The Fight for the Future is Now

I think a fair statement to make is that the TerminatorIs it a series about a future nuclear war and the survivors of the aftermath? Is it a series of chase movies set in the present day? Is it a series about time travel? That fact is that the Terminator series is all of those concepts. The mash-up of genres and ideas shouldn't work, but the films have proven adept at mixing into a heady series unlike any other. franchise really didn’t need to extend past two movies. The Terminator is a fantastic sci-fi horror chase film, while Terminator 2: Judgment Day took everything that was great about the first, refined and expanded it, and stuck the perfect ending on the franchise. Since then, the various movies have struggled to find anything new to say or any new ideas that could be added to the franchise. The various new terminators have all been retreads, in one form of another, of the T-1000, and every plot has been another version of, “oh, no, there’s a terminator! Let’s run from it!”

The only time the franchise managed to really push itself and try for new ideas was with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the short-lived television series that took its time building out fresh concepts. It explored the reality of time travel, the toils of this war that Skynet continues fighting in the past, and ways the future can change from different choices in the present. It was heady stuff, and unfortunately it didn’t connect with the general public. What it did illustrate, though, was that television was a good medium to use for Terminator franchise extension since it allowed the creators to take their time and let their ideas breathe and build.

Five years after the last film for the series, Terminator: Dark Fate (which was not well received by audiences), the franchise is back again, and back on television. Terminator Zero is only the second series in the franchise designed for the boob tube, and is also the first time it’s been presented in the artistic form of anime. Developed by Production I.G. and overseen by showrunner Mattson Tomlin, Terminator Zero moves the franchise out of L.A. and into Japan, following a group of characters completely unrelated to Sarah of John Conner. It’s the first time the franchise has moved beyond the family and it allows this series a chance to explore its own world, its own ideas.

That’s great, and I appreciate some of the swing this series takes. At the same time, though, it is very much limited by two things that hold the show back from true greatness. The first is that, as an anime, it takes some wild swings that you would only see from anime and that, realistically, don’t really fit the world of the Terminator franchise. And the second issue is that, for all its great ideas and new characters, the series still feels like it’s stuck in the same template of all the other previous Terminator works. It can’t really extract itself from what came before to do something different with its characters no matter how many interesting new choices it makes.

Malcolm Lee (voiced by Yuuya Uchida in Japanese, André Holland in English) is a brilliant and dedicated computer scientist on the verge of a major breakthrough. He spends his days at his company, working on a new A.I. project codenamed “Kokoro” (Atsumi Tanezaki in Japanese, Rosario Dawson in English). Lee has had visions, dreams of the future, based on knowledge given only to him, and he knows, in his gut, that Judgment Day, the day that Skynet goes online and nukes the world, is coming. He’s hoping that Kokoro will become Earth’s defender against Skynet, if he can ever trust to put her online.

Two days before the coming Judgment Day, Malcolm goes to the office and tells his housekeeper, Misaki (Saori Hayami in Japanese, Sumalee Montano in English), that he will be gone for a couple of days. Misaki before this had just gone to a toy store and bought a robotic cat for Lee’s children, Kenta (Hiro Shimono in Japanese, Armani Jackson in English), Reika (Miyuki Sato in Japanese, Gideon Adlon in English), and Hiro (Shizuka Ishigami in Japanese, Carter Rockwood in English). Malcolm, though, angrily tells her to take the toy back. She doesn’t initially, letting them play with it for a bit first, and then the kids start fighting over the cat. Reika takes the toy, running off out of the apartment with it, and Kenta and Hiro chase after her. This leaves Misaki to scramble and find them, and she has to go back to Malcolm for help. But on this day, losing sight of the kids is a major issue because a terminator (Yasuhiro Mamiya in Japanese, Timothy Olyphant in English) is coming for all of them, and even with the help of a protector from the future, Eiko (Toa Yukinari in Japanese, Sonoya Mizuno in English), they still may all end up terminated.

Credit where it’s due, while Terminator Zero has a lot of plot going on (even more than I could quickly summarize above), it manages to handle it all quickly and efficiently. This first season (assuming there will be a second, of course) is only eight episodes long, with the average episode coming out around 28 minutes, and it manages to use that time to get through all of the various characters, their backstory, development, and eventually crossing of storylines. This is not. A show that often drags or lingers, especially once the terminator arrives on the scene and the action is forced into high gear.

I appreciate that this show ditches the Connors, focusing on other characters and their various storylines. We’ve seen enough of the Connors, honestly (a thought I’m sure the team on Terminator: Dark Fate has as well, trying to launch a new story with a new leader of the future resistance) and it’s good to get away from them so we can escape their constant time loop shenanigans. Moving the action over to Japan, and putting the focus on the Lee family, lets us go into this without the preconceived ideas of what could happen or where the story has to go. It’s a relief, in fact, because this fresh angle does change the dynamic of the story some.

Think about it this way: when John Connor is on the scene, we know he’ll have to live so he can fight for the future resistance. The show molds itself around him. If he dies, a different person stands up and, in effect, becomes the new John Connor. They don’t get to be a different person; they have to fill the role he left behind. But by moving far away from all that, with none of the legacy characters or legacy baggage (and, hell, not even a mention of the Connors at all), we can finally see a version of the Terminator franchise that doesn’t have to mold and conform itself around the legend of John Connor. It gets to be its own thing, and that was really needed in this franchise.

With all of that said, the anime series doesn’t really manage to push far enough outside the formula of the greater franchise. For instance, despite this new setting and new characters, much of the action still conforms to the expected linear pathing of the series. A terminator arrives, a defender from the future arrives as well, and they both converge on the people they are supposed to protect so that they can then run from the terminator and protect their own future. This is a story we’ve been seeing, time and again, since the very first film, and it feels far less effective or interesting the more times it’s reused.

Additionally, there are a lot of time loop twists and turns that would feel a whole lot more interesting if these same ideas hadn’t already been explored over on The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The idea that jumping back in time and changing the past will create multiple shards of future timelines was something first raised on that FOX TV series, and I don’t feel like Terminator Zero is able to push any further in that regard. Hell, in a way, it’s practically the same ideas and storylines used again here (which I won’t spoil but, for anyone that has watched both shows, it’ll be pretty obvious what I mean). This series being on NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it)., maybe more people will watch this show and these ideas will seem fresh to them, but they didn’t to me.

And then there’s all the weird, anime flourishes that didn’t really work in the context of the show. For instance, the A.I. that Malcolm creates can’t just be a smart program, of an intelligent voice coming out of a speaker. Instead, it’s a whole holographic projection of three women having philosophical discussions about the nature of man. I’m not saying the ideas here, about trying to train and A.I. to want to save humanity, is a bad thing, but the execution feels really weird when tacked onto this franchise. And then when you also slap in a bunch of helper robots wandering around Japan in 1997, way too early for any of this kind of tech to even exist, and it starts to feel like the series wasn’t really interested in trying to keep the past grounded and realistic in the scope of the whole franchise. It sticks out.

With all that said, I did largely like Terminator Zero. I don’t think it’s perfect, obviously, but it’s the first product in the franchise, in a long time, that has anything new or different to say. It can’t always escape the bounds of the Terminator formula, but when it can it actually manages to feel fresh and interesting. There are moments that really work in this show, and action sequences that are quite thrilling. I think if this was the kind of story that was put out into theaters, audiences might actually pay attention again. It’s a story that’s not about the Connors, that lets the franchise experiment and try new things? That’s not a bad thing. Not every swing it takes is good, but when it find that groove, and gets its story going, well, then the show really feels like a proper continuation of the Terminator story.