[COLUMN] Terminator Zero Injects Some Much-Needed Chaos Into the Franchise | by Darren Mooney

There is a revealing scene around the midpoint of the first episode of Terminator Zero, the new anime series based on the Terminator franchise. A service robot known as an 1NNO (Thomas Bromhead) is walking through Tokyo, only to be attacked by a small dog named Indie. The robot scares the dog away, sending it out into the street. With the canine standing in the middle of the road, a driver swerves wildly to avoid it. He crashes his car. It’s a chaotic, random accident.

Terminator Zero returns repeated to the idea of accidents. Inventor Malcolm Lee (André Holland) is developing an artificial intelligence named Kokoro (Rosario Dawson), in the hopes that it can fight the ascent of the genocidal artificial intelligence Skynet. Lee is a single father to three children, Kenta (Armani Jackson), Reika (Gideon Adlon) and Hiro (Carter Rockwood). His wife passed three years earlier in another, separate automobile accident.

Lee is a time traveler from an alternate future, one where Skynet became self-aware and launched a war to exterminate humanity. The entire Terminator franchise is effectively a war across time, as humans and artificial intelligences continually send assassins into the past to alter the flow of history to serve their interests. “For a moment, I actually considered the possibility that someone had assassinated her in an attempt to get to me,” Lee confesses. “To try to end my work.”

However, he admits, “But then I realized it wasn't a conspiracy. And it wasn't fate, either. She didn't die sacrificing herself for some greater good, or to save another life. She died because her head made impact with a piece of metal when a bus driver had a heart attack, and crashed. It was random. No great meaning, just... bad luck. And that's just the way things go sometimes. Her death was tragic and meaningless. There was no point. It's just something that happened.”

This is interesting, because it’s a clear point of contention between Zero and the larger Terminator franchise. The Terminator films are very much about fate. The central tension of the series is the push and pull between predeterminism and free will. Is Skynet inevitable? Can history be rewritten? Does trying to fight the future only help to realize it? Is the development of a genocidal artificial intelligence unavoidable, whether it is Skynet from the early films or Legion from Dark Fate?

For the better part of four decades, the Terminator franchise has been caught between these two extremes. There is a credible argument to be made that this tension fundamentally broke the film series. The franchise’s one undisputed sequel, James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, is essentially built around validating the argument that “the future is not set. There is no fate, but what we make for ourselves.” It’s a powerhouse ending to one of the best blockbusters ever made.

The problem is that the perpetuation of the Terminator franchise is predicated on the negation of the triumphant humanist ending of Judgment Day. Any Terminator sequel must be based on the assumption that there is nothing that the protagonists can do to prevent the machine apocalypse. This may explain why there have been no fewer than four attempts to make a direct sequel to Judgment Day, each ignoring the others: Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys, Dark Fate.

In each of these films, there is a clear conflict between two competing visions of how history is shaped. Is history driven by some unseen force that guides it towards unpreventable outcomes, making the apocalypse inevitable? Or are human beings masters of their own fate, capable of shaping the future through their own decisions and will? The Terminator franchise seems to argue that history is written, and the series is an argument over who gets to wield the pen.

Zero is another direct sequel to Judgment Day. The bulk of the series unfolds in the final days of August 1997, the date of Skynet’s activation in Judgment Day. It ignores the shifting timeline of later films like Rise of the Machines or Genisys. Instead, the show unfolds in parallel to Judgment Day, with the action unfolding in Japan rather than in the United States. This gives the series a unique perspective on the franchise, reflected in the anime’s distinctive visual style.

Interestingly, Zero is predicated on the assumption that the end of the world is not a fixed or singular point. As an American film series that peaked in popularity towards the end and in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the Terminator films exist within the context of “the end of history” and “the roaring nineties.” As such, the threat of the apocalypse – often tied to the arrival of the new millennium – had a very abstract and existential quality to it.

In shifting its emphasis to Japan, Zero makes the argument that the apocalypse is not a single definitive event, but instead something that happens continuously and perpetually. The world is always ending. After all, while Skynet used its power to bring about a nuclear apocalypse, Kokoro points out that Japan remains the only nation on earth to have experienced the use of nuclear bombs as weapons of war. Japan has experienced that nuclear apocalypse firsthand.

The specter of nuclear apocalypse looms large over Zero. Much of the show takes place in the tunnels built beneath Tokyo, an expansive complex connecting various parts of the city. “It was built back in the 1950s, because of the war,” Reika explains of the complex. “It was supposed to be part of a whole underground city, in case the bombs came again.” It is a nice metaphor for Zero itself – a narrative playing out “beneath” Judgment Day – but it also speak to the show’s larger themes.

