Spoilers follow for the entire season of Terminator Zero.
In the midst of Hollywood’s obsession with blockbuster nostalgia, another Terminator revival was inevitable. Fortunately, this franchise is uniquely suited to self-referential spinoffs, with world-building that directly invites us to revisit old material. Each Terminator movie uses time travel to either remix or undo the events of James Cameron’s first two films — The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, respectively — laying the groundwork for new stories like Netflix’s anime spinoff Terminator Zero.
Taking place in Japan instead of the U.S., this series creates a new timeline where the malevolent AI Skynet fails to take over the world. Instead, a new AI named Kokoro disrupts Skynet’s attack, hijacking household robots to act as her army and installing herself as a quasi-benevolent overlord in Tokyo.
Created by American screenwriter Mattson Tomlin (Project Power) and Japanese animator Masashi Kudō (Bleach), Terminator Zero embraces a lot of familiar Terminator tropes, ranging from direct callbacks — someone drops the iconic line “I’ll be back” — to the archetypal nature of the main characters. Fans will recognize elements of Terminator 2’s Sarah Connor and Miles Dyson in the show’s protagonist Malcolm Lee (voiced by André Holland in the English dub), a computer programmer who creates Kokoro (voiced by Rosario Dawson in the English dub), an artificial intelligence, as a means of protecting humankind against Skynet. Meanwhile, his eldest son, Kenta, plays a role similar to John Connor’s as a tech-savvy kid who is destined to become a great leader.
Despite this emphasis on fan service and self-referential storytelling, Terminator Zero still manages to feel fresh. In part, that’s due to the anime aesthetic and Japanese setting. But more importantly, it offers a radical twist on the franchise’s typical style of cyberpunk dystopia, balancing classic material with new ideas. But with all the various timeline jumps and resets, it can be confusing to keep track of where (and when) everyone is from and what their motives are. So let’s break down everything you need to know.
Wait, what do I need to know from past Terminator films?
Mainly Judgment Day, the defining event of the Terminator canon, when, on August 29, 1997, the artificial intelligence Skynet becomes self-aware. Perceiving humanity as an existential threat, it launches a nuclear attack that leads to an extended war between humans and machines. In the original film’s version of 2029, both sides send time-traveling soldiers — Kyle Reese and a Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) — back to 1984 to duke it out over a young woman named Sarah Connor, whose future son, John, will grow up to lead the human resistance. Terminator 2 ends with Sarah and 10-year-old John preventing Judgment Day. Later films feature alternate versions of these characters, battling different enemies in other dystopian timelines. Judgment Day is the inciting incident at the heart of Terminator Zero, happening differently from how it plays out in the movies.
So, what happens in Terminator Zero?
Terminator Zero introduces Malcolm Lee and his three children (Kenta, Reika, and Hiro) as a new analog to Sarah and John Connor, a family who will shape the future of human civilization. Workaholic Malcolm is consumed by a single-minded quest to launch Kokoro, a rival artificial intelligence to Skynet before Skynet obliterates the world, a future he’s already seen because he’s secretly a time traveler from 2045.
Terminator Zero’s premise is shaped by three acts of time travel, beginning with Malcolm’s. Born in 2025, Malcolm Lee grows up in a postapocalyptic future. As a child soldier, he fights against Skynet and its machines, developing a fascination with cyborg technology. Eventually, his experiments with robotics lead him to be ostracized by the resistance movement. When he creates his cyborg companion, Misaki, in 2045, the other humans try to destroy her, and he resolves to kill them to save her. Knowing that Skynet will come online on August 29, 1997, he builds a time machine so they can both travel to 1983. He and Misaki spend the next 14 years perfecting Kokoro’s AI with the hopes of convincing Kokoro of humankind’s moral worth. At some point in Kokoro’s creation, Misaki sacrifices her CPU to launch Kokoro’s AI, losing her memories in the process and adopting a new identity as a human nanny.
On August 29, 1997, Malcolm is racing to finish Kokoro before Skynet can launch its nuclear attack when two other time travelers arrive: a Terminator (voiced by Timothy Olyphant) and Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno), a human resistance soldier, both of whom want to prevent the launch of Kokoro. The Terminator is a relentless killing machine with more unsettling vibes than Arnold Schwarzenegger’s OG cyborg assassin, and he’s determined to kill Malcolm. Meanwhile, Eiko wants to save Malcolm and protect his kids while opposing Kokoro. The children are also helped by Misaki, who is unaware of her nonhuman origins and believes herself to be their nanny.
