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?

12 Monkeys - 'Blood Washed Away' and 'Memory of Tomorrow'

"Are you crazy? Is that your problem?"

A double bill, as I wrap up season 2 of time travel headscrew 12 Monkeys.

In 'Blood Washed Away', Cole and Railly work to prevent the final paradox in 1957. They know where and they know very roughly when, but as their window closes all they have managed to do is rule out every possible suspect and wear each other's nerves to the bone. A nervous man on a temp crew brought in to fix the roof of the factory in question looks solid for the perp, but faced with prophylactic execution he confesses that he was paid to draw monkeys and act crazy.

"I'm beginning to reconsider my calling as a revolutionary leader."

Meanwhile, in 2045, Ramse and Jennifer's team slogs across country to Titan, falling foul of scavenger ambushes and internal strife as the Daughters lose faith in the 'reborn' Jennifer and Jennifer loses faith in herself and the mission as she watches her followers die again. The breaking point comes when Jennifer reveals that her 'wisdom' is a bag of fortune cookie inserts, and Zeit/Hannah returns from scouting the Titan site with the news that there is no facility there, not of any kind. Ramse, Deacon, Whitley and Zeit press on regardless, recognising that anything else would be to passively accept the coming doom.

"There's a house, cedar and pine."

At the last minute, Cole and Railly discover that the real primary is the wife of one of Cole's workmates. That workmate is the Messenger who was sent to kill her and instead fell in love, but with her primary nature tearing at her mind, he kills her in order to be with her forever in the Red Forest. The resulting blast takes out the factory and leaves Railly in a coma for six months. Cole leaves, and when she wakes Railly works another six months as a nurse/double secret future doctor. Then, in 1959, detective finds Cole living under his favourite alias, Morris Morrison in, as it turns out, a house made of cedar and pine. Here he cuts his hand on a saw and she helps tend it, noting as she cleans it that 'most of the blood has washed away.'

"Witness me!"

In the future, Ramse's team reach the Titan facility, which is there; large as life and twice as sinister. They enter the facility and hear sinister music, at which point dead-eyed, crazy Deacon is basically the one sane man in the party.

'Why would you walk towards the weird music? Ramse, nothing about this place says "good idea."'

Ramse is insistent, and they press on, finding a hooded figure in some sort of ritual circle. Suddenly, they are surrounded by other robed figures, all carrying punch daggers, and as Cole and Railly finally get it on in 1959, the scene is intercut with Ramse and his team being slaughtered by the Army, which is some hardcore fan disservice, I can tell you.

And that brings us to 'Memory of Tomorrow', which opens with a voice over which mostly, but not entirely, mirrors that from 'Year of the Monkey', since that's how 12 Monkeys rolls.

'I want to tell you a story... About how the world ends. And the man who came back through time to stop it... And failed. For, you see, there is another traveler, one who's both the architect and witness to our destruction. And the man cannot see the other's design...

It's her! From the movie!

'The end of the beginning... And the beginning of the end.'

James and Cassie are living in 1959 and she is finally using his first name. They are telling themselves that it's all okay, Ramse killed the Witness and time is safe, but then time freezes around Cole and a woman he doesn't know tells him it's not over. If the audience weren't worried enough knowing what happened at the end of last episode, the visitation is given more meaning because the woman - and our mystery narrator - is Madeleine Stowe, who played  Katharine Railly in the Terry Gilliam interpretation. Here it turns out she is a woman named Lillian, a primary who killed her family to save them from the end of time.

This is the sort of happiness that characters in 12 Monkeys really ought to
avoid for survival's sake.

Cole doesn't want to believe, especially when he learns that Cassie is pregnant, but he is persuaded to take a trip to the Pine Barrens, where he sees the emergence of the anomaly and the first tree of many turn red. Lillian tasks him to change the outcome of their confrontation with Charlie in 1957. Of course, he has no machine, but she insists that 'James Cole does not need a machine.' She also tells him that, if it works, he should not go after Ramse, not go to Titan, and I think we all know how that's going to work out.

And so, reluctantly, knowing what it will mean for him and for Cassie, and for their child, Cole drinks the red tea and projects his mind back, visiting a few key moments before settling on 1957 and killing Charlie before he can paradox his wife. At this point I became convinced that the Witness would turn out to be Cassie, after she learned Cole had effectively voided their child's life.

