Arnold Schwarzenegger wears an unidentified watch

By the time Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) catches up with the T-800, the machine has spent more than twenty years hiding in plain sight. It goes by Carl, runs a business called Carl's Draperies in Texas, and has helped raise a woman's young son. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the killer as a deadpan suburban father, right up until a newer model called the Rev-9 arrives and the old work resumes. When Carl fights, he does it in a dark brown work jacket, blue jeans, and leather boots, dressed like a middle-aged man who hangs curtains for a living.

The watch belongs to that cover. Later, Propstore auctioned the battle costume from Tim Miller's film and listed the timepiece with it, cataloged beside the tears, faux bullet holes, and faux bloodstains as a Quartz Q544AA QW Quality Watch on a brown leather strap, its face glass broken. By the auction house's account the jacket carries an interior label reading "T-800-Hero 1-Harness," the production's tag for a hero costume, the one worn by the star rather than a stunt double. The brand means nothing to collectors and the model number leads nowhere. A Terminator passing as a working man wears the watch a working man would actually buy.

Propstore set the costume's estimate at 3,000 to 6,000 pounds, most of it in the hero jacket and the certificate of authenticity that comes with it. The watch is the cheapest thing in the lot, the kind of no-name quartz sold from a display case beside a cash register. A machine built to outlast everyone spent its disguise on the one object in the costume nobody would look at twice.