 Reyes for more than a second at a time.

Scroll up again to those deleted shots, and compare how much clearer and better composed they are than any of this.

In fact, this is so disjointed you’d be forgiven for thinking Dani & Grace are in an identical but totally separate building from Rev here, because there’s no sense of where he is in relation to them or how far away. It’s not even implausible this is another (very expensive!) reshoot, at least in part.

And in the middle of all this, that’s Dani’s cousin getting killed. Did you even notice that when you saw it first? I don’t blame you if you didn’t – our heroines aren’t framed, lit or seen clearly enough to know if Dani herself even knows he’s dead.

Let’s look the effect of these cuts solely from a storytelling perspective though.

The original sequence would have been -

Dani is terrified she’ll get Grace killed so surrenders for that specific reason.

Is devastated to see Grace apparently killed anyway.

Is more relieved to see that Grace is alive than she cares about the attack.

Dramatic slo-mo escape to the chopper

Grace’s deferred freak out that Dani would risk her life like that for her or Sarah.

Besides being shot noticeably better, these little moments also make for a much more coherent little A-to-B journey that shades both characters in significantly.

With the cuts, and Dani's new non-reaction, the drone stuff is just a very dramatic splash of fireworks – narratively, it might as well not have happened. And Grace’s tantrum in the chopper, about Dani’s life being the only one that matters, comes from almost nowhere without that full mini-arc of Dani having endangered herself sooner than put Grace in danger, Grace being an apparent casualty anyway, and how glad Dani is to see she’s alive after all.

These bits seem to me then to have been very deliberately filmed – and then even more deliberately, cut.

But that’s not nearly as dramatic a change as cutting the absurdly angstoromantic “Send Me Back” scene.

And for real, do stop and watch this before carrying on -

youtube

This moment explains just about everything you need to know about Grace and her motivations, absolves Dani of sending her back to her doom, and ties directly into a climactic exchange of dialogue later on - the Theatrical cut still even has that now orphaned follow up line, when Grace repeats her plea to "our" Dani, to let her save her, before she dies. Commander Dani is shown shedding a tear when Grace asks to save her here, presumably because she remembers they will be some of Grace’s last words to her own younger self, later/before.

All that, and that clever little internal loop, is totally lost without this pivotal little scene. We even lose the visual parallel of Grace on her knees to Dani in the present day cockpit, just as she is in her memory from the future here, just as the two versions of Dani converge.

The suggestion Dani raised Grace from childhood is solely from cutting this scene and overwriting it - at the cost of all that continuity and connective tissue mentioned above - with another that looks aesthetically out of whack with the rest of the movie, feels cheap, and was written by monkeys.

Without the swap, without any suggestion of Grace ever meeting Dani as a child, and with this scene back in place as in the original cut, I’m not sure how else could you possibly interpret Grace’s devotion to Dani instead.

But it’s important even regardless of that - it’s laying down all the emotional groundwork for Grace’s death, and the underlying Bootstrap cycle's structure. Cutting it robs Grace and Dani of big chunks of their characterisation and personal arcs, undermining Grace’s dying dialogue and Dani’s vengeful fury after it, and it can’t be explained by saying some subtle reveal needed to be preserved, since both scenes make it apparent Dani’s the Commander even if it isn’t already.

And it's worth highlighting too - @beneaththethunders confirms that the English subtitling of Dani's screams after Grace's death is wrong. She doesn't say he "took everything she had", she says "Mataste todo lo que quería, cabrón!" - "You killed everything I loved". Big difference!

Which all feels a little... coincidental, one might think. Check out how differently it plays out with the corrected translation here.

So it's safe to say that firstly, you would need an excellent reason to shell out for a replacement scene for this one at the last minute, and secondly, that the only explanation we've been offered to date is nonsense.

That's compounded by the fact the reshot and rearranged bits of the movie are almost objectively weaker than the original ones, the deleted scenes were still in place as late as the advance screenings, and even the existing cut of the movie calls back to parts that are now missing as if they’re still there.