She also has a big dog now, and probably a suit of power armour out the back.

With the paradox prevented, the Red Forest retreats, and after a year alone in the facility taking a few levels in badass, Jones brings them back to 2045. With Lillian's clear warning that going to Titan is a shit idea, they use the machine to splinter to where the convoy is to warn Ramse to pull out. Naturally they are too late, and with Cole's brother and Jones' daughter in there, no warning on Earth is going to keep them out.

Jennifer fails to rally the Daughters at first; after a strong start with material borrowed from The Lord of the Rings and Braveheart, a big shout out to Independence Day proves a quote too far. At the last minute, however, she pulls it out of the bag with her willingness to give her own life, and her final lesson: 'Be excellent to each other.'

Whoa.

So fortified, the big damn heroes turn up in time to save Team Ramse, but captured members of the Army will only tell them that the Witness is Safe. It's about here that Cassie remembers, impossibly, the time she and Cole spent, but didn't spend, together in 1959. Before they can find the Witness, klaxons blare, and Jones realises why Hannah couldn't find Titan. The entire facility is capable of travelling through time, and it's about to do it again. 

Separated by Army reinforcements, the team end up scattered. Jones, Cole, Whitley and Hannah escape with most of the Daughters, Deacon is killed buying Jennifer time to escape, Jennifer is caught in a temporal leak and thrown to the trenches of World War I, Ramse is rescued by a seeming member of the Army and Cassie is captured.

I love the mirroring of this image with Ramse getting gut-stabbed over the top
of the sex scene last episode.

As the season comes to a close, Ramse meets Olivia, who promises she is not with the Army any more, and she will take him to his son. Cole and Jones splinter back to the facility, but Cassie's tether is gone. Jones is however able to track Titan and sends Cole after it, to 2162, where the Pallid Man welcomes Cassie and tells her that the Witness is safe, the child of two time travellers born outside of time. Her child. So a) shows what I know and b) OMFG!

I told you, this is a story about how the world ends. One that begins at the end and ends... at the beginning.

As in the first season, 12 Monkeys delivers a finale which changes the game, not merely going forward, but looking back. All the references to Cole and Cassie's part in the plan, their importance, take on a new light.  We also saw the Army become a major, physical threat for the first time, with their vast time ship and conclave of hooded figures, although the great success of season 2 lies in revealing so much about the Army and its plans without removing their sense of overall menace.

And did I mention that Jennifer is in 1917, trying to convince the French that she isn't a German spy. That's earlier than any other splinter to date, and also means that Emily Hampshire is almost certainly going to have lots of totally bonkers and wonderful stuff to do throughout Season 3, and I can not express how happy her presence as a regular this season has made me.

12 Monkeys - 'Resurrection'

"This is so much fun it's freaky!"

In 2044, shit is getting real.

The Red Forest is at the gates, and the team is falling apart. As more and more people lose faith in Jones, Cole's mission to 1957 to save the last primary is imperiled as a group of disgruntled scientists and guards work with Railly and Ramse to hijack the machine for a cross-country, spatial leap to Titan for a final confrontation with the Witness. It seems increasingly clear that they don't consider this so much a hope as a final fuck you to their enemy. It doesn't matter if they lose, so long as the Witness isn't allowed to win.

"Enough crazy for ya?"

Increasingly desperate, Cole teams up with Deacon and the daughters to take back the facility, but things go awry when Ramse baits Deacon and a stray shot hits Jennifer. Fortunately, Jennifer has planned for this, having seen the date of her death on the Monkeys' board, and sends Cole to bring her younger self to the future, providing her Daughters with a promised 'resurrection'. She tells her that she has a choice to make: Cole has to go to 1957, but she can sit tight and hope Cole saves the day, or lead the rest of the group cross-country to Titan. When she was young Jennifer, she chose to stay, so on some level that seems to work, but with her older self's encouragement, Jennifer chooses to lead the Daughters to war.

Damn.

Cole is sent to 1957, followed by Railly, who finally realises that hunting the Witness is just a form of running from what he did to her. Jennifer leads a convoy out of the facility, but Jones is cut off by the anomalies and consumed along with the Machine.

