Earl Boen wears an unidentified watch

In The Terminator, two men sit across a bare table in a police station at night. On the left is Kyle Reese, the soldier Michael Biehn plays, brought in talking about a future war and a machine sent back to kill a Los Angeles waitress named Sarah Connor. Across from him is Dr. Peter Silberman, the criminal psychiatrist Earl Boen plays, there to decide whether Reese is dangerous or simply insane. Silberman hears the whole account of the war and the machines and files it as paranoid delusion. The audience has already watched most of it happen.

The watch is on Silberman's left wrist, and the scene almost hides it. He has turned the plaid cuff of his shirt out over a sweater, and in the band of bare wrist sits a metal case on a metal bracelet, the crystal flaring white under the overhead light. That is all the frame surrenders. The dial behind the glare is a guess and no logo survives the blur, so the watch stays plainly a watch and nothing more particular than that.

Boen did not play Silberman only here. He returns in Terminator 2 in 1991 as the psychiatrist treating Sarah Connor, and again in Terminator 3 in 2003. Besides Arnold Schwarzenegger, he is the only actor to appear in all three films, the rationalist who keeps calling the future a delusion and is wrong about it every time. The watch keeps ordinary 1984 time, strapped to the one man at the table who will not believe the soldier the future sent back.