Honestlyyyy! I’ve been making my friend watch T1 and T2 because she was thinking about watching TDF and I was like, uh, you need context, and again, all I can see are the parallels, the intentional ones! How Grace and Kyle arrive, the cops stumble on them, the hidden shotgun, and that’s just the beginning.
And okay, even T2 has some parallels/homages to T1, in the effectively father-son bond between that protector and John and one could reasonably say TDF is a mix of T1 and T2, where you have Dani as a resourceful but very normal young woman suddenly pulled into this world, i.e., Sarah from T1, but then also a future leader like John from T2, so the protector could go either way, a love interest or family member kinda figure, but then when you bring Sarah back into it, immediately the context does indeed jump back to her sleeping against Kyle? There’s just no other interpretation, at this point she isn’t aware of the “you raised me” exposition, so all she’s seeing are two people–Grace being a person like Kyle and not a cyborg–of similar age in the same situation as her and Kyle, she’s not like, this truly reminds me of the 101 and my son. :))
And to actually shoot that scene to highlight it, I…I tend to be pretty conservative in these assumptions, so I don’t know if a romance itself was ever on the cards, but real, strong subtext surely was. I mean, to have to go through and remove and re-edit scenes from a trailer because they were too shippy? That signals knowledge and intent to tone it down, it couldn’t have been accidental because then they’d have been like, whatever.
I wonder if we’ll ever see all those original scenes…