And... say, how did those screenings go?

Well -

What the totality of all this suggests to me, and very strongly, is that there is in fact no good “internal” reason for a particular thought-line of these cuts.

They don’t make the story better. They don’t make the movie look better. They damage continuity, they cost a bunch of extra money, and nobody had a problem with them until the public started providing feedback.

To me that means the only reason can be external to the movie – for some reason apart from the good of the plotting, the continuity, the aesthetics or the budget, these changes were applied to the story, and they were applied after the public gave their takes.

In other words, that the point of the changes weren’t to help tell the story better, but to change the story being told.

So my conclusion, in the end, is yes.

Yes, I think the cuts were made because test audiences reported that these bitches looked gay. No other reason I can think of would explain all of these decisions.

That brings us to the last question.

iii) Was it initially intended to have a lesbian romantic subtext?

So this is the big one. At some point in the production of this movie, did somebody want us to see Grace & Dani as a love story?

I’ve talked about making weird cuts to make them less “tactile” and why the supposed reasoning for that doesn’t hold up. I’ve also talked about the allusions to another, canonical love affair in stuff like the truck scene, and I want to come back to that.

Source: Scumlow

In the commentary, Miller mentions this was actually unscripted – it was simply something he realised he could easily do once he got to the location for Dani’s uncle’s place. Unlike the Future War stuff, they already had the truck, the cast and the location ready to shoot with, so it was only an extension of what they were already doing.

If that makes it sound thoughtless, it’s not.

The commentary also makes it clear that Miller has a real fluency with Terminator lore; he even talks about some very longstanding Terminator geek debates like the age old “terminator bomb” argument, stuff that makes it obvious he knows both his canon and fandom discourse inside out.

He absolutely knows what this scene means, and we’re meant to too. We’re meant to recognise it, and I’ll bet a thousand dollars that we’re being shown that Sarah does too.

Miller isn’t the only one aware of the parallel neither –

Source: Youtube, around :045

Mackenzie Davis herself is also very much aware of her character’s relationship to Kyle Reese, and his role in the franchise, and acknowledges and goofs around with the implication.

So the above scene may be unscripted, but there is absolutely no way it’s an accidental echo of T1’s own – there is no way Miller just “accidentally” had Dani & Grace re-enact a moment from Sarah and Kyle’s romance, when the fact they became lovers is the single most important event of the whole franchise. He knows it. The cast knows it.

T1 is often described as a love story first and a scifi/ horror second because of scenes like above, but even aside from Kyle, we get details about Sarah’s love life as an aspect of her characterisation. At one point we even hear a boyfriend – voiced by James Cameron, incidentally – leave her a message to cancel their upcoming date.

Curiously, there’s nothing at all like that in T:DF as we see it. There’s never any suggestion of either Dani or Grace’s romantic inclinations, in any direction, at all. Which may not seem unusual for a modern action movie, to be sexless and romance free, but the complete lack of that element in the story is glaring when we’re being asked to directly compare it to T1 in so many ways otherwise.

It will be no secret to Tumblr that Grace is quite the lesbian thirst icon, and much has been made of her being lesbian – sorry for the discourse word – “coded” in her character design and demeanour.

But… let’s talk about Dani here too, while we’re at it.

Are we supposed to take it for granted she’s to be read as straight?

I’m not actually so sure.

(Natalia Reyes doesn’t seem to mind us wondering either, incidentally)

As the eagle eyed @yorkieeightyseven copped, for some reason wardrobe went to the rounds of customising her shoes with rainbow laces for the scene we're first introduced to her, which is a minor but eye catching choice to make -

Source: Prop Auction Store

A far more more interesting one though was made for her introduction to Sarah. If you wondered why this guy in the Pharmacy got so much focus, only to disappear -

It’s because, per Miller, he originally asks Dani out in the midst of all this and gets instantly rebuffed.

I mean, sure, she wouldn’t be looking for a date just now - but why even write and shoot this? Why was it worth making time and space to ever show us Dani dismissing him while she’s attending to Grace?

