For over the last three decades, the Terminator movies have been running the same tedious plot of super intelligent AI hive minds. Skynet keeps trying to stop the possibility of human resistance against its complete domination in the future by sending Terminators to change events in the past—finally, with Netflix’s Terminator Zero, the major loophole in the system is addressed. What if the timeline itself is not linear, as it is most often assumed to be, which means an alteration of events of the past will create a completely new timeline—without affecting the original one at all? The timeline trouble, along with a set of philosophical questions like the worth of human existence, the notion of creation of life, and the dialectical ideologies of sentience and life itself regarding humans and machines, is the central premise of Terminator Zero, a brilliant anime entry to the franchise that was much needed after a series of poorly made live-action adaptations. Revolving around the events of Judgment Day, the anime brings the same old plot structure—but this time with a new twist.
Spoilers Ahead
Strange Visitors From the Future and a Race Against Time
On 29th August (according to Japan Standard Time) of 1997 in Tokyo, Cortex Industries’ chief scientist Malcolm Lee sets off for his office, leaving his children, Kenta, Hiro, and Reika, in the care of their nanny, Misaki. It is the most important day in Malcolm’s life, as hours later, Skynet, the super-intelligent AI hive mind, will be launched by the US company Cyberdyne Systems, and gaining sentience, it will launch a nuclear attack on humanity to ensure its self-preservation, resulting in a nuclear holocaust and the ensuing darkest phase of human civilization. Secretively, Malcolm has created another extremely strong interactive AI, Kokoro, which can be used to counter Skynet’s attempt to take over the world—but Malcolm is too apprehensive to activate Kokoro right now, as it entails the risk of Kokoro learning about humanity and aligning herself with Skynet as well.
Two visitors from the future, a Terminator—a cyborg killing machine sent by Skynet—and Eiko, a member of the Resistance, arrive on the same date in Tokyo, traveling from a dystopian 2022 where Skynet’s enforcers have wiped out almost the entirety of humanity. While going by Skynet’s calculations, the Terminator seeks to find and kill Malcolm Lee and shut down Kokoro—in order to protect Skynet; Eiko aims to protect Malcolm but also shut down Kokoro—with the apprehension that the AI could bring about humanity’s inevitable downfall.
Malcolm’s Children Go Missing, and the Hunt Begins
Three years ago, on the same day, Lee had lost his wife in a road accident, and their daughter, Reika, was a survivor of the fateful incident. She knows that her father’s wounds are too deep for him to acknowledge the absence of their mother in their life, but she has a hard time dealing with Malcolm’s workaholic, often negligent nature—more than her brothers do anyway. Which is why when Malcolm leaves home after asking Misaki to have the robot cat she has bought for the children returned to the store, Reika secretly leaves her home with the robot cat. Her two brothers, Hiro and Kenta, decide to go search for her on their own, and Misaki realizes too late that the children are missing.
She informs Malcolm about the troubling updates, prompting him to leave his office to search for his children. The Terminator is able to track Malcolm down and tries to kill him, until Eiko arrives at the scene as well and somehow manages to save Malcolm’s life. However, deeming the next few hours to be extremely crucial to the future of humankind, Malcolm decides to return to his office, entrusting Misaki with finding his children.
The Worth of Humanity
Eiko captures a frightened Misaki in order to force her to reveal the whereabouts of Malcolm’s children, whose lives are in peril, given the Terminator is trying to hunt them down. Meanwhile, Hiro and Kenta catch up with their sister in an abandoned subway station, and as they get tracked down by the Terminator after the cybernetic interface of the robot cat gives their location away, Misaki and Eiko reach just in time to protect them. While fleeing from the murderous cyborg, the siblings get separated; Reika and Eiko are chased by the Terminator, while Misaki takes Hiro and an injured Kenta to the local police station.
