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| Aaron Marker (Noah Bean), Jennifer Goines (Emily Hampshire), Pallid Man (Tom Noonan), Ramse (Kirk Acevedo), Jones (Barbara Sukowa), Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull) and James Cole (Aaron Stanford) |
We open with 'Splinter', and virologist Cassandra Railly's apparently chance encounter with a man who claims to know her and that they will meet in several years time, before vanishing into thin air. This really sets the scene for the series ahead, in particular the intertwining quests of the two main characters. The time traveller is James Cole, sent back in time to prevent a viral outbreak that will almost annihilate humanity. Warned by Cole and given proof of his bona fides when he scratches the face of her watch and a matching scratch appears on its future version, Railly sets out to do the same, but where her story is linear, Cole's is not.
Each episode, Cole drops into Railly's life and they attempt to further their cause through radically different approaches. In particular, Railly is looking for a cure or containment, whereas Cole is a simpler soul who believes with a desperate fervor that it will all be sorted out if he just kills the right person. That was his mission, and his reward is for this version of him never to have existed and suffered through a viral apocalypse.
It quickly proves less simple than he had hoped, as his goals switch from Leland Goines (Zeljko Ivanek) to his daughter Jennifer in 'Mentally Divergent'. A maths prodigy driven insane by a massacre of which she was accused, Jennifer is the only clue to the location of the plague's source, the enigmatic Night Room. She is also hunted, however, by the Pallid Man, the nigh-preternatural point monster for the Army of the 12 Monkeys.
Losing Jennifer, Cole is next sent to find the only other link to the Night Room, an aid worker known to be in Haiti in 2014. This episode 'Cassandra Complex' is however mostly about Railly, and how her determination to find a global pandemic pathogen that doesn't exist yet has destroyed her career and alienated her from friends and even her former fiance (whose presence in the cast shot suggests he will be more important further down the line.)
We then leave Railly for the bulk of the episode 'Atari', in which a scavenging army finds the base from which the scientist Jones is 'splintering' Cole back into history. This one is a straight up action episode with a time travel twist, as Cole and his hetero life partner Ramse (and eeee! it's Charlie from Fringe!) try to fight off their erstwhile comrades in the West VII (named for their quarantine zone.) The episode digs into the relationship between Cole and Ramse, establishing the latter as the conscience of the pair and one of the ruthlessly pragmatic Cole's only links to the rest of humanity. Jones early explains to Ramse that he is expendable, only present because Cole - whose importance to the programme is not yet explained in the series - insists on it, but it's hard not to suspect that Ramse is key to keeping Cole on mission.
12 Monkeys is not a straight adaptation, nor expansion of the movie, but a much more complicated beast telling its own story in its own way. As is de rigueur these days, the story expands through a series of flash backs and flash forwards, from the two 'presents' of 2015 and 2043 as far back as 2006 and 2035. In a lot of ways, Cole and Railly are the least interesting characters in the piece, acting more as pivots for the rest - particularly Goines, Jones and Ramse - to work around. This is not to say there is nothing to them; Cole's evolving story is a brutal tragedy, and Railly is locked into a self-destructive quest for world salvation.
Four episodes in, I am definitely liking 12 Monkeys, although not loving it as much as Fargo.
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