12 Monkeys - Season 3

Like the Sam Fisher of time.

Thankfully, I was able to get all of Season 3 of 12 Monkeys on catchup for this weekend, Sky having decided not to record it because obviously I wasn't interest in something on SyFy.

Season 3 picks up with Cole trying to track down Cassie, before a future version of himself tells him to look for Jennifer instead, as Jennifer has the answers. Jennifer is also in Paris, between the World Wars, attempting to become a famous actress in order to sell her play about the Army of the 12 Monkeys and thus send a message to the future. Here she is stalked by 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, without horses', a group of four acolytes of the Army dedicated to guardianship of the infant Witness. They are equipped with the season's new hotness, wearable splinter technology, which allows them to do a Kitty Pride every time they are about to be caught and turn out never to have been there.

Cassie tries to escape from Titan, but is prevented by the same technology and her child taken from her. Then Deacon, who turns out not to be dead, is set to rescue her by one of the acolytes for unknown reasons. They find the Splinter facility destroyed, two years on, but with a pair of tether injections left to bring them back to 2046. Then Ramse shows up with Olivia and everything gets dark. Ramse tries to trick Cole into a mission to kill the Witness which is actually an assassination attempt against Cassie, leading to Cole killing Ramse and falling into an existential crisis as he comes to believe that the Witness is beyond salvation because he carries his father's evil in him. Cassie, meanwhile, is determined that he can be saved, leading to a clash in which Cole and Cassie go AWOL using one of the time vests and begin to work against the rest of the Splinter team, even as one of the Guardians takes the Witness - Athan - away to be raised apart from his destiny.

This season also has at least two actual heists!

Tragedy strikes when Athan loses the one person he has truly loved and in despair - and prompted by meeting his mother, long before she met James Cole and just after losing her first patient - decides to go back and become the witness. Cole and Cassie capture him, but Olivia helps the Splinter team send a hit squad and he is seemingly killed when his vest is hit. Then Olivia reveals her long-game: She has been manipulating the team all along to kill the Witness, allowing her to take over Titan and the Army from the Pallid Man in revenge for the Witness taking everything from her after Jennifer stabbed her. As in Season 2, the Army seem triumphant, before Athan - his life saved by Jennifer, following a vision she has long been seeing - reappears to bust out the team. He is killed, Olivia declares herself the Witness (which Athan revealed to her she was all along,) and the season ends with Titan Splintering in above the facility bent on its destruction, but it's not quite the end of the world. Nor, thankfully, is it the end of the series, with a fourth and final season announced.

It's all gone a bit Kubrick.

I continue to really enjoy 12 Monkeys, although I was sad to see Ramse go. I presume that season 4 will see the surviving members of the team - which may or may not include Deacon(1) - forced to go mobile, presumably using a version of the Army's wearable Splinter tech. If they don't hook up with Jennifer again, I will be pouty, because she remains one of the greatest things ever, including a hallucinatory episode in the trenches to the tune of 99 Red Balloons, but with semi-improvised lyrics as well as her theatrical career.

I'm actually heartened  by the announcement that it's going to be the last season, because as much as I am saddened to lose it, I am glad that it is likely to get to tell its whole story to the end and not be cancelled midflow.

(1) I'm assuming it will, because I have a theory that Deacon is important. He was a little upset this season to learn that he doesn't appear anywhere in the Witness's visions, and I wonder if he isn't some sort of freak, temporal wildcard. Olivia calls him an interchangeable component, but what if that's not true?