Zero Day Squanders Its Chance to Meet the Moment

The original post is located at www.elle.com 

Spoilers below.

There are times, when watching the final episode of Netflix’s 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 Day’s 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 show’s stacked cast struggles to maintain momentum.

Episode 6 opens with Mullen’s 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 didn’t work alone.

Kidder—who has since been discovered dead in her cell, following an apparent suicide—was the CEO of the tech giant Panopoly, a winking portmanteau of “panopticon” and “monopoly” 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 “autistic sociopath,” and the billionaire Robert Lyndon (Clark Gregg). Together, they’re 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.

“One minute of system shock, that’s what you said,” 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. “‘A few months with the right power in the right hands and the country’s back on track by Christmas.’”

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 country’s power was the solution to “cut[ting] off the political fringe on both sides” of the aisle and “restor[ing] a shaken faith in our ability to govern.” Alexandra claims she didn’t expect people to get hurt in the cyberattack. But that’s equally ridiculous. Mullen’s congresswoman daughter is depicted as a highly intelligent Democratic official. In what world would she think that such an attack—which shut down railway, automobile, and air-traffic signals, not to mention every other computer in the country—wouldn’t kill hundreds of innocent people?

And, besides, her father is smart enough to recognize that Kidder didn’t operate alone. She might have used her apps to push out a bug that could “jump” between devices, but she had accomplices. When another blackout hits, Mullen’s team gets to work with diagnostics while he and his wife, Sheila (Joan Allen), contend with a group of “extremists” who’ve 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 Mullen’s 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 it—and 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 Mullen’s actions.

Proteus, you might recall from previous episodes, is a supposed neurological weapon secretly developed by the U.S. to target victims’ 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 Pistols’ “Who Killed Bambi?” playing in his head. Although he refuses to admit the extent of these symptoms to his staff, a few trusted companions—including his former mistress/former chief of staff, Valerie (Connie Britton)—wonders 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 Valerie’s as he heads to his daughter’s apartment. There, he confronts Alex in the dark, and finally she comes clean. True, she says, Zero Day was Kidder’s idea, but certain senators and congresspeople agreed to let it happen. Kidder “said that she could scare people,” Alex explains. “In 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 what’s really important, then maybe they’ll tune out all the noise and the bullshit and the lies, and we can go back to actually hearing each other.”

The fact that Alex has to repeatedly emphasize how this all makes perfect sense underscores just how much it really doesn’t. 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 common—and, crucially, foreign—enemy. But what happens when that “common enemy” leads to war predicated on false information? Haven’t we been there before?

Alexandra tries to convince her father that the world he was once familiar with no longer exists; he can’t fix the country’s 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 she’s spent so much of this season pointing out the flaws in both Mullen’s 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.

Mullen’s team gets the power back on just as a newscaster relays the “terrible, if true” news that Mullen was attacked by “radicalized supporters of Evan Green,” the Joe Rogan-Tucker Carlson mish-mash played by Dan Stevens. (“Terrible, if true” 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 America’s 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 he’s going to prison, but Dreyer insists he’s done nothing to betray his homeland. Instead, he has stood up against the half of the country “caught up in a fever dream of lies and conspiracy” and the half “shouting about pronouns and ranking their grievances.” (One of these is not like the other.) He claims that the white nationalists and the ACAB protesters are all part of the same “cancer.” Mullen insists Dreyer’s trying to be a dictator in his quest for supposed peace, and that he’ll soon pay the price for it. Dreyer isn’t so certain. Because if he goes down, so does Alex. And as Mullen’s wife puts it, in no uncertain terms, she can’t bear to lose another child, not after their son died of a drug overdose during Mullen’s 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. “The truth is the truth,” she says, “but it’s not always the most important thing.” She believes that America won’t 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 feeder—the same one that seemed to be messing with his memory earlier this season. When Valerie has it assessed, her team calls it “debris of indeterminate origin.” 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, “Top-secret neurological weapon or just a tired old man with too many demons? Does it really matter?”

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 it’s 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. (“I guess she didn’t want to watch her father lie for her!” Dreyer proclaims, loudly, so all the journalists around can realize he’s 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 “Who Killed Bambi?” playing on a loop—and envisioning his deceased son sitting in his office—Mullen 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 “is a lot like” 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 “from both sides of the aisle” 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 that’s the end. That’s all Zero Day has to say.

In the moments after he reveals Dreyer’s role in the cyberattack, Mullen turns to the Speaker of the House and tells him, “Every time we can do the right thing, it’s another chance to save [the country].” I’m a big fan of doing the right thing. I’m not even convinced Mullen’s truth-telling wasn’t the right thing. But the issue undermining the series’s message remains. In Zero Day’s final episode, what “saves” 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 he’s the only man level-headed enough to lead the Zero Day Commission, a job that gives him near-unlimited power. Isn’t 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 centrism—a message that fails to meet the moment, no matter on which “side of the aisle” you might fall. We are currently experiencing an unprecedented assault on American democracy. Zero Day offers no concrete solutions apart from “confront hard truths.” As a journalist, I couldn’t agree more. But I also recognize that confronting a hard truth necessitates action beyond putting the truth “out there.” The truth can be co-opted. It can be manipulated. Judging by his stance in the finale’s closing scene, Mullen believes his terrible job is finished, now that he’s 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 Day’s approach is to straddle “both sides” 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 don’t disagree that America has a cancer, and perhaps we’re all a part of it. But I don’t think Zero Day knows the cure