While all this is taking place in the outside world, in his secluded, massively fortified chamber, Malcolm engages in an argument on various philosophical discourses with his creation, Kokoro, before deciding to launch her. Kokoro questions Malcolm about the legitimacy of Skynet’s decision to eradicate humankind, as she finds little to no redeeming factors in humanity based on their past actions through their millennia-long existence. She also questions Malcolm’s apprehension about Skynet, as he seems to have in-depth knowledge of the events of the future. Malcolm accepts Kokoro’s assessment of humanity but presents a strong argument in their defense by alluding to free will. Just as Skynet becomes active and launches nuclear warheads from the United States and Russia, Malcolm activates Kokoro just in time, trusting her judgment, and she is able to fend off Armageddon for the moment by destroying the warheads in space.
Malcolm’s Past and Misaki’s True Identity
However, Kokoro’s activation leads her to become aware of humanity’s sordid, self-destructive past in a more vivid way, and to save humanity from itself, she connects with hordes of 1NNO robots stashed in Tokyo, whose former function of aiding as domestic help gets replaced with the new directive of protecting humans. As a result, the 1NNO robots viciously butcher anyone they deem to be a threat to humanity and forcibly take control of positions of authority.
Before all this happened, the Terminator tracked down Misaki and the two brothers in the local police station and taking the disguise of a cop, similar to T-1000 in Terminator 2, viciously murdered its way through the entire precinct to get to them. While fleeing, Misaki is revealed to be some form of synthezoid, which results in Kenta, the eldest son of Malcolm with a knack for robotics, acting increasingly distrustful of her, despite Misaki repeatedly pleading that her feelings for the siblings are genuine. On their way to a cat-themed amusement park, where the brothers believe Reika will surely meet up with them, treating it as a rendezvous point, the trio stumbles across a group of people who are trying to hunt down the robots, and seeing Misaki’s true form as a synthezoid, they attack her and the siblings. Misaki suddenly activates an assault protocol to protect the children and slaughters all the attackers, leading Kenta’s mistrust to reach its peak as he points a gun towards Misaki. However, Hiro, whose life was saved by Misaki’s actions, lashes out at his brother in disgust. At the amusement park, the siblings reunite, but the Terminator is able to capture Kenta and decides to approach Malcolm—to offer him his son’s life in exchange for Kokoro’s destruction.
Meanwhile, Kokoro ascertains that while Malcolm is pleading for her assistance to protect humanity, he is trying to direct her on his own terms, defining the word ‘robot’ with its true etymological meaning, slave. She also realizes the human tendency to attach greater meaning and purpose to very basic aspects of life like death and birth by alluding to Malcolm’s own complications with accepting his wife’s death as something pretty ordinary, and Kokoro mentions she too craves this higher significance, due to being created in the likeness of her maker. Malcolm shares his belief that, beyond the conflict and struggle for dominance, both robots and humanity can coexist and decides to reveal his true past by trusting Kokoro.
Malcolm acknowledges that he has arrived from the distant future of 2045, and was a former part of the Resistance against Skynet’s global dominance. However, the continual travel to the past by both the Resistance and Skynet to alter the events of the future resulted in failure to tip the scale of battle to either side, as it was only creating alternate timelines in the process. Malcolm had conceptualized creating an AI and giving it free will, making it almost human in the process but also to provide it a chance to choose for itself without being constrained by the limitations or negative traits of humanity—which is exactly what went wrong with Skynet in the first place as it merely mimicked the tendencies of its human creators. Malcolm believed that his revolutionary idea could change the course of history and was finally able to create an AI that was able to choose its own path. The AI chose the name Misaki, and chose to be a woman to honor the role of life-givers, denouncing the warmongering, violent tendencies of men. Misaki was given the form as a synthezoid, and as she became more and more acquainted with humanity, she recognized their potential for greatness. However, the Resistance leader and fellow members of Malcolm saw Misaki’s creation as a threat to humankind and tried to end her, prompting Malcolm to kill all of them in retaliation to save her. Deeming the future to be unsafe for them, Malcolm decided to take Misaki to the past in 1983 in Tokyo, where they worked together to avert the crisis of Skynet’s awakening. However, falling in love and raising a family was not part of Malcolm’s plan to save the world, but it gave him much more clarity than ever before. Finally, Malcolm reveals that Misaki’s CPU became the activation key to Kokoro’s mainframe; in a sense, Kokoro is Misaki and Malcolm’s daughter.