And then why was it cut, along with all the other stuff we know about?

The only potentially romantic context we know we might ever have been given for either Grace or Dani is to have Dani reject this man. Otherwise, they never show anything you can even infer as interest in any characters. Well... apart from each other, at least.

This is even starker in light of the audition script used for would-be Danis, but before we get into that, again, I want to be really clear what this is.

An audition “side” is a very rough placeholder script used to test chemistry and emotion. A side’s dialogue will tend from rough to terrible, and sometimes the scene is deliberately misleading, as sides regularly leak via actors who don’t get the part (that’s why we have this one).

The general mood of a side though, is key. It's usually right on the money, because that’s what you’re trying to test your actor for. The side is designed to showcase the particular vibe the Director needs most – so however clumsy or misleading the dialogue is, it represents something that matters so much for a character that they’ll be cast solely on the basis of it.

This side was used to audition actresses for Dani. It takes place on the train to the border, with a Grace who does not know, or claims not to know, Dani or what’s so important about her.

It’s a tentative bonding moment between the two, where Dani shows concern for a shoulder wound Grace is tending to –

(Dani scoots closer, eyes the wound critically.)

DANI (CONT'D)

That scar's gonna be sick. But I got it beat.

(She pulls up her sleeve to reveal a scar of her own on her shoulder.)

DANI (CONT'D)

Like it? Bus accident. The big one in Puebla. I was fourteen when they pulled me out from under. It made the news, even in the States. They gave me obleas to calm me. Like candy can make you forget the pain. The bodies. The weight of twisted steel bearing down—

(She touches [her own] scar, gently with her fingers.)

DANI (CONT'D)

I'll never eat obleas again.

(Grace studies Dani as she traces the line of the scar with her finger.)

GRACE

You wanted to understand where I come from? You already do.

(Dani's eyes meet Grace's for a moment.)

DANI

My mother told me scars make the skin stronger.

(Dani covers her scar with her shirt, then looks out again as the train slows, approaching Nogales.)

Now uh… I don’t think I even have to ask the fanfictionally inclined, but please picture this scene actually playing out on screen, actors and all.

Bearing in mind that the point of a side is the mood - what is the mood you imagine as described here? Because it was so important for Dani’s actress to play that she was to be cast based on it alone. Not her bravery, her sensitivity, her comedy, her action chops, or anything else - but the mood when she and Grace bond over the marks on their bodies.

Sure, we can just about imagine cuts to make them less close were down to some Action Movie Bros suddenly realising they'd accidentally made the gayest ass Terminator imaginable. But it is greatly straining credulity to suggest they were oblivious to the implications of a directions like “Grace studies Dani as she traces the line of the scar with her finger” or “Dani’s eyes meet Grace’s for a moment”.

Let's be real - this scene here reads like Dani is hitting on Grace with a two by four.

And how well this particular scene was performed was the one that decided who got the job.

It’s classic action movie romance stuff. And again, if there could be any question what you were being told if you'd been presented with a guy & girl playing it out, have no fear - Kyle & Sarah are here to clarify, because their corresponding scene in T1 was straight up foreplay. Their scar examination is used to allow for a closer level of intimacy with Kyle, a slightly awkward virgin who thinks entirely in Military radio protocol. Stuff like "affirmative", and "standard operating procedure". And yes, it is immediately followed by sex in a motel room, and yes, the very one they painstakingly replicated for that lost scene of Dani watching over Grace in the bed. I don't really feel like we're having to work too hard for inferences here.

It's just not plausible that someone with Tim Miller’s fluency in Terminator-ese doesn’t know what he’s asking us to think of when we see that motel room or that scene in the pickup. To Terminator nerds, those Sarah/Kyle scenes are so iconic it’s the equivalent of having them mime out the “I’m flying” scene from Titanic, there's not a whole lot of room to miss the implication.