'Resurrection' continues the season's trend of playing up the importance of the previously tangential Jennifer, and cracks the tough facade that Railly has been maintaining since being sent to the future. With two episodes to go in Season 2, we're all set for a very big finish, and a third season in the works for 2017. After a slightly shaky opening, 12 Monkeys has become a firm favourite with me, and I hope it is able to continue to expand its mythology without going too weird.

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.

12 Monkeys - 'Lullaby'

Oh. So this episode is going to hurt then.

Time is on the brink of destruction again, thanks to the Witness's vicious counterstroke, but his actions have given Jones a plan.

The Witness is using Time Travel to do what he does. That means that without Time Travel, none of it would exist: the Army of the 12 Monkeys, the Splinter programme, Sam's disappearance, maybe even the plague itself. Thus, Jones does what she believes is necessary and sends Cassie back to the moment of her daughter Hannah's death to kill the younger version of Jones and erase Time Travel.

Cassie completes her mission, but immediately finds herself back where she arrived in 2020, this time with Cole, who has insisted on being sent back to stop her. As she tries to prove that she already killed Jones, they realise that this is the same day over again, especially when Cole's presence sees them thrown in the Scav Tank with Jennifer. Each time Jones dies, the day resets; Time needs time travel to exist, which means that Jones can't die. More tragic yet, although Cassie realises that Hannah is only suffering from bacterial meningitis, Time won't let her save the child because that would refocus Jones on curing the plague and not preventing it. As Jennifer puts is, Time wants Jones just the way she is. So, they try to wait out the day, but that doesn't work either, so clearly they are here to do something.

Cole engineers a meeting with Jones, although it does require them all to be executed by firing squad, to ask her a question raised by his conversations with Cassie: Is a moment of happiness worth a long period of loss?

Yay!

Cut to Cole and Cassie being recovered to 2044, where they try to convince Jones that Time needs her; needs them. To prove it, they take her to the Daughters' camp and explain that they couldn't disrupt her creation of time travel, so instead they faked Hannah's death early, then resuscitated and cured her, finally delivering her to the Daughters, who took her in for the next twenty four years. Jones's heartbreak was needed, but now she has at least a little time to get to know her daughter.

Just to bring us down again, a drunk Ramse threatens to shoot Cassie for bringing about the events which lost his son. She offers an alternative, however. She was in the Witness's mind while he was in hers, and in the words of Jonathan Harker, she knows where the bahstahd sleeps. She suggests that she and Ramse go to a place called Titan and kill the Witness.

I admit, I was worried this episode would be a total downer, what with Jones's daughter basically dying over and over again. In the end that plot went pleasantly upbeat, and the episode also provided a salutary lesson for Cassie, as just following the mission became not merely ineffective, but impossible. The final scene added a new twist, as Cassie's revelation gave the first indication that the Witness, for all his power, might truly be vulnerable. I doubt it will be so easy, but perhaps there is hope.

12 Monkeys - 'Immortal' and 'Meltdown'

"Costume budget?"
"Costume budget."

After last week's revelations, the team know for sure that they are rescuing primaries from Messenger hit teams in order to prevent time-fracturing paradoxes and the destruction of... pretty much everything.

After a brief interlude playing with Ramse's son and reaffirming their on-again bromance, Cole and Ramse get the detail this week: Travel back in time to protect a primary in the 1970s (because this season they have the budget for multiple eras.) The kicker: This primary is also a serial killer, who murdered and butchered several women, the last of whom is their way to trace 'the Immortal', locate his hunters and so prevent a paradox.

Of course, it all goes wrong. Encouraged by his son to embrace the mission and protect others, not just him, Ramse is the cool head, but Cole can't stand by and let a woman be murdered as a means to an end. He interrupts the murder, provoking a time quake, and they have to pretend to be journalists with a source to get the police to help them locate the killer, Kyle Slade. Then Cole goes charging in, and when Slade says that he has the Witness, helps him to escape custody. Slade wants Cole to kill the Witness and take him to the future, and claims that he has been murdering other primaries to thwart the Messengers. The last victim was just a message to Cole, however, and Cole gradually realises that Slade is insane, and moreover has only succeeded in capturing a Messenger.

