Netflix’s Terminator Zero Anime Is Terminated

Remember when Netfflix had that Terminator anime going? Yeah, there’s a reason you haven’t heard anything about it in a while. It’s now been confirmed Terminator Zero will only have one season.

It’s nice that Netflix finally admitted it, right? …Well, they didn’t. The news came from showrunner and writer Mattson Tomlin, who was asked on social media what the status of Terminator Zero was. He ripped the band-aid off and flatly told his fan “It was cancelled.”

Tomlin claims “the critical and audience reception to it was tremendous,” but paradoxically says “not nearly enough people watched it.” He says he “would’ve loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season’s 2 and 3, but I’m also very happy with how it feels contained as is.”

Terminator Zero was an alternate take on the now well-worn story, centered in Japan and on Malcolm Lee, a scientist living in Tokyo in 1997. Disturbed by apocalyptic visions, he  builds an advanced AI system called KOKORO, not to hasten the rise of Skynet but to fight it. Skynet finds out what he’s doing and sends a Terminator after him, but Eiko, a guardian from the resistance, also comes back to protect Malcolm and his family.

The show starred Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka, Dishonored 2) as the voice of KOKORO, André Holland (Moonlight, The Knick) as the voice of Malcolm Lee. Sonoya Mizuno (House of the Dragon, Crazy Rich Asians) as Eiko, and Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Justified) as the nameless Terminator. Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale, MASS) played an old woman in the future called The Prophet, described as “the philosophical guide for the human resistance.”

I tried watching this series but fell out of it after two or three episodes, and the box just hung there at the end of my list until unceremoniously disappearing a couple months later. I guess it didn’t wow me that much. The Terminator franchise still remains directionless, as every attempt to revitalize it in the last twenty years has fizzled out.