Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Zero Day.Netflix’s new series, Zero Day, gets your attention straight away when, during the first episode, cyberterrorists attack America. This leads to complete chaos, with trains crashing, planes falling out of the skies, and 3,000 people dead. It’s now up to the government to find out who is behind the attack. President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) puts former U.S. President George Mullen (Robert De Niro) in charge to lead a commission tasked with finding the terrorists before they can attack again.
Mullen seemed like the perfect choice because he was a popular one-term President known to work across the aisle, but George isn’t as squeaky clean as the public thinks. He has his own dark demons, some of which may be coming home to roost at the worst possible time. As Mullen tracks down the terrorists, will he do anything it takes, even break the law, to get to the truth? And what will he do when that truth leads him down a path he doesn’t want to go down? With a solid supporting cast, including Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Dan Stevens, Gaby Hoffman, Matthew Modine, Connie Britton, and Clark Gregg, Zero Day is a roller coaster that becomes about way more than just finding out who was responsible.
Who Is Behind ‘Zero Day’s Terror Attack?
The theory of the U.S. government is that the attacks were probably conducted by Russia, but that would be a too predictable solution. George Mullen is on the case to find the truth, and he’s got an elite staff to help him, including workers hacking into the internet to track the cell of hackers who caused the attack. He also has the support of Roger Carlson (Plemons), a loyalist who has worked with Mullen for years, and his former Chief of Staff, Valerie Whitesell (Britton). It’s not going to be so easy though, because Mullen once had an affair with Valerie when he was President, which led to him having a daughter who doesn’t know her father’s true identity. As for Roger, he might do anything for his boss, but he’s also a former drug addict, and he’s sleeping with Mullen’s daughter, Alexandra (Caplan).
Adding to the drama is that Alexandra is a congresswoman who isn’t fond of her father leading the commission. She is then put in charge of a committee to keep tabs on the commission, along with the opposition Speaker of the House, Richard Dreyer (Modine). He gets along with Alex, but it’s easy to see that he’s in this for himself. That comes to be as he tries to gain more power, especially when George begins taking his position too far. First, a 17-year-old is wrongly arrested. Then, with information that a TV conspiracy theorist, Evan Green (Stevens doing his best Alex Jones impression), is aligned with discovered hackers who helped with the malware used in the attack, he is arrested as well. Mullen even goes so far as to have him tortured to get information.
Roger loses his life in search of the truth, as he’s murdered, with it made to look like he died from a drug overdose. Finally, though, the dominoes begin to fall, as the first suspect is caught. It’s an American named Monica Kidder (Hoffman), an aloof billionaire who owns her own social media apps (Elon Musk anyone?). With the good guys closing in, she gets on the radio to her fellow attackers, but they have gone silent, leaving her out in the cold. In jail, she hangs herself, which means Mullen has just lost the person who could tell him the most, but Zero Day gives a shocker. Alex is shown on the radio requesting a meeting with Dreyer. They are both in on it, along with a powerful billionaire named Robert Lyndon (Gregg). They’re not the only ones, either.
What Does George Mullen Do With the Information?
Image via Netflix
In Zero Day‘s final episode, we learn the truth. The terrorist attacks were not caused by a foreign operation but came from a plot within our own government. So why would Americans do such a thing? It was Dreyer’s idea because he was unable to get Congress to come together and pass anything. Everyone on the left and right just wants to live in their bubble and cling to the extremes rather than working together. However, if America were to be attacked, all of the silliness could be put aside, and Americans would work together again for the greater good. Remember that small window we had in reality after 9/11? Dreyer gets Alex Mullen and more than a dozen others to join him.
In the last episode, George learns the truth, as do others at the very top. Mullen’s wife, Sheila (Allen), doesn’t want the truth about what their daughter did getting out. They have already lost one child, a son, after he died of a drug overdose, and she can’t stand to lose another as well. Alex cries and begs for mercy. She just wanted to shake America up, and had no clue anyone was going to die. Dreyer, trying to save his own butt, tells Mullen to let the truth go because if it gets out that the American government has attacked its citizens, it will destroy the country. Even President Mitchell herself goes to George and tells him to hide how deep the truth goes. They’ll pin it all on Monica Kidder and go from there. If what really happened gets out, kiss her getting re-elected goodbye.
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With Mullen set to give a speech before Congress live in front of the whole country, George Mullen agrees to stick to the Kidder story, but when the moment comes, he changes his mind. It’s not just his own conscience guiding him, but Alex’s as well. She left her father a letter admitting what she had done and her willingness to be held accountable. Mullen reads the letter aloud in Congress, naming not just his daughter but Dreyer and many other congressmen in attendance as well. The chamber and the country are in shock, but George Mullen, this man they once trusted but lost faith in, has come through in the end. He was willing to let harm come to his daughter because at the end of the day, only the truth matters, no matter how bad it is.
Is George Mullen the Victim of a Psychological Attack?
Zero Day is about more than the terror attack. There is also George’s own inner turmoil at work. The reason he didn’t run for a second term as President was because he lost his son. It’s not just the pain of that loss he still lives with, but a possible terror attack against his own mind. There are several scenes of George reading his incoherent journal, with the words “Who Killed Bambi?” written, and the song of the same name by the Sex Pistols somehow playing when he’s all alone. What’s going on?
It’s revealed that there is a weapon called Proteus, a cyberattack that can be used to attack a person’s mind from a great distance away. Flip it on, and you can cause the victim to lose their mind. Is George being attacked to shut him up? Proteus has now been modified and was used in the Zero Day attack as a quickly spreading malware. In the final episode, with Kidder dead and the other terrorists on the cusp of being caught, they turn on Proteus again. This time it’s not just for a minute but a lot more. When it happens, Mullen and his wife are at home. With protestors outside their gate, the Secret Service orders him to leave. As they do, the protestors attack in a moment that takes you back to January 6. However, the CIA saves George before he can be harmed. They then fake his death as they close in on the terrorists.
At the end of Zero Day, George finds an electronic device in his bird feeder. It can’t be determined if this is part of Proteus or something innocent. As the series ends, we don’t know if all of George’s hallucinations were caused by a terrorist attack or his own frayed mind. Either way, life won’t be the same. At the beginning of the series, George is working on his memoirs. At the end, he burns them.
Stream all episodes of Zero Day on Netflix in the U.S.
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