Well, this isn't good.

It's at about this time that Cassie is in 2016, having a conversation with apparently-not-dead-Aaron, who tries to convince her to join the Army's mission to destroy time and so put an end to death. He's got some mojo, but when she at last rejects his arguments and realises that he is the Witness putting on a face, he morphs into Cole before splintering out.

Ramse appears and saves Cole's butt. He has already taken down one Messenger at the hotel, and the other is killed - along with two police officers who trigger Slade's booby trap - before Cole executes Slade for his crimes, assuring him that he only needs to stop him dying from paradox.

Jennifer heads out to take the fight to the streets. As Cassie prepares to return home, she sees the masked Witness again and her eyes turn black.

"Witness me!"

In 'Meltdown', Cassie dreams of seeing the machine sabotaged, and wakes to find that she came back with an anomalous second brain signature, and that this growth. is malfunctioning, spewing temporal radiation and randomly zapping people through time. As Cassie, Deacon, Cole and Ramse try to disable the core, Cassie and Sam disappear, nly to turn up in the Core chamber, with Cassie holding a gun on Sam. It becomes apparent that Cassie has somehow been possessed by the Witness, and indeed we see her consciousness now trapped in the cabin of cedar and pine.

This is the Witness's counterstrike after their success in the 70s, and a conspicuous display of his direct power. Fortunately for our heroes, Cole is able - barely - to talk Cassie down by putting his own life in danger, banking on her coming to his rescue even when buried beneath the Witness's mental powers. Which she does.

Damn you!

Unfortunately, by this point the rather lovely Dr Eckland has already sacrificed himself to save Jones, by going in to repair the Machine, or at least stave off catastrophic failure for a short time. Moreover, a last surge of temporal energy zaps Sam and sends him off through time.

TRAUMA!

Well, that was a rapid reversal from beating back the anomalies in 'Immortal' to getting owned by the Witness in 'Meltdown'. It also confirms that the Witness is another time traveler; apparently one who has much more experience and power than they do, and is able to send his consciousness as a passenger in Cassie's mind. It's hella creepy. And someone has found Sam in the forest, which can't be good.

'Immortal' is an excellent episode, and affirms what has also been suspected: That some Primaries are definitely the regular kind of crazy as well. Cole's growing awareness of this as he walks through the booby-trapped corpse store is played to perfection.

I've been expecting bad things to happen to Sam for a while now, and I'm kind of glad that part is out of the way for now. 'Meltdown' also provided something genuinely threatening in the form of the Witness hisself, with his weird powers and ability to go anywhere that you go.

12 Monkeys - 'Bodies of Water'

"Since I haven't been involved in the plot, I've been much happier."

The future; it's not what it used to be, as the Army of the 12 Monkeys pulls the fabric of time apart.

In 2016, Jennifer Goines is doing well. She's healthy, wealthy and medicated, looking forward to a bright and virus-free future. Unfortunately, time has other plans, and when 2044 Jennifer admits that her ability to see all of time has faded with age, a traveler is sent to interrupt 2016 Jennifer's routine, and at her older self's insistence, it's Cassie's turn to deal with her.

On top of their mutual antagonism, Jennifer and Cassie have to contend with the Army, who have been keeping tabs on Jennifer, and who still have plans for Cassie, even if they do not fully understand them. The cycle is broken and Olivia's faith in the witness is failing, although the Pallid Man remains firm. Cassie pays another visit to the cedar and pine hut to meet the Witness, who communicates through scrawled messages on the walls; as you do when you're some sort of messed up arch-primary. Fortunately, Jennifer comes through aces, memorising the Army's crazy quilt of destiny before rescuing Railly and stabbing Olivia in the gut and precipitating a changing of the guard as the Pallid Man takes charge.

Management 101.

In 2044, Ramse and Cole decide that they need to eliminate Deacon, handing him over to an old enemy. He comes back, however, bloody and beaten, and oddly impressed and willing to start over.

'Bodies of Water' is a weird episode, even by 12 Monkeys standards. Not only does Jennifer begin to hallucinate her dead mother, but all sorts of people are drinking red forest tea and tripping balls through time.

