#12Monkeys Monkey Musings #3 - On changing time but not changing emotional fallout

They did it! They managed to change time! Cole will never have to stand in 2017 and watch Cassie die in his arms because the virus doesn't happen till 2018 now! But that means he remembers it and it drives him, but she'll never get to that point--if she does, it'll be a different point now, with a different set of circumstances leading up to it.

And that's what a time travel show is about.

See, to have that scene from Cassie's point of view, they'd have to fail so spectacularly that time resets and the plague goes back to 2017, but now, the plague isn't even the point. Whatever the Messengers are doing is, and it looks an awful lot like they're changing time, too--or making it so there is no time to change?

We still have the issue of the space between 2016 and 2044 that got shifted. There's enough more people in the future now that there's music and radio broadcasts, but our four mains don't remember any of that because they were protected from being rewritten by the serum--how long before Dr Eklund and a restored Lasky aren't the only major personal difference that they stumble across? Because Cassie and Cole and Ramse and Jones are working on the assumption that things have only changed a little and their own perceptions of the future are close enough...but what if they aren't? What if they're now missing vital pieces of information? Things that matter to whatever else is out there--or now out there--that hasn't come to the front of their attentions yet, because they don't know to look for it?

Old!Jennifer probably saw time changing because that's what she does. But Team Splinter doesn't notice a difference. Deacon doesn't. He still hates Ramse and has a rivalry with Cole, but what if there are slight differences in his history that make him different--like, if Ramse wasn't trying to get himself killed last episode, what if he didn't know not to push that button because OldTimeline!Deacon wouldn't have had it, and NewTimeline!Deacon does?

And regardless of all that, Cole and Cassie didn't change, and everything that has piled up between them since she didn't save him from Chechnya last season, all that stuff they haven't dealt with at all, is still there and came with them into the new timeline. Everything that softened Cole since then--learning to dance, eating good food he didn't have to fight for, seeing what sort of world he was saving, meeting Cassie and being impressed by her compassion and her competence--had the flip side of making her hard. It stopped him from killing and taught her how to kill, and did both after she was already mad that he'd let her former fiancee get killed horribly. She thinks Aaron died protecting her from Cole, and seems to have forgotten that he'd sold them out to do it. Cole saved her instead of letting her die, but he did it by stranding her in the exact world that happens because everything she stands for fails--as of this moment, they manage to push the plague back, to delay the apocalypse, but she still fails to save the world, and that's the mission she's given herself since Cole first showed up in 2013 and changed her life.

And they haven't dealt with any of that. 

There's piles of guilt and resentment and crossed wires between them, and while Cole was in 2016 hoping and learning lessons and remembering Cassie fondly, Cassie was in the apocalypse learning how to kill people, seeing what failure costs, and getting trained by the man Cole specifically didn't want to be like. 

And it looks like all that is starting to fall out now. It's blocking Cole and Cassie from making up. It's stopping them from even being as good a team as they were, because she's convinced now that she can't trust him, which hurts him, and makes them both wary and questioning when they need to be able to depend on each other.

Cassie tore Cole's picture in half. That was sort of mean, but it makes a point: they're not together, and the picture isn't how things are. She tore it right down the middle between the two of them. But she didn't shred it or toss it--she gave the two pieces back, and they could be mended, and that's symbolic, too. Maybe on some level, she didn't want to completely burn that bridge. She just wants to keep poking at Cole until she gets the reaction that she wants--and guilty sweetness doesn't seem to be it.

It hurts, watching them with this wedge between them. But it's also wonderfully well done--and it's perfect continuity. How often have people on TV really just needed to talk something out and never gotten around to it? Never even gotten around to admitting that there should be emotional continuity? But 12 Monkeys is a bigger and more thoughtful show than that, and it's taking the rocky road that means characters get what they deserve, and it's amazing.

Monkey Musings 2 - There are no straight lines

One of the themes of this show is that there's no straight lines, and they've done a really good job of running with that. The virus wouldn't have happened if they hadn't sent someone back to stop it--the old Terminator Syndrome. But also, Cassie wouldn't have been there to save Cole when he landed in 2015 if he hadn't wound up too far back and told her to be there. They never would have found Jones to save him later in the season if he hadn't landed too far forward and met a later Cassie. Hell, he wouldn't have been there to begin with if he hadn't gone there to begin with and called home to tell them to send him! And as they said, it took time travel to invent time travel.

And there is, of course, the loops that the story takes, so that they're only linear if you follow the characters--once you start time traveling, your future and The Future are no longer the same thing.

But what's most fascinating to me is that there isn't any straight lines on the emotional level, even. 

