12 Monkeys - 'Tomorrow', 'Divine Move', 'Shonin', 'Paradox' and 'Arms of Mine'

"Nice core. We'll take it."

Well, golly; this is a bit of a call back. I kind of dropped 12 Monkeys a while back for reasons not related to how much I was enjoying the show, and a recent bout of injury has allowed me to catch up on almost* all of the rest of Season 1, just in time for Season 2 in a few months time.

As Cole's body begins to collapse, Jones steals the Spearpoint core in a brutal raid which leaves most of the Spearpoint community dead. She justifies this by saying that the quest for the cure was folly, but the truth is that her obsession is with preventing the plague, the collapse of civilisation and the death of her daughter; she has no investment in the future of this timeline. This ultimately puts her - and Cole - at odds with Ramse, whose new-found family means that he is entirely invested in the future.

"There is no charge for awesomeness..."

After witnessing Cassie's death in 2017, Cole is returned to 2015. With Cassie's help, he finds that the original source of the plague is a trade at a club in Tokyo in 1987; the place and time where he first - or last - met Leland Goines. Ramse attempts to stop the splinter and so prevent his son's erasure by stealing the stabilising meds. He hides out with his partner and son, but is drawn to investigate the Daughters, an all-female sect sporting the emblem of the Army of the 12 Monkeys and led by an elderly Jennifer Goines in a wicked hat.

Things go from bad to worse when an attempt to get the meds back results in Ramse's partner being shot (I told you this wouldn't stay happy.) He returns to the laboratory to destroy the machine, and when that fails instead sends himself back in time. This leads to a full-on brawl in Tokyo and incarceration in a Japanese prison after Cole is stabbed, apparently fatally.

Not a good smile.

So begins the tilt episode, 'Shonin', in which everything changes. Contacted in prison by Olivia, the woman from 'The Red Forest', Ramse is recruited and educated to become both the tool and a prophet of the Army. Apparently rendered ageless by the splinter meds, he spends years in prison before emerging to provide the proof of the Army's purpose by uniting a pendant given to him by older Jennifer with its younger version, worn by the Pallid Man, resulting in a catastrophic paradox (and revealing the one thing we didn't see with the watch in the first episode: that the paradox blast leaves behind a single resolved version of the item in question. This will be important.)

Woman with a plan.

Shonin turns the series on its head, as Cole's greatest friend becomes the enemy who has dogged his steps, Ramse's recollection of his own story providing the Army with the means to thwart Cole throughout his quest. And yet, he is not the start of the Army; his coming has itself been predicted, not by Olivia, but by her father, or perhaps even earlier. They have had a plan all along which included all of the events of the series to date, culminating in the arrival of Ramse and the knowledge necessary to complete the cycle, but it was not a complete plan.

Monkeys 2015.

To save Cole's life, Jones bounces him forward to 2015. With blood loss and splintering damage killing him, Cassie seeks help from the one person who might know how to treat the latter: the 2015 version of Jones. To repair him, they seek out the 2015 version of Cole, who is living with his father, who was warned by Cole's mother to protect him from the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They plan to inject Cole with his younger self's blood, but before the can do more than draw the blood, the Pallid Man comes to finish Cassie and Cole now that their 'part' is done. Cole's father is killed before his son's eyes (providing a key image which we have seen several times, as a nod to the 'fixed moment' in La Jette or the movie 12 Monkeys,) but injecting himself provokes a paradox which takes out the Army hitters and leaves a single, resolved Cole: Unhurt, and now anchored to 2015.

Monkeys 2043

In 2015, Cole and Cassie go to the splinter lab to confront Ramse, who is now its owner. Ramse's plan is just to go back to his son, but taking him for the Witness, Cassie shoots him and is shot in turn by his bodyguard. This is an excellent scene, which highlights that Cassie has become as brutally committed to the cause as Cole once was. In a final moment of redemption, Ramse gives Cole his forward-splinter meds so that he can send Cassie to Jones and save her life.

Unfortunately, Jones is in trouble of her own, as a dozen albino warrior-monks break in with the help of Deacon to seize control of the machine. These, it turns out, are the 12, who were prepared from infancy in 2015 to 'complete the cycle' in 2043. All was ordained, Olivia says, from the moment Cole first splintered to Ramse's death. Yet even as she says this, Cole defies the Army unknowingly by returning for his brother (in 'Paradox' we learn that they met when Ramse took the newly orphaned Cole under his wing in foster care.)

This run of episodes contains a lot of twists and turns, and shows up a lot of the advantages of binge watching a time travel show like this. The first episode opened with a voiceover which seemed to make the Cassie/Cole relationship (Collie? Cassole?) out to be the huge, mythic centre of the show. It rang false, but with 'Arms of Mine' we see that the voiceover was more about a general principle, and indeed applies less to Cole and Cassie and more to Cole's acceptance that Ramse did what he had to do. In addition, the last three episodes build to the idea that Ramse is the witness, before revealing that he isn't, and that the Army's plans go deeper and further than we ever knew. I am very much looking forward to Season 2.

* It turns out that my recording missed the last and very pivotal ten minutes of the final episode.