WARNING: The following contains spoilers for What If...? Season 1, Episode 8, "What If... Ultron Won?," streaming now on Disney+.
The Terminator franchise is one of cinema's most iconic properties, transcending the action genre and becoming a sci-fi legend thanks to the mind of James Cameron. With Arnold Schwarzenegger playing both evil and good robots, it continues to permeate pop culture for the way it thought-provokingly messed with time travel and the idea of humanity being destroyed by its own creation, Skynet. Now, Marvel pays homage to the franchise, only to then mock it in "What If... Ultron Won?"
As Ultron becomes a walking Infinity Gauntlet, he starts consuming worlds. Captain Marvel makes a last stand on Xandar but she downplays the magnitude of the threat. It's part ego, but she also thinks her Tesseract-influenced powers should be enough to take the android down. She jokes as she refers to Ultron as "Skynet" – a nod to Terminator’s rogue A.I. that tried to exterminate all of humanity. She then disses the series by claiming she's seen this movie before and that it doesn't need a sequel. A fight breaks out, but after that moment of comedy, she realizes Ultron's true might as she's incinerated.
It is enjoyable hearing her mention Skynet as it shows she's a fan of Cameron's '84 flick, which was a major success, giving Schwarzenegger one of his signature characters and ramping up his A-list status. This paved the way for 1991's T2: Judgement Day, with Cameron and Schwarzenegger reuniting, using a colossal budget to churn out a critically-acclaimed blockbuster that grossed over $500 million worldwide.
It's one of those films where people hotly debate if the original or the sequel is better. But for Carol, she isn't a fan of any follow-ups to the original. Seeing as she was abducted from Earth in 1989 and didn't return until 1995, it feels like nothing but the original resonates with her, despite T2 being a good film. With this Ultron war occurring decades later, it may be that Carol is more disillusioned about the other movies, had she seen them.
And a lot of that has to do with how convoluted those sequels got. 2003's Rise of the Machines, and then Terminator Salvation, dealt with the fallout of nukes over the Earth, but many felt they were rudimentary and didn't reflect the heart of the franchise. 2015's Terminator Genisys rebooted things, but felt too complex as it tampered with the timelines, Cyberdyne and Skynet.
2019's Dark Fate was meant to kickstart a new trilogy with Dani Ramos becoming the new John Connor in this timeline, but it couldn't strike a balance to move away from the legacy of old. It tried hard to course-correct old mistakes but it just forced in the same plot again.
Ultimately, all these movies skewered the idea of humans on the run from machines, giving too many folks ulterior motives and secret agendas. Sure, we got a cool evolution of robots, but with so many inorganic twists, we can see why Captain Marvel prefers to stick to the original with Ultron recalling that bad A.I. aftertaste.
To catch Captain Marvel's dated reference, Season 1 of What If...? is streaming now on Disney+.