Early in the series, time traveler Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) asks Lee’s maid and nanny Misaki (Sumalee Montano) where she can procure a firearm. Misaki points out that Japan has a very different attitude towards guns than the United States. However, Misaki shares an anecdote. “Two years ago, there was an incident on the subway,” she explains. “It was a terrorist attack. It was horrible. Like some kind of nightmare. The perpetrators didn't need guns. Just a small amount of chemicals.”

Misaki is talking about the terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, in which sarin nerve gas killed 13 people and injured 6,000. The attack was masterminded by Aum Shinrikyo, a doomsday cult that believed the third world war was inevitable and fast approaching. As such, there is a strong sense within Zero that Japan thinks about the end of the world in a very different way than the United States, and so the Terminator mythos means something different in that context.

Zero even goes so far as to argue that the apocalypse can be a personal experience as much as a cultural one. Lee’s wife died in that freak bus accident in late August, the same date that Skynet would come online just a few years later. “My judgment day,” Lee muses when explaining the finer details of the tragedy to Kokoro. (In this context, it is notable that the two atomic bombs were also dropped on Japan in August 1945.)

There is a strong sense pervading Zero that the world is random and chaotic, that accidents happen in service of no greater purpose and for reasons beyond the comprehension of those involved. In the larger context of the Terminator franchises, this is a truly radical idea. The previous films in the series all operate from the assumption that some hand is guiding events, that some plan is shaping the outcome – whether that force is an abstract concept like fate or the will of the human protagonists.

Zero finds a fresh angle on this old and tired franchise by proposing its own counterpoint. What if there is no plan? What if there is no fate but also no will? What if the outcome of events isn’t predetermined by some external force or by mankind’s belief in their own power of self-determination? What if it’s all random? What if it’s all chaos? What if it isn’t destiny or purpose, but just blind luck? That’s a horrifying and unsettling thought, and it upends the Terminator mythology.

In the show’s second episode, the human resistance plans to send Eiko back in time to stop Skynet from reprogramming Kokoro. “Do you really know what’s going to happen?” Eiko asks the leader of the group, known only as “the Prophet” (Anne Dowd). “Or is this all just bullshit?” The wise old lady explains the stakes and the situation very clearly, “Listen to me. Try to understand: no one knows what will happen. You have no fate, child. That is the fucking point.”

This idea of randomness and unknowability ties back into the core themes of Zero, and the conversation that the show is having with the larger Terminator franchise. After all, the Terminator films remain one of the most iconic depictions of artificial intelligence in popular culture, and artificial intelligence is arguably more of a hot-button issue than it has been at any point in human history. Zero is fascinated by the alien nature of artificial intelligence.

“People don’t know how things actually work anymore,” Lee explains to Kenta. “Makes them weak and vulnerable.” Kenta takes things apart to see how they work. However, Lee doesn’t seem to have that option with Kokoro. He has to talk with her. He cannot know what she is thinking. Crucially, he cannot know how she will act if he releases her into the wild. “You believe I have the power to save you,” she observes. “But how do you know that I will?” He can’t. There is no fate, only faith.

This is one of the more unsettling aspects of recent advances in artificial intelligence. Modern large language models produce seemingly random and unreliable data, which is impossible to replicate. It is also impossible to know why they produce the materials that they do. Zero takes that very modern anxiety about the development of artificial intelligence, and weaves it into both the themes and the plot of the show. In a show about fate and history, Zero argues that nobody truly knows anything.

This gets at the relative freshness of Terminator Zero. Early on, there is an emphasis on the idea of a closed circuit. Lee keeps Kokoro isolated. “No outside electronic devices” are allowed at Cortex Industries. When he communes with Kokoro, he orders, “No one comes in, no interruptions.” It’s hermetically sealed. However, outside elements are necessary. In the show’s opening action sequence, Eiko escapes a Terminator by “compromising” its system with an “unauthorized upload.” She literally injects something new into the Terminator.

For decades, the franchise has been stuck in a perpetual loop, repeating and rehashing the same plot points, thematic arcs and familiar debates. “Is this a time loop?” Eiko asks in the finale. “Do you know what's going to happen, or are we just going in circles?” Zero represents a clear attempt to break out of that cycle, by introducing new elements, a new perspective and an emphasis on randomness to the Terminator mythos. Sometimes a little chaos isn’t a bad thing.