12 Monkeys continues to impress me with its ability to evolve its concept each time it runs the risk of getting stale. It changes up, moving its model of time travel forward and shifting the goalposts to keep its protagonists - and now to an extent its formerly all-knowing antagonists - guessing.

12 Monkeys - 'Emergence'

Ramse was less than happy to get stuck with a random suit instead of a sweet
tailored number like Cole's.

With temporal anomalies sweeping through history, Jones sends Ramse back to 1944 to assist Cole and Railly in preventing the paradox which caused the damage. Unfortunately, while he arrives in good time he is immediately hit by a car and is unable to reach the asylum in time to warn Cole or alert events. Although he does encounter the female Messenger, he is unable to convince her that the Witness sent him, or to overpower her. Events play out as before, Crawford Jr. is killed and the paradox rips through time.

In 2044, an increasingly fraught Jones seeks guidance from Jennifer Goines. Using a hallucinogenic tea brewed from reddened leaves, Goines shows Jones the moment the first monkey became self-aware. Jones defies the idea that evolution is made of moments instead of continuity, but Goines likens human understanding of time to a line of ants; hundreds of ants, each aware only of itself and those immediately in front and behind. Only an ant who steps out of the line, a Primary, can see the line. Apparently they are also necessary to stop time losing track of itself, and the Messengers are targeting Primaries in order to break time.

Most of the blood has washed away...

While Railly hates on Ramse some more, Cole goes looking for the Messenger, who also survived the blast, teaming up unexpectedly with the Fed who took a dislike to him and briefly arrested him and Railly before Ramse rescued them. Agent Gale turns out to be a huge HG Wells fan, and gets hold of the whole time travel idea very quickly. They question the Messenger, who is surprised to have survived, saying that 'Father made us too well.' She tells them that the Army will end 'time's cruel destruction' and then breaks loose, but doesn't kill Cole because the Witness has forbidden it.

The time travelers return home, letting Gale see them splinter out. They discuss how screwed they are, while Gale leaves the photo in the hotel room as a clue leading back to its own creation. In 1971 the dying Messenger bids farewell to her son, and in 2016 the Pallid Man - heavily implied to be the son, explaining some of his nigh-superhuman characteristics - scarred but not killed by Cole's own paradox, watches Jennifer Goines check into a mental health clinic.

'Emergence' is a companion to 'One Hundred Years' in a sort of expanded version of the two halves of Season 1's 'Atari'. It gives a different view on the events of the previous episode, and changes their final outcome without actually affecting the events themselves. Ramse's attempt to call Cole, prevented by the nurse, proves that he was present all along, so no retcons for you, 12 Monkeys. Perhaps most interestingly, the plot is increasingly moving away from the plague, with a strong suggestion that the only reason for the plague was to force Jones to send Cole and Ramsey back in time. The Witness's plan is apparently pretty cray-cray, and I admire that in a TV villain.

12 Monkeys - 'One Hundred Years'

Time travel: It's about hats.

Following the clues from the hotel, Cole persuades Jones and the increasingly creepy father-daughter survivalist team of Deacon and Cassie that the next step has to be back to 1944, in pursuit of the Messengers.

While Deacon pushes for Ramse's execution, Cassie and Cole are splintered back, with Cole arriving two months earlier than Cassie. He is clearly loving the period, while nuCassie is all about the mission, which involves tracking a pair of Messengers - a man and a woman - who are going after a man named Thomas Crawford, although Terminator-style, their first attempt hits the wrong Thomas Crawford.

What is the deal with the face? Presumably it's an image that haunts the
Primaries through their weird temporal sensitivity. Maybe someone is going to
throw a baboon into the time machine.

The right Thomas Crawford is a mental patient, daubing the Monkey emblem on the walls of his cell. He is a Primary, like Jennifer, and he knows that the Messengers are coming for him. Played by Continuum's Erik Knudsen, he is kind of adorable, and like Jennifer he is resigned to the predestination of his doom. Unlike Jennifer, he doesn't have a Cole to talk him off the ledge. Cassie's impersonal insistence on protecting him does not persuade him and he gives himself up to the Messengers in part to save Cassie and Cole.

