But then Terminator faltered. Don’t get me wrong, I have always enjoyed the franchise, but the trouble with time travel movies is that there is no permanence to storytelling. There are no risks or rewards because of the idea that once you travel back then your home time ceases to exist and can not be returned to.

Terminator Zero is no different from this perspective. The story centers in Japan, following Malcolm Lee, a tech creator and giant of the industry. He has a family that he slightly ignores because of work. Both an American and a Japanese tendency. His children, Kenta is smart son and into tech like dad, Hiro is a rambunctious son, Reika is the emotionally distraught daughter still dealing with the loss of their mother. Misaki appears to be a nanny type figure in the kids lives whose role isn’t fully defined at first.

Lee has a timeline on a project that he insists on being a priority over his life and family. The project is about an A.I. called Kokoro that he is trying to convince to save humanity. From what? Well Skynet. This story takes place in 1997 a few days before Skynet is set to go live. Lee knows this is about to happen and created Kokoro specifically to counter Skynet, but the A.I. has to be convinced because it has watched humanity and kinda seems to think we suck. Which Lee hasn’t helped with his leaving his family to hyper focus on Skynet.

But this is a Terminator movie. Backtracking a bit, at the beginning of the first episode we had a Terminator travel back in time. The resistance prepares to quickly send someone back to fight against it. And they explain that the window to that past is only open for a short time, so they have to hurry. Eiko is sent back.

So we have three stories going sort of. Lee with Kokoro. Terminator trying to stop Lee. And Eiko who is actually trying to stop both the Terminator and Lee. Eiko wants to stop Lee because her future knowledge comes with the awareness that the A.I. he is about to unleash isn’t going to help humanity. This sets up a wild ride as we don’t have any clear hero to root for. If Lee thinks he is doing something good, but it is going to backfire, then he needs to be stopped. But the Terminator wants to kill him and that usually is a sign that Lee must be about to do something that will negatively impact Skynet. Eiko almost seems to be a chaos factor because she wants to stop it all. The only thing that shifts for Eiko is in protecting Reika and Lee’s children from the Terminator. A role Misaki also carries out when the children are separated from each other and she has Kenta and Hiro.

I touched on the problem with the franchise and using time travel as a plot device. Every story put out creates its own reality thereby making the others irrelevant. Each movie was exciting in its own way, but had no staying power. I’m hoping we get a Terminator Zero season 2 because this Terminator world is really well developed. It reminds me of the Now comics franchise that came out between the original movie and the T2 film. It ran for 17 issues and two mini series for an additional 7. This series put out a cohesive story that stuck with a timeline and dealt with different things rather than every story being a reset scenario.

I don’t want to spoil too much about Terminator Zero because it did have a lot of great moments in it. If you enjoy this franchise, you will like what they did here. Beyond that, you would enjoy the Now comics. Not knocking the Dark Horse ones, those were good too. Worth looking into on all fronts.

This series gets a solid 9 from me. 8 Episodes of about 28 minutes each, so less than 4 hours (especially as I’m sure the runtime includes credits which streaming conveniently offers to auto skip for you, so probably more like 3:15 for a time investment.) Let’s be honest, you are likely going to binge it anyway, and it winds up not being much different from a typical James Cameron viewing.