How Netflix’s Terminator Zero Reboots the Franchise Timeline Explained

Netflix’s Terminator Zero anime series takes the franchise canon into some bold new directions while managing to pay homage to every Terminator film that came before it. By the end of the season, we have an entirely new stage for not only the anime series characters and story to continue – but arguably a new conceptual framework for Terminator movies to build, too. After so many years of stumbling reboot attempts (Terminator Salvation; Genisys; Dark Fate), Terminator Zero arguably cracks the code on updating the Terminator lore or modern times, while still being firmly planted in the world that James Cameron established in his first two films. 

WARNING: This Article Contains MAJOR SPOILERS! 

The story of Terminator Zero follows Malcolm Lee (André Holland/Yuuya Uchida), a tech-wiz scientist and widower, working in 1997 Tokyo, Japan, where he has secretly been developing a new AI computer system called Kokoro after seeing visions of Judgement Day’s imminent arrival. Malcolm and Kokoro become the targets of both Skynet and the human resistance, in a new future timeline where Kokoro’s war with Skynet has become the new threat to the world. A single terminator is sent back to kill Malcolm and shutdown Kokoro, while the resistance sends a soldier named Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno/Toa Yukinari) to protect Malcolm and his kids, while warning the intrepid scientist not to launch his AI creation, or else doom the world. 

Terminator Zero Ending Explained 

Several big twists in Terminator Zero’s ending involve false identities and time travel loops: 

The first reveal is that Malcolm Lee is a time traveler from one of the earliest Terminator future timelines (the original film or T2). Malcolm, a genius programmer, and Resistance fighter, developed a cutting-edge new AI entity, which he loaded into a robot body named “Misaki” (Sumalee Montano/Saori Hayami). Unlike Skynet, Misaki was open to assessing humanity’s potential for co-existence with machines, based on observation and experience – unfortunately, the rest of the Human Resistance saw Malcolm’s experiment as treason and sought to kill him and destroy Misaki. Instead, Malcolm killed a squad of resistance soldiers and fled; he and Misaki built their own time machine and used it to travel back to late 1980s Japan, where they built Kokoro as an exponentially more advanced AI deterrent to Skynet. There were two wrinkles in the plan, however: 

1. Malcolm fell in love and had children. 
2. Misaki’s CPU is needed to fully activate Kokoro, leaving her original robot body a blank slate, which Malcolm disguised as a human live-in nanny/guardian for his children. 

Another big ending reveal is that Eiko is Malcolm’s mom. When Malcolm is finally killed by the Terminator, he reveals the truth to Eiko and tasks her with partnering with Misaki to raise and protect his children, who are implied to have a greater role in the future war. 

That certainly proves to be true of Malcolm’s eldest son (and engineering prodigy) Kenta Lee (Armani Jackson/Hiro Shimono). In another big ending twist, it’s revealed that it was Kenta (not Skynet) who sent the Terminator back in time to stop Malcolm and Kokoro. Kenta learns that he grows up to be a leader who brokers the first-ever peace between Skynet and humanity – a peace threatened by the Resistance and its time travel operatives. Kenta’s Terminator gives him the option to fry Kokoro with an EMP or trust in a new future being possible; despite all the death and darkness he witnesses, Kenta ultimately chooses to trust in his dad and let Kokoro take up the task of protecting humanity. 

Eiko and Misaki end up hiding in a bomb shelter with Kenta and Malcolm’s other children, to wait and see what new future may be waiting for them. 

How Terminator Zero Reboots the Franchise Timeline

Terminator Zero has several key scenes that attempt to fix the convoluted knot of the franchise timeline. The Terminator anime posits that every single time a Terminator and/or resistance fighter went back in time, they created a new alternate version of the future. This gives validity to each installment of the Terminator films, which have all added new tweaks to how Judgement Day occurs, and what happens in the aftermath of the future war: they’re new timelines constantly being written over the previous ones. 

That said, changing the future by going to the past is compared to trying to swim up a waterfall – meaning that even though you can change the context of how it happens, that major future event is most likely still going to occur. The difference between the other Terminator films and Terminator Zero is that Malcolm Lee doesn’t try to stop the inevitability of machines from evolving and gaining self-awareness: he tries to guide that process in a way that gives humanity and machines a chance at co-existence. 

That opens the door for the Terminator franchise to enter a new era. Zero makes it clear that there are complicated shades of gray on either side of the war: Kokoro is an uncertain ally to humanity; some humans (like Kenta and Malcolm) defect from humanity’s side to join with machines, while machines like Misaki show machines can also defect and join humanity’s side. Those new nuances restore the potential for new Terminator projects to play a more compelling game of time travel chess, with the theme of “No Fate” taking on exciting new meanings. 

Terminator Zero is streaming on Netflix.