12 Monkeys - 'Hyena'

It's telling how much more with it Jennifer looks when adopting this Patty
Hearst persona.

As promised a few weeks ago, Jennifer takes the fight to the streets, forming her own army named for the natural predator of the monkey - the hyena.

Look, if you're Jennifer it makes sense.

'A wise man once told me, "There are many endings, but the right one is the one you choose."'

Despite cautionary words frmo Jones and Cole, Cassie and Ramse are locked into their new goal: Find Titan, kill the Witness. When Cole goes to ask Jennifer about the third targeted Primary, he agrees to ask her about Titan. She tells him that she doesn't know who the third is, only the Tall Man knows that, and that only death awaits at Titan. For whatever reason, he tells Cassie and Ramse that Jennifer didn't know Titan at all, then sets off to join the younger Jennifer in 2016.

It's Chris Heyerdahl, and he isn't dead by the end of the episode!

Meanwhile, Hannah - or 'Zeit' as Jennifer has always called her - tells Cassie and Ramse that there is a man who might know about Titan; a sort of living database called the Keeper. He is a collector of knowledge and deals only in truth. They set out to find him and get captured and strapped to a polygraph to exchange truth for truth. In particular, he wants to know why they hate each other so much. He rejects Cassie's claim that she hates Ramse because he was willing to let millions die for the sake of his son, and ultimately both admit that they hate each other because at some point Cole has chosen the other over them*. In exchange, the Keeper gives them a heavily redacted document referring to Titan in 1961 East GHermany, and a scientist named Kirschner. Not much, but enough for a mission.

It's like recruiting your paramilitary organisation from mental patients with
antisocial behaviour disorders was a bad idea somehow.

In 2016 (arriving to the strains of the theme tune from the movie version of 12 Monkeys, which is hella weird,) Cole meets the Hyenas, a gang of heavily-armed women with antisocial personality disorders whom Jennifer has liberated from mental institutions to help her take down the Army of the 12 Monkeys. As their leader, Jennifer is a cool, suave revolutionary in control of her surroundings, using a planted cellphone to eavesdrop on the Tall Man and having taken down almost all of Markridge's pague labs. Yet all is not well, and the arrival of Cole immediately creates friction, especially with Jennifer's number two, Vanessa.

The Tall Man is clearly troubled by the Hyena's success. Olivia, alive but wheelchair-bound, reminisces about 'Mother' (not, I think, a shared birth mother, and it's interesting that previously they talked about her father as some sort of founder of the Army) and tells him that the Witness lies, which causes him to flip out and nearly kill her.

Okay; not one of my better theories.

Hmm, the Witness is a manipulative time-traveler with a complicated plan who lies on an almost axiomatic level...

The Hyenas have also tracked down Peters, the scientist who made the virus and whom Cassie told to disappear, which he appears to have done by moving in which his brother and getting a job as a janitor in a hospital. They grab him as he is tinkering with biologicals, and he explains that he is working on a vaccine for the plague virus in secret. The Hyenas want to kill him, but Cole wants to set a trap for the Tall Man so that he can learn the identity of the final Primary. It's after the trap has been set that the Hyenas rebel, deciding that if they kill the Tall Man, everything will be tickety boo. It's not an unreasonable conclusion, given that they don't know about the red forest, although it's reached more as a result of Vanessa's seething resentment of Cole and the fact that the army is held together more by devotion to a charismatic leader and a singular goal than by a robust ideological framework.

Cole and Jennifer escape and capture the Tall Man, torturing him for the information they need in a particularly brutal fashion. It's weird and uncomfortable watching Cole embrace his inner scavenger again, even against his father's killer, but it seems to work in the end. The Tall Man is tough as nails, but finally reveals a) that the final Primary is in upstate New York in 1957, b) that he firmly believes that there is nothing Cole can do to prevent the Paradox, as it has already happened, and c) that he has embraced technology sufficiently to know that he was being bugged and turn the tables on the Hyenas by planting a bomb in the hospital, which kills Peters, the Hyenas and hundreds of innocents. Then one of his goons arrives and he escapes, so all in all a great success.

Cole reassures Jennifer, who is thunderstruck by her actions leading to so many innocent deaths, and he passes on the words of wisdom she related to him at the start of the episode. He heads back to 2044, but almost immediately shows up at the door of the hotel room again, looking pretty messed up.

And in 2044, Hannah and Jones start to bond a little. Jones tells her about her father, and we cut to 2016, where said father - whose previous work was cut off on account of a dead bodyguard showing up in his lab - is recruited by the Tall Man to work on a contingency project so vast they call it Titan.

All in all, 'Hyena' is a very strong episode, both for the action-packed events in 2016 - huge props to Emily Hampshire's performance once again - and the more character-driven developments in 2044. The episode once more kicks our heroes to the curb just as they were starting to get a handle on things. In retrospect the Hyenas were pretty much doomed from the start, but there was enough of a hint that they were the Daughters to be that their death en masse was a shocker. Curiously, despite his supposed ongoing importance, Peters' death caused no temporal ripple, which means that the Army must already have another way of getting their virus back. Perhaps the most baffling thing is that Elliott Jones is somehow involved in creating Titan almost forty years after the date Ramse and Cassie have retrieved. As ever, while much is revealed, most of it is more mystery.

* Actually, some people speculate that the person Cassie cared for who chose Ramse is Aaron, who defected to the Army, and she was certainly pretty steamed already when she confronted him at the original time machine.