Like the Alien franchise, the Terminator series has been stuck in a rut since its early days, with its subsequent projects failing to recapture the greatness of its first two films. While Netflix’s original anime spin-off, Terminator Zero, doesn’t entirely shake the uncanny sameness of its predecessors, it boldly returns to the series long-lost core theme: “No fate but what we make.”
At first, it seems like Terminator Zero, written by The Batman co-writer Mattson Tomill and animated by Ghost in the Shell studio Production I.G., retreads the same narrative beats of every film from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines to Terminator: Dark Fate: killer robots are going back in time to snuff out humanity. And intially at least, it seems that Terminator Zero is treading that teritory as well, with its time-jumping hero Eiko (played by House of the Dragon’s Sonoya Mizuno) tasked with protecting a scientist and his children from a Terminator hellbent on stopping a rival AI program from thwarting Skynet. To make matters worse, she has 24 hours to save them all from Timothy Olyphant’s terrifying Terminator before Skynet goes online and kickstarts a nuclear holocaust.
But while Terminator Zero’s eight episodes are filled with the typical gory killing sprees and callback catchphrases the series is known for, the anime offers a shocking revelation in its sixth episode: all this time traveling isn’t changing the existing futures, it’s creating separate timelines. Instead of using this twist to deter its hero on the futility of her mission, Terminator Zero weaponizes this revelation to light a fire under Eiko, just like the one that drove Sarah Connor in Terminator 2.
In the original Terminator, time-traveling hero Kyle Reese brings Sarah a message from her son John, the leader of humanity’s resistance in his grim future, which includes the phrase, “The future is not set.” From there, the idea that there is “no fate but what we make” became a refrain in the Terminator films, and though Eiko has learned that she can’t change fate for the people she knows because her actions can only create a new branch in time, rather than alter an existing one, she nonetheless decides that a new present and a completely different future are something worth fighting for. Mix that in with some existential debates between an AI and its creator about whether or not humanity is a disease that should be purged, and a Terminator with a retrofitted crossbow attachment to circumvent Japanese gun laws, and you’ve got a pretty smart anime on your hands.
Speaking with IGN, Tomill recounted how he navigated developing a story for a world that already has its own—albeit uneven—canon while putting his own emotional spin on its storytelling.
“I don’t recommend you do what I did, [but] if you get on Reddit for four seconds, you very quickly go, ‘Okay, there’s a lot of things [fans] don’t want. And then there’s a lot of things that they do, and then there’s kind of this in-between area,’” Tomill said. “And so for me, it’s going on a journey of [asking], ‘Why does this need to exist in 2024? What is it that I have to say that is real, that is emotional?’
He continues: “For me, once I find something emotional and something where [I go], ‘Oh, I can use this as the vessel to tell an emotional story that really means something to me,’ then it’s just a matter of going, ‘Okay, what do people expect?’ Well, they expect Terminators. I think that they expect a level of time travel. They expect, whether or not they would articulate it this way, a story about families. The first movie is a love story between a man and a woman, and the second one is a mother-son story. And so I think it’s about sticking to those tenets and then going, ‘Okay, now I’ve got to just try not to make everybody mad.’”
While your mileage may vary with the Netflix anime’s surface-level moral quandaries, Terminator Zero boasts the best writing the troubled franchise has had in the last 30 years. Hopefully the series will steer clear of leaning on the crutch of Arnold Swarzenegger’s T-800 and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, should it get the green light for a second season.
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