Similarly, it’s not plausible to think that stuff like the “teaching Dani to shoot” scene was done in blissful ignorance. It’s such a well-known visual shorthand it’s its own sitcom punchline by now, and Miller is as well versed in action movie tropes as he is in geek lore – several Love, Death + Robots eps he wrote for are explicit genre spoofs.

The train scene we see in the movie is, of course, very different to the side above. Sarah doesn’t even seem to be in that scene at all, whereas she’s the central speaker in the final version. The one we do see is odd for a whole other reason of its own though - it’s actually pretty much the only scene which really engages with the idea we’re supposed to expect Dani to be the mother of the Commander, rather than she, herself, the Commander.

Isn’t that a little strange?

Given that’s key to what's supposed to be the big reveal?

Shouldn’t that be a much bigger deal for her, too, given there isn’t a single surviving human male in her orbit? And that our Kyle proxy here is very much a woman? And she’s got to have a kid in the next like… 24 months for them to be an adult in time for any of this to work? And even that’s a stretch given Grace says she’s from 2042?

But it’s never mentioned again; not until the reveal it won’t be her hypothetical kid after all. Nobody, Dani included, even seems to think idly about her impending destiny-altering-messiah-pregnancy after this, not until the very heavily ADR’d and continuity-messy cockpit scene, when, incidentally, the foster mom stuff is also introduced, for the first and only time.

Keep that in mind, because I don’t think the weirdness of both plot strands is unrelated.

Recasting Dani as Grace’s parent is a weird choice that doesn’t really serve any purpose except to create an alternate explanation for their bond. But it doesn’t even do that very well, even if we take it as a given they’re not in love, because nothing at all about their relationship otherwise reads as maternal.

Let's, for the sake of argument, accept their dynamic was never supposed to be romantic, and try to imagine how else we were supposed to understand them originally, ie before the maternal stuff was introduced either.

Think about the deleted border gunfight - Grace takes orders from Dani about wounding the Federales and surrendering to the CBP, yes, but not without friction. Okay, they are technically Officer/Subordinate - but evidently they have a personal working relationship that puts them on more equal terms than that suggests, if Grace is openly contesting orders from someone about two dozen ranks over her. This happens again at Carl’s place, when she point blank rejects the killbox plan. And even in 2042, it is Grace, not Dani, who outlines what’s going to be done about the TDE.

Ultimately she does almost always defer to Dani, yes - but not without making her own case first. She sure as hell does not simply accept what Dani says as the kind of sacred, inviolable Commandment set down by a mother figure, but forgetting that for now; it’s not how a suicidally loyal footsoldier would behave, either.

So how were we supposed to think of this?

As somebody (I'm incredibly sorry I've forgetten who) once very neatly put it, the movie finds itself in the bizarre position of having to convince us its two leads are not in love despite itself - even though the implication of their alternatives create a bunch of other weird problems.

Primarily, that without the scene which tells us that Grace, with full agency, actively opted into this suicide mission, and with one that instead casts her as her kid, the movie is asking us to root for a leader who ordered her own child to die for her. She found and raised her, just to sacrifice her to save... herself, apparently? And we’re not given any mitigation like Grace having plead with her to do it, or the tears Dani sheds in response.

You might think that’s a weird choice to make for a heroine - and Tim Miller agrees.

In a panel discussion with about directing in 2022, he says this -

"We shot a scene on 'Terminator' that I didn't believe in, but I had to shoot it. I got up in front of the crew, and I said, 'So I hate this scene. I don't believe in it. I don't think it's going to work and I don't think it'll ever be in the movie, but I'm going to do the best I can to shoot it.' [M]y rationale there was I've been working with these people and if they know it's s*** too, and if I don't say it's s***, then they question my judgment. They don't believe in you. You got to say it. You got to be honest."

He doesn’t specify which scene he means here, but I think we can safely guess it’s the one that looks absolutely nothing like the rest of the movie, was shot after everything else, blows a hole in a dialogue callback later on, and creates a plot element he had a “problem” with. From another interview with io9 -

“I always have a little bit of a problem with Dani sending Grace to die,”[Miller] said. “We set up this whole [story] where Grace is kind of Dani’s surrogate child and a mother sending her child to die for her is just...yeah, I had a different scene in mind.”

