Terminator timeline: We try to make sense of the futures past

In McG's Terminator Salvation , which opens today, the main events take place in the year 2018, 14 years after Judgment Day and 15 years after Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is put to death (or is he?). As an adult John Connor (Christian Bale) says in the trailers for the movie (though not in the movie itself), "This is not the future my mother warned me about." And how. (Possible spoilers ahead!) One of the key elements of the fourth installment in the sci-fi franchise is that the future has changed, that the war against the machines must deal with the accelerated development of advanced Terminators and that the outcome is not as pre-ordained as Connor was led to believe: "No fate but what we make." Things weren't always this messy. (link)