Netflix has just tried its hand at another political thriller with its new limited series, “Zero Day.” Despite its star-studded cast and intriguing premise, the show fails at every turn.
While the events of the series are fictional, the concept of “zero-day” or a “zero-day attack” are in fact real. The term refers to a vulnerability of a computer system that is completely unknown to the developers of that system until it is exploited. It’s called “zero-day” to signify just how little time there is to fix the issue. Netflix’s show takes this idea and institutes it on a much bigger level.
The plot of the series centers around a brief cyber-attack that takes place in the United States in the first episode. This attack, labeled as “Zero Day,” takes everything offline causing thousands of people to die after transportation systems shut down and panic to spread through the country. In the midst of this chaos, President Evelyn Mitchell (portrayed Angela Bassett) creates the Zero Day Commission and tasks former president George Mullen (Robert De Niro) with leading it. The rest of the series follows the commission's work to apprehend the group responsible for Zero Day.
The first episode of this show was really intriguing. It gets you asking a lot of questions about the attack and even about George as a character. At the end of the first episode George sees a woman named Anna Sindler (Hannah Gross), who he’d met breifly before “Zero Day,” in the crowd of his press conference. Which is odd given that we see Anna die in a car crash within the first 10 minutes of that episode.
George spends a lot of time fixated on Anna and her death during the first half of this series, this fixation highlights a huge issue within the show as a whole. Now, I love a good character that haunts the narrative. They’re often a great way to add depth and intrigue into a plot, it’s that kind of character that Anna is set up to be. Just like George, you’re asking questions like “What did Anna have to do with zero day?” Or “Is she really dead?” Unlike George, you are still asking those questions even after they abandon that plot line halfway through the series. It’s jarring to have felt like you’ve devoted so much time to figuring out a character and then to just have that character disregarded like they didn’t matter.
Another gaping plot hole in the series is in the existence of Proteus, a fictional neurological device created by the National Security Agency in “Zero Day.” This device is allegedly used on George throughout the series causing him to have both auditory and visual hallucinations. This mental break is shown to the viewer both through the song “Who Killed Bambi” by the Sex Pistols and in George’s notebook that he keeps with him throughout the series, filled with the scribbled words “Who killed Bambi?” just like the song he keeps hearing.
Throughout the show they are worried about the use of this device, a fear so prevalent that George sleeps in a portable Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility as a way to block out the device's effects. They don’t know who is controlling the device, where the device is or if it’s even connected to zero-day. I had the same curiosity they had about the Proteus device. It’s one of the few plots that is carried throughout the show and so you can imagine my disappointment when he found a foreign device in his bird feeder and it was chalked up to just being trash that fell in. You never find out who was using Proteus. You don’t even find out if Proteus is real. It just felt like lazy writing to me.
It’s like the writers of the show had all these ideas on how to make the series really mysterious and interesting and they just said yes to everything. What you get from that is a messy tangle of plots that are impossible to keep track of. None of these plots are solved within the show. Instead, they are cast aside when they no longer serve an immediate purpose to this deep state conspiracy that the show is trying to create. It happens with characters too. We see them a few times, they do something insane like kill or bribe someone, then we never see them again and are only given the explanation that they’re probably in some other country now. I’ve seen confusing shows before, but the sheer amount of plot holes in “Zero Day” gives all those other series a run for their money.
As infuriating as these plot holes can be, the real issue is in how upsetting some of the content shown can be. I know political thrillers often have some extreme content and when you go to the show’s page on Netflix you see that the series does have a TV-MA rating for language and violence. However, I would argue that none of that prior knowledge prepared me for all the unnecessary violence within the first few episodes of this show.
While Netflix has often been regarded as one of the streaming services that really opened the door for viewers to binge content easily, I would say that this is not a bingeable show. I had to take periodic breaks while watching the series purely because of the intensity of these events and the way they are dealt with within the show. The acting as if nothing happened, was driving me crazy.
At the end of the day, the biggest issue is that the series thinks too highly of itself with its constant commentary on corrupt politicians and the complications of the United States’ democracy. So much so that I would argue it falls victim to one of the very things it tries to criticize, it’s overly complicated. The sad reality of “Zero Day” is that it’s not some fascinating political mystery, it’s just a sad, up close and personal look into the downward spiral of a man who has lost so much and will keep on losing. Unless you’re trying to give yourself a headache I would avoid “Zero Day” at all possible costs.
