Terminator Zero - Tumblr Posts

I’m watching Terminator Zero, and it’s a great example of how the corporate media scene’s approach to IPs is a disease.

I have a lot of issues with the show on its own merits. The pacing is awkward, the only real twist I’ve seen was poorly foreshadowed in narrative but painfully predictable from metatext, and the pseudo-philosophy is framed as profound while being beyond basic when it isn’t totally incoherent.

But much greater than that, the show just can’t seem to escape the gravity well of the installments of Terminator that came before. Four episodes in, I’ve watched the show rip off a string of the more popular elements from Terminator 1 and 2. The police station shootout. Miles Dyson’s lab and character beats. Kyle Reese’s costume. The motorcycle cop disguise of the T-1000. The No Fate dream, done about half a dozen times over by now. It’s a new installment by way of meme culture, endless self reference…

…only without any understanding of what made those memes work in the first place, and that’s the fatal flaw.

As an example, why was the T-1000 disguised as a cop in Terminator 2? It was because that made it a better predator. James Cameron understood that the core fear the terminator invokes is of an unstoppable, implacable predator, and that framing it as a cop added a layer of unquestionable authority for this predator to abuse and immunity to the red tape of society. But is any of that theming or nuance actually involved in Terminator Zero when the terminator disguises itself as a cop? No. It shows up where its targets are and starts a slaughter, it just used the costume because the T-1000 did so many movies ago. So the reference feels cheap, and pointless.

This kind of thing happens time and again. In the MCU, in modern Star Wars, Star Trek, adaptations of Batman, Jurassic World, Ghostbusters, both live action AtLA remakes… I could go on. While I think the most common reason is that corporations focus on entertainment as a business rather than an art and capitalism gives them the real control over it, I don’t think that’s the only reason.

I think fandom does this too. A fan of a certain thing will get the chance to make their spin on it, whether “officially” or otherwise, and they know they like the thing but haven’t really thought critically about why. So we get nods to the original which feel totally out of place because they are narrative devices lifted out of their context and recycled into a less fitting beat.

So yeah, TL,DR: capitalism works against the creation of art and good derivative media takes solid media literacy and comprehension skills to create.

Review(102)||Terminator Zero Episode 5

Review(105)|| Terminator Zero Ep6