Crawford is ritually murdered using a piece of his own future skeleton, invoking a paradox which sends devastating ripples into the fracturing timeline. As anomalies tear open - fortuitously interrupting Ramse's execution - the forests turn red, and the world is one step closer to the Army's vision.

Also, Dr Ecklund is rocking out in the time machine room and giving Jones the Tormund eye. So cute.

'One Hundred Years' brings snappy suits, while spiraling our heroes further and further down the rabbit hole. Cassie continues to bridle against the new, softer side of Cole, but it is increasingly apparent that it is Cole who is - ironically as a result of Cassie's influence - coming to understand the big picture.

12 Monkeys - 'Primary'

Look again: The comedy crazy girl is now a tragic heroine.

"I was sent back in time to kill a man. It was supposed to fix everything; it didn't. So I killed more people; nothing changed. And then I save someone, someone who should have died, and that is what changed things. It's the only thing that's ever made any difference."

We open with a quick montage of Cassie's eight months in the future, living with the West VII and learning to be like them, before cutting back to the roof where Ramse joins the pistol party. Cassie explains that there are eleven more vials of the virus waiting in a plane to complete Jennifer's voyage of death, but still Cole refuses to let Cassie kill Jennifer, instead persuading her to hand over the vial.

Hey kids, it's Michael Hogan from BSG!

Together they go to the airport and destroy the virus, and as it burns time shifts around them. In 2044 the Project Splinter facility suddenly has a sizable staff of scientists and Jones' research material is back, and altered. Yet Cole and Ramse remain. Things have changed, but Jennifer assures them it is not in the way that they think. Cassie angrily returns to the future, and takes Ramse with her to be grilled on the Army's plans. While Jones explains the changes to her staff - better quarantine, more survivors - one of them, Dr Eckland, suggests that if she doesn't remember him things might be awkward when they go to bed together. Being a gent, he moves his stuff out.

In 2016, Jennifer's special awareness of time/voices in her head lead her and Cole to a hotel which she insists he has been to before. She tries to persuade him to kill her and then tries to cut herself with a broken mirror, explaining that she had a purpose, but it is gone now. He stops her, and they get moved to a new room, 607 - a prime number, to Jennifer's delight, and one she has been calling out for a while; also, apparently by chance, the first three digits of Jones' 2016 phone number - a suite which a James Cole bought in perpetuity in 1944. Jennifer confesses her feelings for Cole and tells him that, although he feels he ought to be with Cassie, that is the way that the world ends. He does however convince her that she can find her own purpose.

Deacon tries to get information from Ramse, until Ramse throws him off his game by revealing knowledge of his past. This is a key moment, reminding us that Ramse may look the same, but he's lived a lifetime since he last met Deacon. Cassie then proves how far gone she really is by threatening Ramse's son for the information he doesn't have, but is interrupted when the daughters show up and tell Jones that she must bring Cole back. This is a message passed on to repay his act of mercy towards Jennifer. Despite Cassie's doubts that Cole is committed to 'the mission' anymore, he and Jones reach an accord and he shows her a picture of him and Cassie in 1944, speculating that this is where the Messengers were sent. He also rejects Cassie's insistence that he must be prepared to 'do what is necessary.'

To go beyond a single series, a show has to be able to adapt, and 12 Monkeys is certainly making a go of it, not just with the expanded cast of scientists and the 1944 setting to be introduced next week (yay!) but with the reversal of Cassie and Cole's moral roles. Having spent a season softening Cole and hardening Cassie, jumping her straight to point-a-gun-at-a-kid level of commitment is both a reassertion and a reversal of the status quo, maintaining the central dynamic of 'kill vs cure' while changing the relationship which couches it. Part of me is starting to suspect that an ultimately disillusioned Cassie could be the Witness.

Also of note this week is the continuing apotheosis of Jennifer. Whether her ability to perceive temporal manipulation is causal of, consequent on or even parallel to her madness, it adds a deeper dimension to a character who previously appeared very much as a tool, or the dark shadow of a manic pixie dream girl, while the fact of her mental illness importantly serves to curb her power and make her a less than reliable prophet. Even her attraction to Cole has gone from a manic infatuation to a deep and almost tragic affection.

As it deviates further and further from its source material, 12 Monkeys becomes an ever more intriguing work, holding and revealing its secrets at just the right pace to keep interesting. I hope that it can maintain that pace, at least for this season.

