WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1 of Pacific Rim: The Black, now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix's Pacific Rim: The Black takes place five years after the original movie, focusing on Australia being considered a dead zone after too many Kaiju incursions. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps has more or less abandoned the country and considers anything near that continent to be expendable. This leads to abandoned siblings, Taylor and Hayley, trying to find their parents, former Jaeger pilots who went missing -- or just about any sign of resistance.
What they discover, though, is humanity at its worst, tearing each other apart to survive. But there's one ray of hope in the mysterious 'Boy,' who may not only be one of the greatest finds in the franchise's history but also hides a devastating secret.
Five years after Taylor and Hayley's parents left, tragedy struck. Their colony at the Shadow Basin is killed by the Copperhead kaiju. It's all due to Hayley making too much noise when she activates a training Jaeger she finds, called Atlas Destroyer, and after they survive the beast, they decide to move on. They end up in Meridian, trying to find a power cell for the damaged robot. However, after dodging kaiju-dogs, they discover a secret lab in the center used for Jaeger pilot training.
Hayley's stunned to see a kid in a stasis cell and convinces her brother to pull him out. She knows what it's like to be abandoned so she decides to take him with them, and while Taylor reluctantly agrees, he doesn't name the kid because he doesn't want to get emotionally attached. Their journey in The Black gets more and more perilous from there, especially when they meet Rickter and Mei -- scavengers who connect them to Shane's colony. Sadly, these fiends want to use their 'bot for evil, and a war erupts that results in the kids escaping.
This is when they realize that something's up with the unnamed Boy. He takes a bullet to the chest from Rickter and remains unharmed. The siblings chalk it down to luck, but when they investigate new breaches in the Australian terrain, they see there's a lot more than meets the eye. They're then attacked by Apex, a giant kaiju-Jaeger hybrid, but just when it's about to kill them, Boy stops it by communicating with it, sending off energy and establishing a neural bridge, which shocks the siblings and their A.I., Loa.
As Boy begins drifting with the monster, he pulls the siblings into his neural net with them where they see he means no harm and that he can actually control the tech-beast. So much so, in fact, that even after the link's broken, the creature finds a compatible arm in the Jaeger and kaiju graveyard they're in and brings it back for Atlas. They attach it and surprisingly, it has weapon capabilities now, which shows that Boy knew what they needed. The kaiju ushers them off and at this point, it's clear it wants to save Boy and whoever he considers a friend.
This sets up a brutal finale for The Black's first season in Clayton, wherein Copperhead returns to fight the group as they try to convince Mei to join them. She and Taylor end up in Atlas Destroyer, but they're overpowered, which allows Copperhead to go after Hayley on the ground. But just as it's about to kill her, Boy steps in, eyes glowing red, and... he transforms into a kaiju. Though he's smaller than the average monster, he's much quicker and packs a strong punch -- defending Hayley with his life, considering her a sister and at this point.
As Taylor notes after the fight, it's a game-changing revelation for the Pacific Rim franchise because humans didn't make Boy -- the Precursors (kaiju overlords from the other side of the breach) did. These aliens are clearly creating kaiju disguised as humans to infiltrate their society and attack from within. Luckily, despite being bred by the enemy, Boy's emotional bond with Hayley adds enough humanity to him that he doesn't end up being the trojan horse he was intended to be.
Co-created by Craig Kyle and Greg Johnson and produced by Legendary Television and Polygon Pictures, Pacific Rim: The Black Season 1 is currently streaming on Netflix.