As Eiko, Misaki, the Terminator, and the children play cat and mouse throughout Tokyo, Malcolm and Kokoro continue their work. Kokoro’s onscreen role presents an interesting departure from the movies. While some of the later sequels do give Skynet a humanoid avatar (i.e., Matt Smith in Terminator Genisys), Kokoro goes a lot further. She’s a fully fledged main character here, and much of her screen time focuses on moral debates with Malcolm. He’s torn on whether to let Kokoro go online, fearing the potential repercussions. Yet he hopes that by giving Kokoro free will and access to all of human knowledge, she’ll decide that Skynet was wrong to see humans as an existential threat and will protect them from Skynet’s nuclear attack.
In the end, Malcolm is half right: Kokoro decides to protect humankind, but only manages to shield Tokyo. She also establishes herself as a tyrannical AI babysitter, quickly taking control of society and using her robot army to kill any human who tries to resist. After Kokoro’s takeover, we learn of two additional twists: Eiko is an alternate version of Malcolm’s mother, and a future version of Kenta sent the Terminator to 1997.
And how does all this affect the various Terminator timelines?
While the Terminator franchise canon is notoriously convoluted, this scenario illustrates a straightforward way to cut through the confusion: Each act of time travel creates a new timeline, overwriting every story that came before.
Just before Eiko travels back to 1997, her adviser — a woman known as the Prophet — explains that “time travel sends you back to a past, not the past.” Eiko realizes that rather than traveling back through her own timeline, she’s going to arrive in a brand-new version of 1997. As the Prophet puts it, “Every instance of time travel, every time someone has stepped foot into one of those machines, all they’ve really done is manage to swap out one reality for another.”
This means that Terminator Zero functions as a stand-alone drama featuring a new timeline stemming from Malcolm’s lifelong belief that a benevolent AI can save the world from Skynet.
For movie fans, the important thing to remember here is that we’re now in a different universe from Sarah and John Connor’s core timeline, which was disrupted as soon as Malcolm arrived in 1983. In addition to starting a family in the 1980s, Malcolm has had a noticeable impact on this timeline’s technology. By 1997, Japan is full of rudimentary humanoid robots known as 1NN0, which Kokoro reprograms to become her army on Judgment Day.
We spin out further from the original Terminator timeline when a Terminator travels back from 2022 to 1997, hell-bent on killing Malcolm and preventing Kokoro from coming online. This Terminator comes from a future where Malcolm’s son Kenta has brokered an alliance between humans and machines. The 2022 version of Kenta assumes that the 1997 version of Kenta will agree with his plan to stop Kokoro, but when the Terminator asks young Kenta to deactivate Kokoro, he refuses. Kokoro makes a convincing argument that she’s the only thing protecting humankind from Skynet, and Kenta allows her to take over using the 1NN0 robots.
Meanwhile, Eiko travels back from 2022 in order to protect Malcolm from the Terminator — but she also wants to shut down Kokoro, ominously describing the AI as “a weapon” and “another machine that’ll get us all killed.” In other words, she has reason to believe that Kokoro will become just as dangerous as Skynet. Since she leaves her timeline in 2022, three years before Malcolm’s birth, her version of Malcolm will never be born. After Malcolm dies in the finale, she’s left to care for his three kids.
So what happens next?
Throughout most of the Terminator franchise, there’s a clear delineation between the dystopian future settings and the peaceful normalcy of the present day. Terminator Zero shakes things up by introducing a different kind of AI takeover, one where most of the human population survives, but society goes through a massive upheaval.
The burgeoning human-resistance movement will provide an interesting political backdrop if Terminator Zero returns for season two. Kokoro’s robot army has already sparked a violent response, including a sequence where human rebels try to kill Misaki for her visible cyborg traits. From one perspective, they’re a new twist on the resistance fighters led by John Connor. From another, they’re a reactionary movement that may get everyone killed. If humans decide to fight back en masse, Kokoro might decide that Skynet was right after all.
The finale also lays the groundwork for several individual character arcs, including Misaki struggling with her new identity as a cyborg and Eiko navigating an unfamiliar new timeline. Most importantly, Kenta is ready to take a lead role like John Connor. Speaking of which, we may hear more from the future adult version of Kenta — along with, of course, another Terminator. This show can’t exist without one of those guys onboard.
