Don't need to apologise - maybe we're being too purist? An interesting point was brought up in a discord chat that you could write a very Terminator-inspired story using characters like Ultron (as your megalomaniacal AI villain stand-in) and Bishop/Cable (as your time-travelling heroes preventing a bad future before it happens stand-ins). Maybe what we should be doing is less 'how can I bring in this off-the-wall media property' and more 'how can I use established comic canon to weld parts together into a story inspired by/similar to the media property I love'. 

That said we've also had the most experimentation in this game of any iteration of these one-comic-universe games I've played, and I've been enjoying how much more flexible and daring everyone's been.