If it weren't for time travel, Cole and Cassie never would have met, and Cole and Ramse never would have wound up on opposite sides. If Cole hadn't been there in the room with Cassie the last time she died, holding her in his arms, would he have realized just how much she meant to him? Would he have come back more determined than ever to save the world for her? Definitely, Ramse's defense of his child wouldn't have hit the brick wall of Cole's resolve if being out of sequence hadn't made it.*

And now, here in episode one of the new season, they're out of sync again. Cole has been in 2015-16 for only three months, and it's been rough but it's also been in civilization and all it's available luxuries. He's learning what it is he's saving, even if that's just a side-effect of being in it. Cassie, though, she's been in the future for eight months, more than twice as long.** What happened in her own time sits differently in the context of the reality of 2043-44, and what she has to do there. Cole is the one who has to wait for the heroic time traveler to come back, he's the soft one who values life. She's the badass, hard-nosed killer. And they don't match up now.

If humanity is the mark of progress, Cole has gone forward while Cassie has gone backward, and Ramse went off on some side route. Who knows where Jennifer is, or how she got there, but she's also in the future, pulling strings and sending people back--Ramse wouldn't have known what to do if she hadn't given him that necklace and told him a bunch of things he's now had almost 30 years to mull over as he goes back into association with her younger self. And isn't that an interesting thing? My tendency is to focus on Cole and Cassie, but behind them, we have Ramse and Jennifer; she said he'd be a good friend to her--but is that because of what happens now? While Cole and Cassie are coming back to common ground, how are Ramse and Jennifer going to deal with being on the same team now? How much did he have to do with her life when he was Ethan Seki and she was Leland's weird daughter?*** How much will that bear on their adult interactions now?

It's fascinating. It's complex, and a bit addicting, watching how people line up, or don't line up, watching them moving through their own timelines and coming into sync and falling out of it with each other. I feel like I need to make a character-infographic, but how would that even look? There's no straight lines to draw on it!

*And now--he's got that memory, that knowledge of her personal future (assuming it doesn't get changed along with everything else as they alter stuff this season), and if things start looking close to that, will he try to divert it? Will the still try to save her?
**Almost long enough to have had a child there, if they'd gotten to hook up before the left...(sorry, that's literally where my mind goes every time it's mentioned that something is eight or nine months)
***I would love to see a flashback of her as a little girl, and him talking to her because she's the only kid around and he misses his son.

Monkey Musings 1 - On waiting and on payoff

I always feel like it's a big risk to make fans wait--but I also know that it's better when a show as fewer episodes because there's no room for lame wheel-spinning. And 12 Monkeys has always been really good about eating up story. So much story. All the story. Like, seasons and seasons worth of story in an old idea of show shows work. It's one of my absolutely favorite things that this show does: there's no waiting around for things to happen, things are always happening!

All the waiting happens after the show is done airing for the year, and MAN did we wait! After the summer. After the fall season when everything else started coming back. After even the spring season, when we originally thought it was coming back, since it was a January show in season 1. There's a sort of madness that descends on fans as the waits get longer, and the way fandoms tend to deal with that madness is trying to fill the gap. Fan art, fanfic, and literally hundreds of theories! Man, we dissected everything and tried to figure out what all of it meant! I, personally, stuck to rolling around permutations rather than trying to figure out what's going to happen--because that way leads to insanity and a lot of disappointment when a show doesn't do what you want it to do, and I never want to be disappointed in this show.

But here's the thing, though. Our showrunner and our actors are there for us! I don't remember the last time I watched a show where the fans were so well-supported by the people who make the show, and it made the wait go a lot smoother--it kept the show active and present in our minds and it built the hype as much as the talking to other fans did!

But then, there's all this expectation. There's all this built-up "oh my gosh, everything is finally happening!" that comes with the new season starting on a show you love. And there's that fear that the endless building up with create an inevitable let-down, that nothing could possibly be as good as you imagined it could be. And, of course, this being the second season--how man shows had awesome first seasons and then went off the rails on the second?*

Thankfully, 12 Monkeys doesn't feel like it's going to be one of those shows. Season 1 was so tight, so well-paced and well-plotted, that there's hope that they can do it again, plus they had the extra time given by pushing the show back. I was so worried about starting the season, so afraid it wouldn't live up to how much I loved season 1--and I didn't need to worry at all. I watched the first episode three times, including live, and it's so good. It's more than worth the wait, and it sets up a really great tone and direction for the season that I can't wait to see unfold.

Is it too soon to say that? I hope not, because I'm so invested by this point. But thus far, all the hints and hopes have paid off. The first episode of the season was the exact balance of character work and conflict and awesomeness that make the show so wonderful to watch.

*cough - Sleepy Hollow - cough.