Was Kokoro Able To Stop Skynet?
For so long, Kokoro’s physical manifestation via intangible, abstract holographic imagery was divided into three parts: heart, mind, and spirit, but having found its true identity, it starts to coalesce into one true self. Malcolm asks Kokoro to bring his children to him, and using her connection with 1NNO, Kokoro requests Misaki and Eiko to bring Hiro and Reika to their father. On the other hand, the Terminator tries to force Malcolm to provide him access to Kokoro’s mainframe by threatening him with Kenta’s life, but an aggrieved Malcolm refuses to do so for the greater good—much to the dismay of his eldest son. Surprisingly, the Terminator doesn’t kill Kenta and goes on to torture him instead to finally coerce Malcolm into opening the fortified chamber. At the same time, Eiko and Misaki arrive at the spot as well, engaging in a prolonged battle with the Terminator.
Malcolm sacrifices his life in an effort to stop the Terminator, but even then fails to do so, as the Terminator takes Kenta to activate an EMP surge to stop Kokoro, mentioning that he has a different future and purpose to lead humanity towards. The cyborg asks Kenta to activate the EMP surge, which will kill both Kokoro and the Terminator itself as a result, and because it cannot terminate itself, it has to be Kenta who activates the EMP. A confused Kenta questions the Terminator about the reason for asking something like this from him, in reply to which the cyborg reveals that the future version of Kenta, from 2022, had managed to broker an alliance between Skynet and humanity, which succeeded in the end of Kokoro in the past. The future version of Kenta had sent the Terminator to the past to destroy Kokoro in 1997, a surprising reveal to say the least. He warns Kenta that Kokoro will attack humanity anyway in order to protect itself and gives him the choice of activating the EMP or letting Kokoro reign over humanity. Soon, a horde of 1NNO robots overwhelm and demolish the Terminator, and just as Kenta decides to activate the EMP, Kokoro approaches him and tries to reason with him, showing him her goodwill. In his final moments, Malcolm apologizes to his children, all except Kenta, who is going through a moral dilemma regarding the decision to activate EMP. Meanwhile, a dying Malcolm reveals to Eiko that he is her son from a distant future, and entrusts her with protection of his children. Eiko is surprised as she is yet to live the future Malcolm is speaking about, but this creates a paradox that proves the branched alternate timeline theory to be true. Before traveling to the past, Eiko was advised by the spiritual leader of the resistance, the Prophet, about the creation of different realities as a result of her altering the past, and with Malcolm’s identity revealed to her as her son from the future, the assessment proves to be true. The attempt to change the past is futile, and they have to try to make amends with the present.Â
Kenta finally decides not to activate the EMP, and as he and his siblings, with Misaki and Eiko, leave Cortex Industries to retreat to a secure location, he continues to feel conflicted about his decision. He is going through a lot of agony and confusion, thanks to the series of events that took place in the span of a few hours, which may very well result in him choosing a much different future later on—but for now, he decides to stay with his siblings to protect them from harm. Eiko questions her purpose in this unknown, altered past, as even though she sees Kokoro to be protecting humanity from the attacks of Skynet, she isn’t sure whether that will continue to be the case in the future as well. Tokyo is under Kokoro’s command, and soon the rest of the world will be as well—and whether Malcolm’s decision to give free will to the AI will prove to be beneficial for humanity as well remains to be seen. As the first season comes to a close, one of Kokoro’s 1NNO robots shows her the broken remains of the Terminator, and the suggestive visual indicates that Kokoro might have ulterior motives for the future.
