Time travel will never not be confusing. Even when the rules are clearly explained, loopholes and questions remain, especially in sci-fi stories that take place in a time loop.
The Terminator saga has long favored loops; would Skynet’s obsession with changing the past even matter otherwise? Each Terminator film follows the omniscient AI as it sends a cyborg assassin into the past to assassinate someone destined to one day lead an uprising against it. The future informs the past again and again: John Connor is only born because Kyle Reese goes back in time to save his mother, Sarah, and he only survives because the Resistance continues to send reprogrammed Machines back to protect him.
For decades, the franchise existed in a perpetual cycle. It wasn’t until Terminator Genisys — inarguably the most hated Terminator film — that the status quo began to shift. The film tried to reboot the saga by introducing a branched timeline, and thus a new future for familiar characters. To say this particular remix was poorly received would be an understatement, but it hasn’t stopped the latest Terminator story from trying again, this time with better results.
How Genisys reset the timeline
Genisys began as most Terminator stories do: after Skynet sends its advanced T-800 to the past to murder Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), the human-led Resistance follows suit with a warrior of their own. Sarah is a target because she’s destined to give birth to the leader of the Resistance, John (Jason Clarke), and ironically, it’s John who ends up sending his dad, Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), to protect and eventually fall in love with his mom.
That’s already a lot to keep track of, and things only get more complex. Just as Kyle enters the time machine that will send him to 1984, he witnesses a new Terminator attack John and, long story short, a temporal paradox is born.
When Kyle lands in 1984, it’s an entirely different timeline. The Sarah he meets is not the Sarah that John described at all; instead of a helpless waitress, she’s already become a version of the warrior we meet in T2: Judgment Day. And that’s all thanks to a reprogrammed T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger, naturally) that was somehow sent back in time to rescue her as a child and raise her. Together, Kyle, Sarah, and the Machine she calls “Pops” set out to save a new future.
On paper, all of this is pretty cool, but it hinges on clunky exposition that makes zero sense. Genisys also isn’t interested in smoothing out the kinks of its ambitious premise, instead barreling from one action set piece to the next. It resulted in a film that, for all its good ideas, fails its story at every turn.
How Terminator Zero does it better
From the very beginning, Terminator Zero feels like a radical departure for the franchise, and not just because it’s the first project to try a new medium. Netflix’s anime reboot is also flirting with the same time paradoxes that tied Genisys into knots; rather than using branched realities as a gimmick, Zero makes it an integral part of humanity’s fight against the Machines.
As the Prophet (Ann Dowd) explains in Episode 6, time doesn’t really flow in a straight line, at least not if you’re a time traveler. “Time travel sends you back to a past, not the past,” she tells Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno). “The point in time you’re traveling to, and the point you’re coming from, are different timelines.”
This, she argues, is the reason Skynet continues to fail: whenever it sends a Machine back in time, “all they’ve really done is managed to swap one reality for another.” Every assassin should end up in an entirely new past, which becomes their new present. And even if the Resistance does stop Judgment Day, that would only change the future for one timeline, not the one they came from.
As Eiko prepares to follow in Kyle Reese’s footsteps, she’s forced to grapple with that paradox. Her efforts will save whatever reality she winds up in, but the future she knows will never see the results of her hard work. “If I can’t save the people that I care about here in this time,” she asks, “then what’s the point of any of it?” That question haunts her throughout Terminator Zero, but according to the Prophet, it’s the key to actually defeating Skynet.
With one key scene, Terminator Zero perfects Genisys’ interesting but flawed ideas while remixing the battle between man and machine that’s defined the Terminator saga to the point of tedium. The rules of time travel are still chaotic, but Zero embraces that chaos, creating a surprisingly meaningful story about causality in the process.
