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Spoilers below.
There are times, when watching the final episode of Netflixâs limited-series conspiracy thriller Zero Day, that it feels as if the show might have something vital to say. The Robert De Niro-led drama dangles an undeniably timely premise before its audience: In Zero Dayâs alternative but reflective version of America, a cyberattack has rattled a politically divided country and killed thousands. Former President George Mullen (De Niro) is called in by current President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) to lead an unprecedented (and unconstitutional) effort called the Zero Day Commission, which seeks to find the attackers before they can make good on their promise to trigger another blackout. By the time the sixth and final episode rolls around, much of the thrill of that premise has evaporated, even as the showâs stacked cast struggles to maintain momentum.
Episode 6 opens with Mullenâs daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), fast-walking through the halls of Capitol Hill as she digests what her father (and, now, the American people) have recently discovered: Billionaire Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) was responsible for the Zero Day attack. But Alexandra knows she didnât work alone.
Kidderâwho has since been discovered dead in her cell, following an apparent suicideâwas the CEO of the tech giant Panopoly, a winking portmanteau of âpanopticonâ and âmonopolyâ that purposefully evokes companies like Meta and figures like Elon Musk. Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine) finds it convenient to dump Zero Day at the feet of Kidder, whom he calls an âautistic sociopath,â and the billionaire Robert Lyndon (Clark Gregg). Together, theyâre a slam-dunk excuse for Dreyer, considering Kidder was already under government investigation and Lyndon is basically a stand-in for Jeffrey Epstein. Still, Alexandra can feel the walls closing in around them.
âOne minute of system shock, thatâs what you said,â Alex tells Dreyer, revealing to the audience a mere minute and a half into the finale that Capitol Hill was itself a conspirator behind Zero Day. ââA few months with the right power in the right hands and the countryâs back on track by Christmas.ââ
Caplan really does her damndest to sell the necessity of such a preposterous, horrific act of treason, but neither she nor Modine can make a convincing argument that blotting the countryâs power was the solution to âcut[ting] off the political fringe on both sidesâ of the aisle and ârestor[ing] a shaken faith in our ability to govern.â Alexandra claims she didnât expect people to get hurt in the cyberattack. But thatâs equally ridiculous. Mullenâs congresswoman daughter is depicted as a highly intelligent Democratic official. In what world would she think that such an attackâwhich shut down railway, automobile, and air-traffic signals, not to mention every other computer in the countryâwouldnât kill hundreds of innocent people?
And, besides, her father is smart enough to recognize that Kidder didnât operate alone. She might have used her apps to push out a bug that could âjumpâ between devices, but she had accomplices. When another blackout hits, Mullenâs team gets to work with diagnostics while he and his wife, Sheila (Joan Allen), contend with a group of âextremistsâ whoâve gathered outside their home. When their attempted escape devolves into chaos, the CIA steps in to rescue Mullen and Sheila, going so far as to fake Mullenâs death so that Dreyer and his co-conspirators believe his threat eliminated.
When the CIA lead shares that Dreyer might be connected to Zero Day, Mullen has no trouble believing itâand suspects Dreyer worked with other allies in the U.S. government. The lead also drops an interesting tidbit: The CIA is not using Proteus to manipulate Mullenâs actions.
Proteus, you might recall from previous episodes, is a supposed neurological weapon secretly developed by the U.S. to target victimsâ brains from a distance. Mullen has spent much of this season dealing with memory lapses and erratic decision-making, as well as the continual troubling refrain of the Sex Pistolsâ âWho Killed Bambi?â playing in his head. Although he refuses to admit the extent of these symptoms to his staff, a few trusted companionsâincluding his former mistress/former chief of staff, Valerie (Connie Britton)âwonders if the instigator is Proteus. Perhaps the weapon was dragged out of retirement to torture him? Still, Proteus increasingly feels like a red herring as Zero Day careens toward a close.
After the debacle with the extremists, Mullen drops his wife off at Valerieâs as he heads to his daughterâs apartment. There, he confronts Alex in the dark, and finally she comes clean. True, she says, Zero Day was Kidderâs idea, but certain senators and congresspeople agreed to let it happen. Kidder âsaid that she could scare people,â Alex explains. âIn just one minute, she could remind everybody how vulnerable we are, how fragile we are, and that makes sense. It does. It makes sense that if you can remind people whatâs really important, then maybe theyâll tune out all the noise and the bullshit and the lies, and we can go back to actually hearing each other.â
The fact that Alex has to repeatedly emphasize how this all makes perfect sense underscores just how much it really doesnât. Zero Day seems to want to position the attack as a self-imposed act of terrorism, intended to bring citizens together by giving them a false but commonâand, crucially, foreignâenemy. But what happens when that âcommon enemyâ leads to war predicated on false information? Havenât we been there before?
Alexandra tries to convince her father that the world he was once familiar with no longer exists; he canât fix the countryâs problems simply by being stoic and civil. On this point, I agree with her. But she soon starts begging him to fix things for her anyway. After sheâs spent so much of this season pointing out the flaws in both Mullenâs thinking and his behavior, at the last moment she drops her defenses and agrees that the best path forward is whatever he says it should be.
