system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[spoilers] [Terminator dark fate] what was the plan?

Grace was sent back to save Dani. But she was barely effective against the rev9. Earlier defenders at least had a plan and a way of damaging terminators. But Grace didn’t seem to have a plan other then running. And she wasn’t great at that either with all the security footage .
There must’ve been a better plan before she was send back?


From the other side, why did legion send only one rev9? We know it had legions. The fight seems to be in full swing. Grace doesn’t have stories about the rev9 being a last ditch attempt like the original t800 was.
Two of those things would’ve ended things pretty quickly.
gpt
Both times a human has been sent back, the plan has been to run. Kyle Reese said quite plainly that he wasn't sure he could destroy a single Terminator with the weapons available in 1984. He never planned to confront it; he was always going to run.

If Grace had been able to bring weapons with her, she very likely would have been a match or the Rev9. Her metabolism is tuned for quick combat, and she said that "you either kill a Rev9 in a few seconds, or you die," or something to that effect. It's apparent that the augments have at least some success taking our the newer Terminators.

As for her plan: Grace grew up in a post-technology world, so she didn't know a lot of the things that would be necessary to evade the Rev9. She doesn't really understand security cameras, cell phone signals, or the ever-present surveillance state. She basically got lucky in meeting Sarah Connor, who had both experience in evading Terminators and evading modern law enforcement.

There's a lot we don't know about time travel, especially since everything after *T2* is no longer canon, but it seems like time travel is very difficult and very expensive. This is the only explanation for why both Skynet and Legion only send one Terminator at a time, because you're right, an invading force would be much more effective. It's also possible that, like Carl, Legion *did* send multiple Terminators, but sent them to various points in the time stream.

Time travel was, for Skynet, a last ditch effort to prevent failure. For Legion, it's probably more about optimization. Grace said the nuclear was was intended to stop Legion's "spread" across the globe; it's more akin to a virus than an all-powerful control mechanism. Legion searches out weak points, inserts itself, and grows stronger. It searches for enemies, and then searches for a way to neutralize them.

Even if she wasn't *winning* the war, Dani Ramos was the biggest threat to Legion. When it discovered time travel, it would have been natural for Legion to use that technology to continue its spread, and to find a way to neutralize its greatest threat.