Terminator Zero Fixes the Franchise’s Major Problems

It’s one of the best anime of the year, and the best Terminator since The Sarah Connor Chronicles, in part because it brilliantly avoids the confusing storylines that came before. But rather than completely avoiding the countless sequels, Zero justifies them by finally explaining the physics of what’s going on.

Terminator is a never-ending time war

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So far, we’ve seen Skynet and the human resistance send soldiers into the past time and time again in an attempt to outdo each other. The AI ​​wants to eliminate the Connor family because Sarah’s son John will lead our uprising against the machines. Meanwhile, future John continues to send soldiers to intercept these assassins.

Time travel seems to operate on the idea that humans are seeking to influence a singular timeline, to either cause change or prevent it. So far, humanity’s defense has held firm (go team!).

But all of this has resulted in a time war that has become utterly incoherent. Terminator and T2: Judgment Day followed a certain level of logic, but Rise of the Machines, Genisys, and Dark Fate have pushed action movies into hopelessly convoluted territory. Salvation avoids all of this by following the adult John in his battle against the machines.

There have been multiple assassination attempts on John, one of them successful, and numerous Model Ts. The timeline is now incredibly tangled, not to mention Genisys’ abandoned plans to start a trilogy, leaving even more threads dangling.

Zero tackles absurd timeline

Terminator Zero addresses this topic in a monologue about what it means to travel through time and space. The Prophet explains the sacrifice Eiko makes by traveling to 1997 to find Malcolm Lee before the new T-machine does.

“Time just flows in a straight line,” she says in episode 6, “Model 6.” “But time travel takes you back to a past, not the past itself.”

Eiko asks if time traveling means she’s moving to another timeline, and the Prophet confirms that it does. “The time you’re traveling to and the time you’re from are different timelines,” the Prophet explains.

“Every time someone has traveled through time, every time they’ve stepped into one of these machines, they’ve simply succeeded in replacing one reality with another. It’s an imprecise science, and we’re simply swimming in chaos.”

Terminator is actually a multiverse (sort of)

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In other words, the future someone comes from is canceled once they reach the past, where they now build a whole new tomorrow with every action they take. Terminator is now a multiverse, but with no possibility of any of the branching timelines touching each other (yet).

The problem is that Skynet has not yet figured this out. The AI ​​has neither considered nor taken into account the paradoxes inherent in all the assassins it sends, operating solely on survival instinct and according to the available data. Skynet is “blind to the truth”, as the Prophet says.

Terminator, T2, Rise of the Machines, each installment is essentially its own present, stripped of any artifice related to the future where the T-800s, T-1000s or whatever come from, because that tomorrow no longer exists. A little hard to understand, but the gist is that each sequel is its own trench warfare about Judgment Day and what comes after.

It’s a poetic explanation that finally brings some logic to the pile of garbage that Terminator’s internal logic has become. There’s a little more reason for everything, and the added problem is that Skynet operates on imperfect information, because the AI ​​can only regurgitate data; it can’t discern it, hypothesize it, or reason with it.

What happens next is still uncertain. Terminator Zero’s ending has given way to another season, even though James Cameron has been threatening to return to his iconic franchise for years. As the Prophet says, tomorrow is up to us.

I can say one thing for sure: I won’t be rewatching Dark Fate or Genisys. If you want a slightly less complicated anime, check out our guides to Dandadan and Dragon Ball Daima.