12 Monkeys - 'Year of the Monkey'

One of the drawbacks of being up to date with the series again is the relative paucity of screen shots, so instead enjoy this rather sexy promo image hinting that some of our cast may get to splinter into the 20s or thereabouts.

The gritty SyFy 'adaptation' of 12 Monkeys returns to our screens, beginning with a welcome recap of Season 1, given that it's been a while - a full year - since Season 1 finished airing and that I lost the end of the last episode to a recording fault.

We pick up in 2016, with the Army of the 12 Monkeys pursuing Ramse, determined that he must die to 'close the circle' and validate the Witness's predictions. Ramse and Cole are fighting back tenaciously. The Witness's future knowledge remains a powerful advantage, but a chance remark by Olivia tips them off that actually it is not prescience giving them away, but a tracker implanted in Ramse's neck. They call on an ex-Markridge researcher (played by Brendan 'Mr Bates' Coyle) to remove it, but he tries to betray them and gets shot for his troubles (I think; it as off screen, so maybe Cole is even more changed than we thought.) Despite their ongoing divergence of goals - as Ramse puts it, he is for the future, Cole is for the past - they decide to stick together and the Ramse reveals that the doctor let slip that the virus is set to be released in New York by Jennifer Goynes at the Chinese New Year.

Cut to Jennifer at a speed dating event, encouraging one of her partners to shoot her and save the world.

Presumably this bit of bone is to be reunited with its older self as a token of
the Messenger's origin.

In 2043, the Twelve, calling themselves Messengers, tell Jones to send them back in time to coordinates kept secret from her. She sabotages the first splinter, killing one of the messengers by sending only part of him through time. I'm not sure, but I've a feeling that it might have been the same parts that remained of the precursor corpse. This leads the head Messenger to threaten to kill Cassandra. Jones and Cassie are both willing for her to die, but the West VII tech gets the machine fixed instead.

Cassie persuades Deacon that she can save him from his progressive Wilson's disease and gets him onside. He grabs her guard while she stabs him, despite her obvious horror at the act, and they let in the rest of the West VII and Marcus to take back the facility. The remaining Messengers are killed, but half have already been Splintered to wherever they are going.

In New York, Ramse gets cold-cocked by someone, but Cole corners Jennifer on a roof. She asks him to stop her, but he refuses to shoot, telling her that she doesn't have to release the virus. There is no fate, he insists, laying out what I suspect will be the theme of the season. This is a choice; there is always a choice. He is cornered in turn by members of the Army, but they are killed by Cassie, reappeared from the future as a stone cold badass and here to assassinate Jennifer like Cole assassinated her father. Cole however puts himself in front of Jennifer and tells Cassie exactly what he told Jennifer: You don't have to do this. It's a choice.

I really like this series. I was a bit iffy about it at first, but just look at those pictures. I'm theorising in the captions instead of snarking. Now, I really hope they can keep this rolling, because Season 1's almost closed loop was really good, and in particular everything that had gone before was made better once it was finished, so they've got a lot to live up to now. 'Year of the Monkey' is a solid beginning, however, and promises more intriguing puzzles to come.

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.

12 Monkeys - 'The Keys' and 'Yesterday'

Sometimes you have to stop and smell the extinction event.

Cole, Railly and Railly's apparently on-again fiance Aaron are on the trail of Operation Troy, but it's slow going (as investigation into above top secret CIA black ops are wont to be if your team consists of a virologists, a Senatorial aide and some bloke from the future.) They get a brief boost when they interrogate an archaeologist at an exhibition of extinction level relics (subtle irony!), but only really learn that the Army of the 12 Monkeys may be connected to a double-secret Chechen offshoot of the already obscure and esoteric Druze*, and that the archaeologist is terrified of them, and especially the Pallid Man.

Before they can get much further, Railly receives a call from Cole; he is in Chechnya and has the virus, but needs her help to destroy it. Operation Troy is the use of the virus to eliminate a CIA whistle-blower, but with the Army and the Russians closing in on the outbreak, There is little to be done but attempt a hail Mary and persuade the CIA to airstrike the bunker where Cole is being held before locking Aaron and Railly away forever.

