12 Monkeys (spoilery) thoughts

This is what I said the other night when I couldn't sleep and I was already on Tumblr and didn't want to come back here, where it actually better-belongs:

I feel like they’re setting us up to expect a grandfather paradox (what I’ve been calling the Terminator Syndrome), what with Cole seemingly reacting to the skeleton, but I also think that so far, the writers have been very aware of the genre and their audience, and very smart about how they build a story. Which makes me think they aren’t going to go that way.

We saw this week that Cole CAN affect change, and I think he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. Like, he’s not trained in any of the science involved; he’s only there because he was on the recording. My reading of this ep was that he’s been sure destroying the virus is what was needed, but he’s finding out that it’s not a heavy-handed-action sort of thing. He burned the origin, but he’s still here—so there’s still virus around, or he’s carrying the virus, or he’s not bound to his time enough to evaporate like he wants of it disappears while he’s out of it. Or, which is the theory I’m really liking right now, it’s not the existence of the virus that causes the plague, it’s the fact that they know about it—and the fact that the 12 Monkeys have Cassie now.

After she was taken and he failed to save her, the plague still happens, but the time travel project doesn’t. It seems. So I’d conclude that they make her work on the virus, or, maybe more damaging, them having her keeps her from interacting with a young Jones or someone else involved in the program so that while it’s started—the machine is there—no one comes to revive it. And then Cole is outside of time, because he can’t have been sent anywhere without the project.

I’m hoping that means he’ll be “rejected” by a future without a time travel project and get back to now to save Cassie and change that again—and prob have a weirder future. If it continues, he should get further and further from his own timeline and eventually have to stay!

You guys, I love thinking about this show so much. There's so much going on, and it's presented pretty clearly and directly, though out of order so that you don't know what you're looking at until it's needed later. It's so well-structured!