At the start of the limited series Zero Day, now streaming on Netflix, a deadly cyberattack forces former US president George Mullen (Robert De Niro) out of retirement to search for the truth in a world where facts have become subjective.
From his controversial investigation into the attack, during which he deals with rampant disinformation and hallucinations that leave him questioning what’s real, Mullen discovers that the call was coming from inside the White House. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, including Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine) and Mullen’s daughter, Alex (Lizzy Caplan), coordinated the attack with help from finance billionaire Robert Lyndon (Clark Gregg) and tech billionaire Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann).
Mullen doesn’t learn about Alex’s involvement until Episode 6, but the congressmember’s role is revealed to the audience at the end of Episode 5 when she uses her CB radio — the Zero Day perpetrators’ preferred method of communication — to call a meeting with Dreyer.
“There’s this unofficial rule about writing thrillers, that you’re supposed to start with the ending and work backwards,” executive producer, co-creator and co-showrunner Eric Newman told Netflix. “We did not do that.”
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Alex’s participation in the Zero Day attack gives Mullen an agonizing choice: Does he protect the country, as President Mitchell (Angela Bassett) suggests, by concealing how deeply the conspiracy goes? Or does he share the truth with the American public and risk losing his daughter, having already lost his son to a drug overdose?
With the world watching, Mullen begins sharing a sanitized version of the truth until a vision of his son spurs a change of heart. The ex-commander in chief ditches the teleprompter to read Alex’s written confession and goes on to name her co-conspirators. The House Chamber erupts in chaos, and Mullen walks away firm in his choice despite what it has cost him. “There are going to be a lot of questions about whether this is a happy ending,” Newman said.
What that ending conveys, Newman said, is that “the truth is hard to come by, and that it’s a very lonely place to be for an individual — to say, ‘I’m going to speak the truth’ when so many don’t want to. And you might not be rewarded for it. In fact, you might be punished for it, but it’s still important. It still really matters.”
So, where do we go from there? Keep reading to dive deeper into those Zero Day reveals, including what caused Mullen’s hallucinations and the message viewers should take away from the limited series.
In Episode 6, both Speaker Dreyer and Representative Mullen explain that the reasoning behind the cyberattack was to unite the nation under a common cause. With Americans divided and Congress at a stalemate — they hadn’t passed a single piece of legislation in 18 months — Dreyer turned to a handful of his colleagues, including Alex, for an effective solution.
“They weren’t looking for money, they weren’t looking for revenge; they were looking to make the world a better place. And a lot of the worst endeavors in human history begin that way,” Newman said.
Despite the surprising revelation, Caplan, who plays Alex, and Modine, who plays Speaker Dreyer, knew from the beginning that their characters would be the culprits behind the treasonous act. “I think I told them both in the casting process, ‘And by the way, you’re the bad guy, but no one will know that until the end,” Newman said.
“We were always protecting what we call the ‘second watch,’ ” he added. “Whether anyone watches the show twice doesn’t necessarily matter, but we were always thinking, ‘Oh, if you watched it knowing that she’s a part of it, does it still play?’ ”
Though Caplan knew that Alex was involved in the attack, the actor felt that it was important not to play the legislator as the villain. “If anything, I think there are a lot of characters that have villainous moments throughout this entire piece,” Caplan tells Tudum. But Alex believed that the zero day attack “was the thing that needed to be done to get the country back on track.”
Proteus is the cyber weapon developed in the series by the National Security Agency to, as scientist Dave McKenna (Joseph Adams) explains in Episode 4, “inflict a traumatic brain injury from a distance with surgical precision,” and whose origin “could never be traced.” That tech was then modified and used to execute the Zero Day attack.
In Episode 6, Pennington (Jay Klaitz), a Zero Day Commission employee, lays out exactly how the malware spread so widely. Tech billionaire Kidder (Hoffmann) pushed it through automatic updates to her app, which was “downloaded on 80% of the phones in America.” It then jumped to any phone it came into contact with via Bluetooth, USB, and other methods, ensuring wide distribution.
If Pennington’s explanation sounds simple, that’s intentional. “It’s right on that line between the technical aspects of it and explaining it to the viewer in a way that they’re going to understand,” Clint Watts, a cybersecurity expert who served as a technical consultant for the series, tells Tudum. “That’s really the key to this show. The characters are laying out, ‘This is the virus. This is how it jumped. This is how it made its way from here to here, and it metastasized, and it became the thing that it was.’ You’re doing that in a way that the average person says, ‘OK, I get it. I’m not a computer programmer, but I get it.’ ”
While out jogging, Mullen notices a strange object in his bird feeder that leads him to suspect his mind was being tampered with, perhaps even contributing to those reality-blurring hallucinations, like seeing polarizing TV host Evan Green (Dan Stevens) speak directly to him through the television screen. But the lab results are inconclusive. “Debris of indeterminate origin,” Valerie (Connie Britton), Mullen’s former chief of staff, tells him in Episode 6.