In a cruel twist of paradox, Aaron gets them out of that fate, but this leaves Railly to smile and send Cole to his death by giving a past version of him the information that he needs to be in Chechnya in the first place, without telling him that he is going to die.

I can't bring myself to believe that this will end well.

In 'Yesterday', Railly is determined to find out if Cole is still alive, as if he is then there is a risk that the virus has escaped. Meanwhile, Cole is still alive, and in the process of being rescued from the hole, but his rescuers are sick. In the future - where we spend the bulk of the episode - Jones tries to secure a replacement Core from a sister base futilely seeking a cure for the plague, but the base commander is absolute in his commitment to curing the plague or dying in the attempt. This leads Jones to decide that the Core must be taken, but Ramse's loyalties are divided: Cole may still be in the past, but the other base houses an ex-lover and the son he never knew he had.

In a twist, at the end of the episode Railly confirms that Cole is not still alive at the bomb site, while Cole is pulled free to learn that the failed attempt to retrieve him has only jumped him forward to 2017, at the height of the global pandemic.

12 Monkeys has worked hard to be a distinct entity from its movie version (interestingly, it turns out that the opening credits do refer to the movie 12 Monkeys, while the closing credits go back to La Jette,) but comes back from time to time to touch base. In 'The Keys', the title refers to the Florida Keys, which are Cole's 'anywhere but here', having seen a picture of them once, connecting to the idee fixe which enabled him to travel in time in the movie while being an entirely different concept. The plot may still be in a holding pattern - Cole's sacrifice not stopping the plague one jot - but on a character level, there are big developments for Cole - whose impending death from time travel or mutated virus has him trying to enjoy what life he has left, even in the midst of a mission - and Railly - whose effective betrayal of past Cole, even at the behest of his future self, is a far cry from the woman who pleaded for the life of Leland Goynes**.

* An actual religion, and pretty esoteric
** Goines? Given that I mostly just hear the name, it's so hard to tell.

12 Monkeys - 'The Red Forest'

"I recognise you from the cast shot, don't I?"

It's 2043, and Cole is very confused, as apparently West 7 is in charge of the facility under a one-eyed Ramse's command. The absence of Railly's message meant that Cole was killed on arrival, and a vengeful Ramse now runs the place as a shelter for his people. In addition, the virus was released a year early, in 2015, as part of something called Operation Troy (some people think Trojan Horse, but even if this is a TV meaningful op name, I am minded more of Apollo striking the hubristic Greeks with plague.) Persuading Ramse and Jones to risk everything by burning out their core to send him back, Cole returns to 2015 and recruits Railly's ex, the rather hapless Aaron, to help him rescue her from the Army of the 12 Monkeys.

While they are successful - despite Aaron at one point shooting past-Cole in the shoulder, and then leaving the gun in the car - there are a couple of other changes that are not undone. Railly is subjected to a hallucinogenic brainwashing attempt, led by the Pallid Man's female colleague, in which she seemingly meets with 'the Witness', plague-masked leader of the Army. The unnamed woman leads Railly's brainwashing with a repeated mantra:

"You are walking through a red forest and the grass is tall. It’s just rained. Most of the blood has washed away. There’s a house in the distance, cedar and pine. You’ve been there before. You’re not alone. There’s a man. You see him, you go to him. You know him, like a memory of tomorrow."

"Are we remaking Twin Peaks already?"

I'm calling at this stage that the Witness - who 'has plans' for Cassandra Railly - as well as the corpse, is Cole. The woman also refers to a 'Brotherhood' who 'will know what to do', which suggests that the Army is not the extent of the Witness's forces; unless the Witness answers to the Brotherhood.

Perhaps of more immediate import, Jennifer 'Head Full of Codes and Secrets' Goynes is picked up by corporate security. We are told that the corpse Cole destroyed was just the source of the virus, and that the refined version is still in play somewhere. Aaron's senator boss mentions Operation Troy in reference to an overseas crisis. Jennifer could put the virus back in play for the Government as a weapon, and thus back into the reach of the Army.

Oh, and there's a cyberterrorist doing a publicised whistle blow, more Julian Assange than Chelsea Manning. Not sure what he's about yet.