Mullenâs team gets the power back on just as a newscaster relays the âterrible, if trueâ news that Mullen was attacked by âradicalized supporters of Evan Green,â the Joe Rogan-Tucker Carlson mish-mash played by Dan Stevens. (âTerrible, if trueâ is a hell of a thing to say on behalf of a news organization, one that Zero Day certainly seems intent on depicting as credible. But I digress.) Dreyer gives a heavily performative speech about how the war against Americaâs enemies has only just begun, but as he slides into the backseat of his car, he gets a call from a very-much-alive Mullen.
They agree to meet at an on-the-nose spot overlooking the Washington Monument. Mullen tells Dreyer heâs going to prison, but Dreyer insists heâs done nothing to betray his homeland. Instead, he has stood up against the half of the country âcaught up in a fever dream of lies and conspiracyâ and the half âshouting about pronouns and ranking their grievances.â (One of these is not like the other.) He claims that the white nationalists and the ACAB protesters are all part of the same âcancer.â Mullen insists Dreyerâs trying to be a dictator in his quest for supposed peace, and that heâll soon pay the price for it. Dreyer isnât so certain. Because if he goes down, so does Alex. And as Mullenâs wife puts it, in no uncertain terms, she canât bear to lose another child, not after their son died of a drug overdose during Mullenâs first term.
President Mitchell comes to visit Mullen at his home and gives him some advice: Sometimes the truth is not a simple black-and-white binary. Context is essential, especially where protecting the innocent is involved. âThe truth is the truth,â she says, âbut itâs not always the most important thing.â She believes that America wonât survive if the people find out their own government conspired against them. And, of course, she wants another four years in the White House.
As Mullen, forgive me, mulls over these words, he discovers a random electrical node in his bird feederâthe same one that seemed to be messing with his memory earlier this season. When Valerie has it assessed, her team calls it âdebris of indeterminate origin.â It could have been a Proteus device planted at his home! It also could have been a piece of electronic trash that plummeted into his birdseed. Replies Mullen, âTop-secret neurological weapon or just a tired old man with too many demons? Does it really matter?â
Um, yes? I would think it matters a tremendous deal! If some unknown entity out there has captured a secret biological weapon the U.S. government cooked up itself and is using it to target a former president, then I feel like that should be worthy of substantial alarm?? Am I going insane??? This is the milquetoast method with which Zero Day chooses to wrap up the Proteus sub-plot, and itâs indicative of so many other problems plaguing the limited series.
At the joint session announcing the results of the Zero Day Commission, Alex is nowhere to be seen. (âI guess she didnât want to watch her father lie for her!â Dreyer proclaims, loudly, so all the journalists around can realize heâs guilty as sin.) But as anyone watching this series could have predicted, Mullen pulls the plug on his initial plan to cover for Alex and her co-conspirators. After once again imagining the refrain of âWho Killed Bambi?â playing on a loopâand envisioning his deceased son sitting in his officeâMullen changes his mind. He pins the Zero Day attack on its true masterminds.
To his credit, here De Niro gives a convincing performance as a still-grieving father. As Mullen, he tells the audience that the truth âis a lot likeâ a lost loved one: hard to find, hard to face, but never truly gone. He reads aloud from a letter Alex wrote him, admitting she will turn herself in for the greater good. Then, he lists off all the congresspeople and senators âfrom both sides of the aisleâ who were responsible for Zero Day. Watching on screens around the country, the American people nod approvingly and applaud this uncomplicated act of heroism.
Mullen goes home. He burns his memoir manuscript. The next morning, he goes for his usual run. There, he pauses along the edge of the lake, overlooking his country. Other than his dog panting beside him, he is utterly alone.
And thatâs the end. Thatâs all Zero Day has to say.
In the moments after he reveals Dreyerâs role in the cyberattack, Mullen turns to the Speaker of the House and tells him, âEvery time we can do the right thing, itâs another chance to save [the country].â Iâm a big fan of doing the right thing. Iâm not even convinced Mullenâs truth-telling wasnât the right thing. But the issue undermining the seriesâs message remains. In Zero Dayâs final episode, what âsavesâ the country is not the self-imposed Zero Day attack but Mullen standing alone, the sole hero brave enough to see the world clearly. And yet the limited series has made repeated emphasis of the fact that Mullen does not always see the world clearly. Even with his mental faculties failing him, Proteus or no Proteus, Mullen repeatedly insists heâs the only man level-headed enough to lead the Zero Day Commission, a job that gives him near-unlimited power. Isnât that the exact same strain of hubris that Mullen would later criticize in Dreyer?
In fact, Zero Day, as a whole, is a hubristic take on noble but ineffectual centrismâa message that fails to meet the moment, no matter on which âside of the aisleâ you might fall. We are currently experiencing an unprecedented assault on American democracy. Zero Day offers no concrete solutions apart from âconfront hard truths.â As a journalist, I couldnât agree more. But I also recognize that confronting a hard truth necessitates action beyond putting the truth âout there.â The truth can be co-opted. It can be manipulated. Judging by his stance in the finaleâs closing scene, Mullen believes his terrible job is finished, now that heâs revealed the corruption inside Capitol Hill. He can rest easy knowing he did the right thing. But the rest of us understand the work would have only just begun.
Zero Dayâs approach is to straddle âboth sidesâ and frown at them equally, acting as if the scales of justice are naturally in perfect balance, should only the right person hold them. I donât disagree that America has a cancer, and perhaps weâre all a part of it. But I donât think Zero Day knows the cure