Terminator Zero

This was pretty solid. Not the greatest ever but was worth the watch. Was a lot of filler with the kids in the first half of the season.

This is a high-quality show. Watched the first half or so of it over the weekend. Wish there were more than eight episodes.

I do have a complaint though. The main heroine is, get this, vastly physically overpowered. She had a terminator hanging from her foot at one point and managed to kick it off of her. How much do those things weigh?

Then a couple episodes later she gets into a martial arts fight with another terminator. She loses*, but nobody should be getting into martial arts fights with terminators, especially not a 110 pound person. 300 pound prime-era Hulk Hogan would lose a physical altercation with a terminator in seconds.

* - And IIRC she only loses because the terminator cheats, lol.

Then there's the way she pushed a terminator like 20 feet into an elevator shaft. At that point I start wondering if she's supposed to have bionic enhancements in the story, like that one character in Dark Fart? Like my suspension of disbelief can only take so much here. I thought "well maybe they're easy to push?" but then an episode later a large man tries to push a terminator and it doesn't budge.

So uh...

Basically the same issue I had with the Castlevania anime and some Marvel movies, they try to make certain characters "look strong" at the expense of the continuity or believability.

They did a fantastic job making the terminators look like a threat for the first time since the original movies, just an absolute unstoppable menace... then they kinda un-do a lot of it trying to make the MC look strong. Hopefully the back half will straighten things out a bit.

As I've gotten older I've figured out how to override my suspense of disbelief when it comes to things like "that's not how grenades work" or "no one, especially not a humanoid robotic assassin, would miss spraying a gatling gun at a <15m fleeing target." I just tell myself, "it's true in this show's world."

Unfortunately, modern shows tend to violate their own rules when the story needs it to happen. But for the few shows/movies that ARE consistent within their own respective universes, I can generally talk myself out of hating something because it's not "realistic."

Bonus for those who like to read: For example, "in this universe there wasn't feminism or white saviors sending trillions of dollars to other continents so Murica was able to give the world hoverboards and flying cars by 2015."

I can very easily suspend my disbelief if the show sells it in a logical way. Starting refugee resistance fighters looking like arnold? Hey, they're just the ones tough enough to survive. We done selected out the weenies.

When its both blatant and illogical, like a woman throwing around a terminator, a machine designed to be superhuman, my mind goes OH SURE.

Basically, if a story can maintain some sort of internal consistency I can just accept it. But when it breaks both story logic and real life logic at the same time, you probably need to give a reason to accept that. One of the worst examples to me was the knights falling into the water with full armor in game of thrones and then surviving. That's a complete and total affront, when the story literally explains how stupid it is to do that, and how certainly you'll die. Turning on that for a gotcha later in the story is the epitome of horrid story writing.

If the terminators are as light as a human then I'm pretty sure small arms fire would penetrate them. Particularly from ARs and shot guns.

Chanur said:

If the terminators are as light as a human then I'm pretty sure small arms fire would penetrate them. Particularly from ARs and shot guns.

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Pretty much unless its made out of some exotic unknown material.

Theres a scene in T3 where Arnold is temporarily disabled in a crash and some fire fighters try to move him but are unable to due to how heavy he is;

They fucked around in the first half but showed up super fucking strong in the second half and in OT. This was a surprise banger. It's like there were two completely different writers between the first 4 eps and second 4 eps.

Maybe they had a good idea for a soft reboot but couldn't figure out how to make the "excuse" for the setup work in a super believable way? Or maybe the girl boss shit got left in the first 4-5 eps because they were too far along in production to practically remove them when "woke" started becoming toxic however many months ago.

Finished all eight episodes. Kind of dark and depressing, but well-done. Not sure what the point of it is. Tells a different story than the main Terminator mythos, more or less. The best part was the future war stuff in episode 7, which felt like it should have been the whole show. The "alternate AI competing with Skynet" idea was done by the Sarah Connor Chronicles show first, right down to a character (the aptly-named Ellison) sitting down with the new AI and talking to it for extended scenes. They also did the same thing TSCC did by having the antagonist T-800 turn out to be morally ambiguous later on.

Edit: Oh yeah, another thing. Was cool how a bunch of white guys show up late in the show and turn out to be evil assholes and then get murdered brutally by the girlboss. Then we get a future scene with another bunch of white guys who won't leave Malcolm Lee alone and get murdered brutally. Says a lot that as soon as the first group showed up I was like "bet these guys turn out to be evil assholes". Thing is, they were just a bunch of guys protecting their community from the robot rebellion, essentially looking out for their neighborhood, but it portrays them as jackasses about it and has one of them hold a kid at gunpoint because of course.

As for the ending:

darkmiasma said:

It was good, but not great - the biggest disappointment was that they really didn't do anything with the story - 8 episodes and not much changed. At some point the Terminator media needs to tell a new story, either the future war stuff, or show that they made a significant impact in a future timeline, even if that means they made things worse.

The show looks good, and I was engaged enough that I watched the whole thing in a day or two. It is a better second half than first half IMO. If you like Terminator stuff, its worth a watch, but it doesn't break new ground, just more of the same.

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Yeah the lack of creativity from every Terminator property we get is kind of nuts. This universe has so much un-mined terrain and yet everyone who gets to do anything with it just makes their own spin on T2. Over and over again. Salvation was the only one that tried to do something different, and should get props for that. It didn't look right for the future war but it was also early in the war and I'm sure its planned sequels would have had the lasers and everything.

TZ could be worthwhile if in the future it turns out Kokoro is worse than Skynet. Maybe in the original history, the T-800 brought the kid to the EMP and the kid set it off, stopping Kokoro and resulting in a peaceful future once the humans and Skynet reached an agreement. They made a lot of fuss about "free will" leading up to that situation, and the kid exercised his free will by refusing to throw the switch. Thereby sparing Kokoro, which will now be a threat again. Having Skynet be on the good side against an even worse AI would be one way to actually tell a new story that hasn't been done to death. But who knows if we're getting that.