Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series.

The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet. Malcolm Lee, its creator, makes poor arguments for human survival. Again hubris. If we were looking to enlist an artificial champion we would hope our most talented minds would engage with it to build our case. But no, here we have the heartbroken computer scientist who can’t muster enthusiasm for his own children. This is the man who thinks he can use philosophy and rhetoric to prevent the AI he has built from agreeing with the army of red-eyed metal skeleton killers on the way.

The balance here as in other movies is the idea that Skynet has overwhelming technical superiority but is too inept to finish the job its nuclear strike started. But then, "AI wipes out humans and now reigns over cockroaches" isn’t that much of a story. Here we get a robot action girl, a human action girl and three ghastly children. By anime standards it doesn’t look like the state of the art. It's too computer animated and looks cheap at times.

The flaw in this show is that it attempts to ask questions the premise was never designed to answer. Terminator is a story about a stalker who cannot be reasoned with looking to kill a person who has to save themselves. It was never more complicated than that. While Skynet creator, Miles Dyson, should have engaged in four hours of philosophical meditation before building the thing that destroyed humanity, the rest of us don't need that. You can skip this series.