I think the scenes he means here are one and the same.

So… if the Director of the damn movie didn’t like the scene's implication, why is it there…? If the original "Send me Back" scene was his preference, which seems to be the case, where is it gone?

In the commentary, he mentions that his idea of Dani’s Resistance depends on the fact a time traveller died for her; it is foundational to her gospel as a leader, because the fact that somebody came back for her proved that the past can be changed, and thus the war avoided. And separately, Davis has let slip that she would have been back for sequels, implying that Dani would/will successfully rewrite the immediate future, and generate a new iteration of Future Grace in the process.

That makes the cut “Send Me Back” scene seem integral, I think, to Miller’s concept of the whole story, and I think there are hints of how he communicated that to the folks he worked on it with.

Here, for example, is how legendary make up and prosthetic artist Bill Corso contextualizes his work for the scene –

“In which Grace tells her beloved Commander” that she wants to go back.

Not her like… mighty, respected, esteemed or adored Commander. Not her beloved foster mom, parent, or mentor either. Her beloved Commander.

Huh.

The core tragedy of Miller’s story then is that Dani & Grace are locked into a cycle of heroism and sacrifice that fate keeps demanding of them. But without that key scene you’ve lost the axis of that, and again, you'd need a really compelling reason to replace it with one that both costs more money to reshoot but looks cheaper, doesn’t cohere with the rest of the movie, and weakens the emotional punch of a character’s upcoming death.

And since we know Miller didn’t want it, it has to be worth overruling him as Director to do it, by someone with the authority to do so.

Miller has repeatedly said there were serious conflicts with Cameron during post-production – describing debates over the final cut as leaving “blood on the walls” of the edit suite - but he’s fairly vague about what the major arguments were about (worth noting - Mackenzie Davis mentioned she had a beefy NDA when backing off a question about the by-then already scrubbed sequels).

Miller has mentioned one scene - Sarah confronting Carl in the cabin – in passing, where there was a disagreement over the tone. He handled that by shooting everything Cameron wanted to keep him happy, plus what he wanted, with a view to editing it down to only the stuff he hoped to keep.

In that case, he mostly won out, and the comedy elements JC wanted were scaled back.

But he didn’t win them all – he also mentions he very strongly wanted to suggest the humans are losing the Future War this time, where Cameron insisted the opposite. Here, the compromise was not to make it clear either way, so we’re left to guess (though I still think it hints more towards Miller’s version than Cameron’s).

The “Send me back/You raised me” swap though is much bigger than either of those. The Future War winning/losing stuff is just background lore geek wrestling; the comedy stuff in the cabin is a drag but not a gamechanger.

But framing Grace and Dani as a love story vs a half assed familial thing changes the whole timbre of the story. It changes the movie’s genre even, from a straightforward actioner to a romantic tragedy in an action costume, something far more in the vein of T1 than what we saw.

So… is that what Miller was alluding to?

Was Miller’s frustration that he made a movie about two lovers trying to save each other across time, and then watched it get retconned into a much more confused story about, I dunno, really intense work colleagues?

My conclusion, in the end, is yes.

I’m 90% sure that at some point Dani and Grace were intended to be interpreted romantically. Not 100% - but 90%. More sure it was than it wasn’t.

Here’s an oversimplified summary -

Deliberate, overt parallels to iconic scenes from mythology’s core romance, by a Director who is extremely well versed in both the movies and fandom, with a cast who are well aware of same.

How physically close Dani & Grace are, to such an extent they couldn’t hide all of it even with an entire extra edit pass.

Innocuous justification for those cuts is a blatant fib.

The one single No-Homo disclaimer having to be imposed against the Director’s wishes, and at the cost of continuity and storytelling issues.

Swoony romantic clichés like tending to wounds, teaching to shoot, courtly kneeling.

Odd little details like Dani’s costuming.

Just how much more sense their dynamic, and indeed the plot, makes if they’re in love.

