Note: This story contains spoilers from “Zero Day.”
The finale of Netflix’s “Zero Day” saw former U.S. president George Mullen (Robert De Niro) reveal the identity of the perpetrators behind the limited series’ massive cyberattack.
During a joint session before Congress, Mullen delivers the results of the Zero Day Commission’s investigation, identifying the perpetrators of the conspiracy as Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), billionaires Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) and Robert Lyndon (Clark Gregg) and at least a dozen lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle, including Mullen’s own daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan). He adds that there are additional conspirators both inside and outside the government that still remain unidentified, and that while the Zero Day Commission is ending its investigation, the work it started must continue.
“We had a pretty clear sense of the ending from the very beginning,” co-creator Noah Oppenheim told TheWrap. “We had a couple things that we were prioritizing. One is we wanted the character of George Mullen to face a really tough decision — a choice between telling the truth and knowing that if he did so, the consequences for his family would be enormous, the consequences for his reputation, for his hold on power. And yet that he would, in that moment, still make the right decision to err on the side of truth and transparency, despite all that it would cost him. So that was a North Star. From the very beginning, it was really important to Robert De Niro that his character would do that when faced with that kind of dilemma.”
Read on as the cast and creators unpack the series’ conclusion, twists and whether a second season could be in the cards.
Why did the Zero Day conspiracy happen?
In order to carry out the cyberattack, billionaire Monica Kidder’s Panopoly hacked into an exploitable code in its apps, carried on 80% of phones in the world, to shut everything down for one minute.
Alexandra Mullen reveals to her father that the cyberattack was proposed by Kidder and used as a means of uniting the country together against a common enemy in order to make both sides tune out all the noise and finally start hearing each other. She added that Congress had not been able to pass a single bill in 18 months and that working together with Dreyer and the other members of his party would allow them to focus on working towards bipartisan solutions to the country’s problems.
“[Alex] assumes that she knows what’s best for the world and the country, when she’s far too young and inexperienced to really be weighing in on all of that. She should be listening more instead of talking more. But I also have a lot of compassion for Alex. I think that she has a lot of unresolved trauma in her family with her brother, and I think that she is a bit of a lost kid in many ways, and stuck in time,” actress Lizzy Caplan adds. “I think that her intentions underneath it all were good. What she wanted is not too far afield from what her father wants. It’s just her method of getting there was not, let’s say, something I would personally advise.”
When George Mullen confronts Dreyer, he confirms what Alex said, adding that he did what he did out of loyalty to the country with the hopes of giving it the “last chance” to save itself. His goal was to be named the head of the Zero Day Commission so that he could rebuild the country in the image of his own ideology and policies, but he was ultimately passed over by President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett).
“Dreyer thinks that in order to fix something, you have to take it apart and break it. I do not think that’s the right way to do something and I do not think that lying and creating misinformation is a solution to anything,” actor Matthew Modine said. “[George Mullen] believes that you have to be truthful, you have to be honest and nobody is above the law, even his daughter and that’s really important. If we do not obey the rules, you begin to deconstruct American democracy. You have a system that does not function anymore.”
Though the attack ultimately kills over 3,000 people, co-creator Eric Newman said some viewers may side with Alex and Dreyer and believe their argument “sort of makes sense.”
“The means justifying the ends argument should not hold water,” he said. “But if you listen to what they were trying to do, there will be a segment of the audience that believes, ‘that’s a good idea.’”
When it came to figuring out the scope of who was involved in the conspiracy, Oppenheim said that it made sense to require “at least complicity, if not active participation, of a wide variety of people when you’re talking about something of this scale.”
“We are naming some names, but it goes beyond that,” he said. “Even Speaker Dreyer alludes to others that are helping call the shots that are not necessarily on screen.”
Was Proteus being used against George Mullen?
One key unanswered question from “Zero Day” is whether Proteus, a neurological weapon created by the National Security Agency, was actually being used against Mullen as he was investigating the cyberattack and causing his mental acuity issues or if it was dementia.
It’s revealed earlier in the season that Proteus was designed to inflict a traumatic brain injury from a distance and be completely untraceable, which Valerie Whitesell (Connie Britton) theorizes is being used against Mullen. But that theory is never actually explicitly confirmed and the weapon is never actually shown being used on screen.