So what really causes Mullen’s hallucinations throughout the series? That’s up to viewers to determine for themselves. “When Noah [Oppenheim] and I designed the season and wrote the show, we made a pact with each another that Proteus was being used, but that it should be open to interpretation,” Newman said. “Our personal belief when we were writing the show was, yes, Proteus was being used on Mullen. Having now watched the show, I’m not so sure.”
“It’s an interesting thing for a creator to say, ‘I’m not entirely sure now,’ ” he added. “I think that happens occasionally. There are things in movies and TV shows that take on a life of their own and have a meaning that goes beyond what anyone intended, even the person or people who made it. And I don’t speak of our show with the same reverence as some of these films, though I’m very proud of it. But I think in this case, I’m not even so sure anymore, and I co-created it.”
Among those unintentional meanings is a scene in Taxi Driver (1976) starring De Niro, which Newman cited as one of his favorite films of all time.
“There is what I believe to be a dream sequence at the end of the movie,” Newman said, describing the screenwriter and director’s interpretation of the film. “I have heard Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese both say it’s not a dream sequence, but I still believe it’s a dream sequence. I’ve had conversations with people about movies they’ve made where I said, ‘Hey, what about this?’ And they’re like, ‘Huh, I never thought about that.’ And I think there is, in every creative process, an unconscious force at work. You’re telling a story that matters to you, that you might not even entirely understand, and as a result, you find your way to something that has a meaning that maybe was not what you intended.”
In Episode 6, before Mullen addresses the findings of the Zero Day Commission to Congress, he privately meets with Speaker Dreyer to discuss Dreyer’s surrender for his involvement in the attack. But when they come face-to-face, Dreyer argues that disclosing his actions to the world is not what’s best for the country at this moment.
“Dreyer in many ways understands the country as it is now better than Mullen does,” executive producer Oppenheim tells Tudum. “Mullen has a somewhat old-fashioned view of what America is, and Dreyer is saying, ‘Look, 25 years ago, maybe what you’re saying is true, and maybe I would be facing enormous consequences if people found out what I did. But nowadays, it’s a lot less clear… This isn’t a rough patch, it’s an emergency.’ ”
And in emergencies, people are willing to give up much of their freedom. “They’re willing to tolerate a lot from their leaders,” adds Oppenheim, “if they think those leaders are going to help navigate them out of the emergency.”
Mullen and Dreyer’s conversation, Modine tells Tudum, is about “humanity and community constructs and institutional trust. And in order for a government to function, there has to be that kind of trust.”
Mullen, after revealing the names of the congress members involved in the Zero Day attack, retreats to his Hudson, New York, estate and tosses the untitled draft of his memoir into the lit fireplace. He does so, co-creator and executive producer Noah Oppenheim tells Tudum, because he “probably has realized his decision in the House Chamber is going to define his legacy moving forward, regardless of what he wrote before. So those pages have been rendered obsolete.”
Plus, Mullen has come to accept that any attempt to define how he’s remembered is futile because he chose to upend his political career by telling the world the truth. “Being at peace with himself and having his integrity intact, that’s what really matters,” Oppenheim says.
The series ends with Mullen, while out for a jog, staring out at the open water. That final shot, Oppenheim says, depicts a man who has “accepted the sacrifice of a life in public service, if it’s spent doing the right thing. He may not have much left, but he’s got his integrity. And I think that’s not to be discounted.”
Mullen’s decision to reveal the Zero Day co-conspirators (including his daughter Alex) to the world may have cost him more than his political career. Joan Allen, who plays Mullen’s wife and federal bench nominee Sheila, says that losing their daughter may have been a bridge too far for Sheila. “She’s hoping that he will protect their daughter, and when he chooses not to,” Allen tells Tudum, “I’m not sure that they survive in a marriage anymore.”
“My hope is that, through this story, people will recognize that just because the intention behind an action is good, the means can’t always justify the end,” said Newman. “I do think that people believe — as the creative team behind this show does — that we’ve got to do something to protect ourselves before a real Zero Day event occurs. Maybe we can make some small difference.”
Co-creator and executive producer Michael S. Schmidt (who also served as a writer on the limited series) noted that after 9/11, the US united “for many, many months as the government tried to figure out how to deal with the problem of terrorism. It was bipartisanship in a way that I’ve never seen in my life.”
However, it’s “hard to think that if there was a similar-size attack today, that that would happen,” Schmidt said. “No matter what your political views are, the country finds itself divided in a different way. And what I was interested in exploring through this show was what would happen if that kind of attack happened now? How would the government respond when there are facts that the left and the right don’t agree upon, when there are completely different realities that divide the country? Are we prepared technically for something like a cyberattack? And are we prepared democratically, as a country, politically, to deal with that? I really wanted to see what that would look like.”
Additional reporting by Keely Flaherty.