Dani losing her shit at Rev 9 for killing what she querías in response to Grace’s death, and the strange subtitling discrepancy around this.

So what to make of that?

Well, here's my working theory of what might have happened to explain it all.

Let’s imagine that Tim Miller, fresh off directing Deadpool 2 ft Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and knowing his Terminator lore like gospel, wants to push the franchise forward a bit with DF. He wants to make a movie structured around an operatic love-and-sacrifice-and-love bootstrap tragedy where, instead of creating the next warrior-messiah by fathering him, Grace drives Dani to create that person from herself; Dani, in turn, creates the Grace we know.

This idea both honors the original lore and puts a fresh and maybe genuinely surprising twist on it (and incidentally, is very much in the LD+R flavor of scifi)

Miller still has to answer though to James Cameron, Producer and IP stakeholder, who we know was vetoing some of his ideas, like the losing war, and adding some of his own, like the plane crash sequence.

No worries. As Director, it’s him, Tim Miller, who’s going on set every day, and that means he can do stuff like guerrilla shoot the truckbed scene or collect alternate takes to have options later on. There’s nobody on the set to stop him, at least.

But we know Cameron reared his head later, in the editing stage. Miller describes serious conflict with him in this phase, while skirting around the main bone of contention.

I say - what if it’s this?

What if the question of whether Dani & Grace can be a romance was the problem, the big conflict between Miller and Cameron?

I suggest it is plausible that Miller intended and shot Grace & Dani as a love story on set (and sometimes off-script) where he could. I think he got it past Cameron & Co in the initial test screenings, either without them picking up on it or simply not caring enough to intervene yet - but then when they started getting notes like… well, “lesbian” from the audience, or saw the backlash to the early promo images of THREE WHOLE WOMEN, panic kicked in among higher ups.

It's now, at this point, in the editing and reshoots, that the romance stuff gets nuked, at a considerable expense.

But it's not that easy, because doing that creates a big new storytelling problem - by neutralizing the whole tragic cycle drama and its climax, it’s pulling the structure out of the story as Miller had built it.

Realizing this, that now the third act has just lost its bones, Cameron, or the studio, try to have the movie restructured around an improvised new twist, the “reveal” that Dani herself is the Commander.

It has to be done by cutting, overdubbing, and reshooting chunks of what they've got, sometimes resorting to sub optimal alternate takes, and even then there are still awkward artifacts that can’t be avoided, like Dani in the stretcher.

The train scene, which was already being totally reworked, was further repurposed to plant setup for the new twist too - but since the rest of the movie still proceeds as if we all already know it’s her anyway, it feels very much like the afterthought it is. The efforts can only be a limited success, simply because Miller did the shooting taking it as a matter of fact that Dani was Grace's Commander.

That’s also, ultimately, why the twist surprised literally no one – because the movie wasn’t shot for it to be surprising.

The real surprise, the point, the heart of the whole thing, was supposed to be that this, too, is a lover's loop just as T1 was – that while Dani may not be the mother of the next messiah, both she and Grace are the Resistance’s parents, albeit in a new and unconventional way.

And that Grace came across time for just the same reason Kyle did.

...Now all that's just a theory. But it’s my theory, and it's the only way I can make sense of the whole picture we've got. I’m all ears for any better ones, or elaborations or corrections, but by now I'd need convincing it is not what happened.

But don’t get me wrong - oddities and all, I really do love this freaking movie.

I'd just love to see the one hidden under it too, wouldn’t you?

***

Hopefully, you found something of interest in there. And if you’ve made it this far, holy shit, well done and thank you for joining me on this protracted Crazy Wall of a post.

Please go check out Station Eleven, it's gorgeous, and write more fanfic everyone, the T:DF Ao3 tag is starving out here.

Shout out to @booasaur, @evocatiio and @scumlow, I hope they don't mind me using their gifsets and posts as I have above, @yorkieeightyseven for catching that little detail about Dani's shoes, and @beneaththethunders for the legit translation of that line the subtitles LIED to me about.

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