Newman told TheWrap that the idea of Proteus was inspired by the Havana syndrome, a “very vague, misunderstood, never quite proven, series of attacks against U.S. Foreign Services employees.” When asked for a definitive answer, he and Oppenheim suggested that it’s up for debate.
“When we set out to write about those scenes, Noah Oppenheim and I made a decision that we believed that it was happening, and whether we confirm that or not in the story we had not decided, but we believed in order to write it, we have to operate like it’s happening,” Newman explained. “When we finished editing the show and looked at all six episodes, I was sort of struck, which is an interesting experience for a creator or writer, to say, ‘I’m now not so sure that it was happening.’ And I think the point of it is whether it’s happening or not, whether your inability to discern reality from fiction is born of some external/internal influence, a bias of subject does not matter. The reality is we are where we are, and we need to make the right decision based on the data that we have.”
“There will be an audience I believe that watches it and thinks he was definitely being attacked by some soundwave weapon,” Newman continued. “And then there will be an audience that believes he was not, and that’s very much on theme and that is intentional.”
Oppenheim argued that regardless of whether they declared definitely whether it was or was not Proteus, “half of the people listening are going to tune it out and assume it’s a lie anyway.”
“We’re all drawing our own different conclusions from, in many cases, the same set of facts,” he added. “And really we live in a world right now where having someone in a position of authority say something is one thing or the other does not really mean as much as it used to.”
Will the “Zero Day” conspirators be held accountable?
By the end of the series, Alexandra Mullen has given her father a letter revealing her plans to turn herself in to the police and Monica Kidder is dead after having been arrested. But what about everyone else?
Though it appears as though the perpetrators are going to be brought to justice, Oppenheim suggested that what actually happens next is more open-ended.
“Obviously George Mullen gets up and tells the world what has happened. It’s a really interesting question for the audience to debate: What happens the day after? Just because he reveals all this to the country, I think some people will look at that and say, ‘Of course, they will be held accountable and be brought to trial and face justice.’ But I think we live in a world in which that’s not always the case. So I think it’s interesting to contemplate. Even once the truth is out there, how is it received and are people willing to accept it?”
Newman said solving the answer to that question is “not our problem.”
“The characters in the story are gonna do what they are gonna do. And hopefully, [Richard Dreyer] is going to go to prison, the people responsible are going to go to prison and democracy is going to have a close call that perhaps puts it on the right path or on a better path, or not,” he said. “All you can do is provide people with the information, and they need to make the right decision.
“I just choose to find it as a very hopeful story in that one person, at their own personal expense, can make the right decision and sacrifice for the people following their leadership,” he added. “And I think that and this complicated relationship we have with the truth are the two biggest issues in our world today.”
Ultimately, Newman said the purpose of the ending is to convey “the responsibility of our leadership to tell people things they do not want to hear, and do the work, and build consensus and use the tools afforded to them by this great democracy.”
“Something that was very important to Bob [De Niro] and we preserved at the essence of the character, is that this is not a guy that’s going to abide. That is not a person who is going to allow an internal plot to subvert democracy and basically burn us down in an effort to save us,” he added. “So it all came together, very nicely in the end.”
Could “Zero Day” Come Back for Season 2?
While “Zero Day” is considered a limited series, Oppenheim, Newman and De Niro were all open to the possibility of continuing it, though no conversations about doing so have taken place.
“I think we all feel like we have told what is right now a complete story. That being said, it’s a group of people that happen to like each other a great deal and we all had a great experience making it,” Oppenheim said. “So Eric, and I and Mike [Schmidt] often will chat about what would happen. What does happen to Alexandra Mullen, what does happen to Speaker Dreyer the next day? But there’s no active plan at this moment.”
“I don’t know whether it would be a continuation of the situation with the character. It could very well be an interesting second part of what we’re going through,” De Niro told TheWrap. “Of course, there’s a lot of ways to go and everything is moving so fast, but it’s not out of the question. I mean, with Eric, and Noah Oppenheim and Mike Schmidt, they could very, very easily, in some ways, come up with something that’s special. We all would agree on that.”
Regardless of whether it’s another installment of “Zero Day” or another project, Newman said he’d love to collaborate with the same team again.
“I just like everyone so much. I should be so lucky and Noah should be so lucky to continue to work with this group,” he said. “So I would say I’m very much open to it and definitely thinking about it when I have a moment.”
“Zero Day” is now streaming on Netflix.
