12 Monkeys - 'The Night Room'

"One guy, three girls, multiple timelines... I'd probably be more weirded out
by a love tesseract if I wasn't already crazy."

This is it, the culmination of Cole's quest to eliminate the plague which ravaged humanity, which happens to coincide with the Army of the 12 Monkeys' charge to liberate the plague. The Night Room has been located by both sides, the secret laboratory housing the precursor to Leland Goines' viral strain, but who will get there first?

We open with Cole and company celebrating the last night of their timeline. It is clear that they are getting increasingly desperate as the time machine breaks down. We then proceed to the usual cross-temporal division of the episode into the siege of the Night Room and some hard truths in 2043.

"Funny story; we're totes the good guys. Go nature!"

In 2015, Cole and Railly are captured by the Pallid Man and his masked commandos, who torture first Jennifer and then Cole until Jennifer opens the vault, only to be defeated by a secondary failsafe system. With time running out and corporate commandos on the way, the Army seem to leave, only to dummy Jennifer into opening the vault for Cole, the only person she trusts, leading to a desperate gambit.

In 2043, Ramse, frustrated that none of their efforts seem to be paying off, learns that Jones has sent others back in time, with horrific results. Their confrontation is actually the emotional core of the episode. Ramse believes in having standards - it's what got them hounded out of West 7 after all - and that their actions matter even if they are going to erase this timeline; Jones also believes in standards, specifically of life, and holds that the loss of learning and culture wrought by the plague is unacceptable, and that a thousand years of reconstruction just to return to where they began is not enough to constitute 'survival' for humanity.

This also hints that the precursor, a partial corpse held in the Night Room vault, may be the infected remains of a previous traveler, if not of Cole himself.

"I'm just a soul whose intentions are good..."

The Pallid Man - in between sliding bamboo splinters under Cole's fingernails, explicitly for shiggles - affably explains that he serves the cause of 'the Witness', the Army of the 12 Monkeys' prophet. He sees the precursor and its viral descendants as a divine weapon to scourge the Earth and restore 'the natural order'. Tom Noonan is working his mojo hard on this one, and the taut rage behind his eerily avuncular exterior is a big part of what sells the episode.

As he tries to set Cole's allies against him by revealing his crimes (the murders of Leland Goines and Henri in Haiti,) Jennifer's reaction ("That is... awesome!") has more punch to it than Railly's disappointment. Her anger doesn't really have enough edge, given the level of trust she has put in Cole and how much she has sacrificed for his cause.

'The Night Room' isn't as good an episode as 'Atari', but it's not without its strengths. In particular, with the core concept of the story flagging over series length, it shakes things up by closing with Cole sucked back to a very different 2043, Railly captured by the Army and Jennifer Goines free of all constraints and, apparently, possessed of every one of her father's security codes. The show's game was sort of played out, and as Ramse noted the future is not being erased, even by the incineration of the precursor. At this critical moment, the show has changed the game.