After resetting humanity to the Stone Age, a scientist attempts to create a new world alone.

SYNOPSIS:

Dr. Eli Mercer is a brilliant but undervalued theoretical physicist. His ideas are seen as too radical, his research too risky, and he himself is considered a paranoid loner. After a string of rejections, dismissals, and ridicule from his peers, Eli finds himself alone in his lab, with one last chance to prove his theory.

In a desperate bid to assert his relevance and outplay the system, Eli initiates an unauthorized experiment based on his theory of temporal collapse. But instead of a localized reaction, a global event unfolds: humanity is reset to zero. People all over the world lose their memory, language, culture, and knowledge — reverting to a primal, Stone Age state.

Waking up in an unfamiliar, wild world, Eli realizes he is one of the few who retained their memory and knowledge. Everything is gone: electricity, the internet, medicine, history — even language itself. The world has started over. And now, in Eli’s mind, he has a chance to do it right. If he caused the end of the old world, he will become the father of the new one.

Eli gathers a group of “cleansed” survivors — people learning to speak, think, and build from scratch. He teaches them fire, hunting, math, logic. He writes new laws, creates a primitive school, and holds the first public gatherings. He quite literally becomes the first chapter of a new civilization.

But no utopia survives under the rule of a single man. Soon, Eli encounters others who, like him, have retained their memories: the cold-minded bioengineer Rachel Quinn, the hardened military strategist John Slater, and the idealistic former politician Michael Harper. Each holds a different vision of what this new civilization should become.

Conflicts begin to rise. Some want to restore the old world. Others aim to build something new — but not the way Eli envisions it. Camps form. Ideologies clash. What began as a second chance for humanity becomes a battle over who gets to write its future.

The pilot episode ends with a chilling realization: Eli is no longer in control. He merely pushed the first domino. Now, Era Zero moves forward on its own.