Time has alway been something that the Terminator franchise has been acutely interested in since the moment Brad Fedel’s iconic score first played through the speakers of cinemas back in 1984. Be it the mad rush back through time that kicks everything off, the fascination of paradoxes that force time into an unchangeable loop, or the recent revelation that time travel isn’t anything as simple as a mere straight line you just move along, the franchise has focus every ounce of attention it has (when it’s not flipping trucks or being iconic as fuck) on the pliable nature of time. Which is a good thing, because Terminator Zero is fast running out of it.
With only three episodes to go and with a string of rug pulls under its belt, it’s time for Netflix’s anime series to get its ducks in a row before Judgement Day comes and as a result, the show has to ease of the gas slightly.
We begin with a flashback (Or is that a flashforward? – bloody time travel) to the war torn, future hellscape of 2022 where the Prophet discusses the finer points of the paradoxes that inevitably erupt when a murderous AI and desperate humans both start flinging their soldiers back in time to gain a valuable foot hold. By the end of the conversation, Eiko recognises that nothing can truly be changed by going back in time and thus asks the $100,000 question: if going back in time only succeeds in creating a whole new past which leads to an alternative future that doesn’t affect the present in any way (stay with me now), what’s the point in fighting at all?
As we leave Eiko chewing on that moral conundrum, we bounce back to 1997 where both Misaki and her young charges, Hiro and Kenta, are still trying to come to terms with the shocking realisation that Miskai is a cyborg. While Hiro still sees her as the family nanny, Kenta is way more suspicious, which makes sense considering as basic robots named 1NNOs have recently placed the city under siege. However, despite Miskai’s protests that she’s pro-human, that doesn’t stop her from getting emotional at the sight of a ravaged 1NNO carcass or murdering the living shit out of a gang of resistance fighters.
While Kokoro endlessly debates with her creator, Malcolm’s story takes a personal turn when they discuss the death of his wife, Eiko and Reika finally reach the amusement park they’ve been heading for to finally rendezvous with the other group. However, before they can be reunited, the Terminator – sporting his gnarly, new, two-headed, glow up arrives to spoil the reunion.
After the devastating revelations that Terminator Zero has plugged into our memory banks over the last two installments, the show wisely decides to pull back on the earth shattering twists for a bit and just let our characters just soak for a bit – after all, it isn’t every day one of your main charscters is revealed to be a cyborg and time travel as you know it is suddenly re-explained. As a result, the makers of Terminator Zero take some time to completely go over it’s more seismic plot turns in order to make symure that everyone is on the same page. As a result, we have an episode that not only gives itself some breathing room between robot massacres to move its players around to the optimum position in preparation for the big finale, but so.e may find Model 106 to be something of a repetitive episode that simply goes over stuff we already knew.
For example, the episode starts with a scene that sees Eiko and the Prophet hashing out the new and improved rules of time travel that suggests all this “time is a line” stuff is pure bunk and instead ploughs into something more complex. Now while it’s mercifully simpler to grasp than the time travel of, say, Avengers: Endgame, it’s still fairly involved and surprisingly nihilistic. It seems that Skynet’s fucked up its calculations a little when it first came up with the concept of launching Schwarzenegger back through time and instead of ensuring its future by changing the past, all it did was create a new past that will result in an entirely new future. However, the catch is that the old future isn’t actually overwritten but still exists on a separate timeline, so all Skynet’s been doing is just creating new timelines all along which never actually succeeded in cementing the future it originally started from. As a result, the humans technically haven’t achieved anything either, only succeeding in creating a different future for themselves while the loved ones they left behind still suffer in a techno-hell. As fascinating and helpful as this all is, its stuff that was already covered (although not as deeply) in the previous episode and so it only acts as a refresher to those who didn’t catch it last time.
While we also get Malcolm sharing the story of his wife’s death in a car crash, the bulk of the rest of the episode concerns Misaki trying to come to terms with her new status quo as a cyborg built to raise Malcolm’s children and while we’re yet to receive any flashbacks detailing this, we do see that the hapless housekeeper is now torn between two worlds. Her desire to protect the children is absolute, but she still feels a kinship with all the mindless 1NNOs stomping around in a hive mind that are holding the city hostage and after she sees one strung up as a warning by the rag tag human resistance, she seems to exhibit genuine grief. However, that doesn’t stop her ripping through a band of humans who are threatened by her non-human appearance and threaten the Lee children in her care. It’s a legitimately shocking moment seeing the formally timid nanny suddenly go into “instant kill” mode and headbutt the brains clean out of a man’s skull and it certainly shits Kenta up plenty who hasn’t trusted Misaki since the moment the Terminator ripped her arm off. And yet, despite the character drama and that burst of super cool violence, it’s still not exactly covering anything we didn’t already know and the whole point of the episode purely seems to be to get everyone into the same place in order to carry us on to the finale.
While it’s nice to see everyone meet up, the Terminator also seems to be programmed to be a party pooper and makes its presence felt before the reunion can take place, understandably freaking out Kenta with his bizarre new, multiple-headed look and taking him hostage and we’re now obviously set for a final showdown at Malcolm’s lab.
It seems obvious to me that still further revelations are planned as we are still no closer to discovering how both Malcolm and the Prophet know so much about the future and the nature of time travel when Skynet doesn’t. Are the characters we’ve been following in the present actually character in the future? Is Misaki actually remodeled into the Prophet? Is Eiko actually a grown up Reika from another timeline? Am I just making this all up? Possibly. Probably. But in the world of Terminator Zero, only time will tell.
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