To properly subvert an established format, you at first have to play the game in order to lay out the rules that you’re fully intending to screw around with. Take Terminator Zero’s second episode for example, which pretty much has to go through the usual Terminator motions to hopefully set up some far out twists and turns later down the line. But while it does this with all the style you’d expect from the animation studio that gave us Ghost In The Shell, you can’t help feel that in order to set us up for something that could blow the entire franchise wide open (I hope), we’ve got to wade through some classic Terminator stuff to get there.
Thus we get Mode 102, aka. Episode 2, aka. the set up episode that strongly hints that changes are well on the way…
After finding out that Skynet is planning yet another timey wimey attempt to guarantee its own rise to prominence, the human resistance once again plan to counter this move with a dimension spanning checkmate of their own. A high ranking human known as the Prophet (hello, Matrix) has dictated that mankind’s only hope lies with the ass-kicking Eiko who is soon stripped and waiting in the time displacement device that the fleshy ones conveniently have ensconced away. But as she starts on her one way trip to 1997, the Terminator unit she was brawling with last episode makes its dramatic appearance after tacking her back to base and starts blasting while Eiko can only hopelessly watch.
Meanwhile, in 1997, tension is brewing in the Lee household after angsty scientist patriarch, Malcolm, has demanded that his children get rid of a robot cat toy named Koneko that their housekeeper, Misaki, which causes daughter, Reika to run away from home in defiance. The reason that Malcolm is so tense about robotics is that he somehow knows that Skynet’s attack is only hours away and has created his own AI, Kokoro, to counter it – but worryingly, there’s a high chance that she could simply team up with the villainous intelligence instead of fighting it due to humankind having a long history of being awful.
However, after finding out that Reika has gone AWOL and was closely followed by her siblings, Malcolm heads out to find them with Misaki in tow, but when they’re attacked by a robot assassin, Malcolm knows he has to succeed. However, once Eiko appears and temporarily takes the Terminator out, something curious happens that make you wonder who exactly she’s sent back to kill…
If my opening paragraphs made it sound like Terminator Zero has buried itself after a single episode, let me assure you that this simply isn’t the case. In fact, Model 102 does some impressively solid foundation building which takes our stock, human characters and starts to put flesh on their bones. The problem is that to do so, we have to go through the standard first act that every single entry in the Terminator cannon has to go through that starts with the future combatants being zapped back in time and ends with them butting heads for the first – but certainly not the last – time. Between those two poles, however, is a lot of time spent setting things up and while it’s all important stuff, any Terminator fan worth their salt has been through this at least six times before.
Still, as over familiar as a lot of the episode is, it’s still damn cool to see it rendered in hyper stylized animation and even though most of the plot is taken up by shuffling the cast into the roles they’ll be portraying once the dystopian shit really hits the fan, it’s sandwiched between two stock Terminator action scenes. The first sees the faceless T-800 Eiko was scrapping with in the first episode track her down and start blowing away people left and right while she’s powerless to help due to her first class trip to the past being already underway. Not only is it gruesomely graphic, but it brings with it echoes of the police station massarce from the original film and following that, the episode closes with Eiko temporarily thwarting the Terminator sent to wreak havoc after it attacks Malcolm Lee and Misaki on a bridge. And yet despite of some nifty action beats, there’s still a sense that the show hasn’t truly cut loose yet and that it’s simply treading the established Terminator path in order to enact a massive rug pull.
In fact, the clues are already beginning to make themselves known in a couple of telling moments. The first is that there’s already a chance that Lee’s counter AI, Kokoro, is already offering up reasons why she shouldn’t help humanity at all and if unleashed would most likely join Skynet in all the human killing. While this ratchets up the tension with only hours to spare before Judgement Day, another spanner in the work appears to be the question of what Eiko has a totally been sent here to do. After temporarily dispatching her robot nemesis, she corners Misaki demanding to know where Lee is, ranting to the terrified housekeeper that he must be stopped which again raises some fears about the results of the man’s work. However, as he’s going to be safe while locked up in his lab, Eiko surmises that it’s his children who are now the key to getting to him and if she’s figured that, so has her metallic opposite…
Ah yes, the children. While some would have no doubt felt a sinking sensation at the news that a trio of bickering kids would be at the centre of Terminator Zero, let me remind you that even John Connor had to start somewhere and players who are young enough to play a mystery role in the oncoming future must never be riled out in a time travel story. But still, the kid’s mission to track down their robot cat doesn’t entirely inspire confidence, despite the fact that they stumble onto an entire secret stash of the robot worker drones known as 1NNOs. Will this hidden army of robots go all I, Robot and prove to be Skynet’s first wave of proto-Terminators only time will tell, but it’s good to get all the expected stuff out the way early.
A solid episode with many moving parts, Model 2 still suffers somewhat from an understandable lack of answers to familiar questions and the typical physical inconsistencies that frequently come with most sci-fi anime actioners such as Eiko being able to run up the side of a truck as it tips off a bridge, yet struggles to chase down Misaki’s panicking ass.
Still, if I’m being harsh then it’s only because I care and while the pace is fast and the gore plentiful, I can’t wait until the show stops going through the usual, Terminator motions and shows us what it can really do. To paraphrase the the little Mexican boy at the end of the original film: there’s definately a storm coming, but let’s hope it hits us sooner rather than later.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 