12 quick reasons to watch #12Monkeys

1. It's scifi based on HOPE, and when was the last time that happened?
2. Moral ambiguity is the name of the game, and it's addictive, not offputting.
3. Every episode crams five episodes of some lesser show's worth of story into it.
4. The fans are international, thoughtful, passionate, and dedicated. The creators are open, accessible, and informative. Also often really funny!
5. It's PACKED with awesome, awesome ideas that no other show has given us.
6. It's deeply serious, but not bleak or dire--there's funny parts, bizarre parts, and good old gee-whiz awesome parts. It's Big Weird Ideas that blow your mind grounded in 100% human emotional reality.
7. Remember when Lost and Fringe were all about figuring out the patterns and guessing the answers? It's like that, but it actually gives answers as often as it poses questions!
8. The love story is literally epic. It transcends time. It also is more than just romantic love--and it involves just about any combination of people you can think of, somehow. 
9. The whole thing is smart--the characters and their development, the writing, the plotting, how they use time travel and time-travel-story-tropes, the way they assume the audience can keep up.
10. Women who do things and men who aren't afraid of of them or made powerless!
11. Hard scifi with a deep emotional core--something a lot of scifi shows miss out on.
12. Conspiracies! Everywhere! Who doesn't love a conspiracy?

#12Monkeys Monkey Musings 4 - I have a problem with Aaron Marker

ETA: I almost didn't publish this because it feels like I'm picking a fight when really I'm asking someone to change my mind? Let's talk, Monkeys.

We in the fandom have been talking a lot lately about who the Witness is. Personally, I think it's going to be Sam, Ramse’s son--mostly because it'll then all literally be one person’s fault, because that one person fought so hard to make sure that kid existed--or one of the Joneses because they are the ones who broke nature to invent time travel. Story-wise, and based mostly on my own personal writing habits and understanding of stories, those are my favorite theories.

But actually--if the Witness is actually a villain and not misunderstood or trapped*--on an emotional level, I’m hoping it's Aaron Marker. Because he's a punk and a weenie and I want him to keep being a villain and not get out of owning up to his weenie-ness so easily as dying.

See, here's the thing. I have a problem with Aaron Marker. The fact that Cassie is so pro-Marker in her anger right now has brought into focus what it is for me: he is a problem.

Cassie loved him in the beginning and it looked like they were set up for a fantastic rich-and-influential-people life. But then Cassie, the woman he's engaged to, who he wants to spend the rest of his life with, is kidnapped--and he doesn't support her through her trauma?

Okay, I get that she's talking about time travel and killer viruses and it looks like she's snapped, but he's the one person in the world who should have been there for her, and he wasn't. From what we’ve seen, he mostly wanted her to stop talking about it and never think about it again--to pretend she was still the same as before--and get back to their lives as if nothing had happened. As if that wouldn't have driven her insane for real.

Then, when he does know for sure that she’s been telling the truth all this time, we never see him apologize for being so unfair to her for two whole years. He just, again, tries to pick up where they left off. He doesn't give her space to mourn her dead partner she was on the phone with when he died, that we see, he just wants to sweep it all under the rug. Again. And she’s lost and lonely and grieving and without purpose again, and goes along with it. Before Cole comes back after Chechnya, she doesn’t look as okay with all this as Marker does, no matter what she says.

And then, when that's blown up again, and they find out they still need to combat the end of the world, his third chance to get on board with the mission the woman he loves is dedicated to whether she likes it or not, he sells them out.

Now, I don't doubt that he loved her. If he's alive, I don't doubt that he’ll say he still does. But it was a small, closed-doors, narrow-minded sort of love that led him to literally be okay with killing the whole world if he gets to keep her--despite the fact that she had already told him that's not acceptable and he knew that she'd been working on this problem for two years. That’s what bothers me the most about his tactics: she specifically said that’s not how this is going to go, and he goes that way anyway--and tries to force her when she won’t go willingly. He was willing to not only sell out Cole, but to cut Cassie off from the only purpose she has in life now, and to hold her hostage while something she could have helped avoid happens all around her.

That's not a good man.

And it's my opinion that he would have still been that man even if the plague was never going to happen and Cole had never shown up. He proved to be the sort who isn't far-sighted enough to think of the many, the sort who isn't secure enough to let his potential wife make her own choices or trust her own experience, and the sort who more than once tries to avoid both dealing with big issues and taking responsibility for actions taken because of them. They would have gotten married and been rich and powerful--and then some other crisis would have shown who he really is.

For all his faults, Cole always believed in Cassie’s intrinsic value and capableness--which, in the beginning, is probably one of the things that drew her to him. He accepted her for what she is, and didn't try to make her fit some mold he had predetermined for her. In fact, he told her not to change, to stay who she is.

And now, in her anger, Cassie has decided that Marker was some wonderful thing and that Cole systematically took that from her. It irks me. I have infinite compassion for the trauma she's going through, but I really hope we get some time with her dealing with what's happened to her and realizing that Marker wasn't good for her, that he never had her own wishes at heart and often directly tried to stop her from making decisions as if she wasn't an autonomous adult, and that Cole has never systematically done anything. I think she’s mourning the life she thought she had and lost more than the person Marker actually was, and is avoiding dealing with the fact that he was always a weenie and they would have all died if Cole hadn’t smashed into her life like he did.

Marker made his own bed. And Cassie needed fuel for anger to keep her alive and sane, so she canonized him and blocked all that, and blamed Cole.

But he's still a weenie.

Think of the reality check Cassie will get if they find out the Witness is Marker. If he's justifying everything he's done with his love for her--if he’s upped his game from letting the world die to actively making it die in an attempt to keep her. Cole will also take the blame for having beaten him and not made sure he was dead in that fire, but that beating was directed by Cassie of her own free will. She made him, and he made himself, and they've been against him all along. That's a story I would love to watch.

I love Noah Bean, so I’m inclined to like him, but he’s made a character that severely bothers me on a personal level--and I think that’s some genius casting. Take this inherently likable guy, and make him this hard-to-define low-grade ordinary-standing-in-the-way-of-epic bad. Make him less bad than the actual baddies, and therefore more ambiguous. And pit him against the heroes. Then, maybe one day, revealing him as a greater villain than they thought. That’s brilliant, and it’s worked so well so far. What potential! 

I fully expect the show to throw every wrench** at me on this topic, like all others, but the story feels unfinished and in the middle of the action, and I’m willing to have my opinion changed...because it’s not a great opinion of the man right now. And, of course, with actual change thrown in, maybe they've already altered him and his story, but still have their own memories of before to deal with...

*Olivia is making me think that either a) the Witness is not telling everyone everything and is more devious than we’ve been led to believe, or b) she’s just saying whatever she wants and calling it the will of the Witness, which would make her worse AND bring the opportunity that she’s USING the Witness rather than serving him.

**Monkey wrenches!

#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.

10 things you're missing out on if you're not watching #12Monkeys

1. An amazing story that's totally Binge-able
As of this moment, there are fifteen episodes. Thirteen for the first season, and two so far in the second. That means that you can watch all of them in one day, if you're really dedicated, and get the full extent of the series without ads or breaks or waiting on anything! It's immensely re-watchable; these writers have put in all sorts of hints and clues and foreshadowing that you pick up more and more of when you rewatch, but the benefit of watching all at once is that you can track all the storylines without gaps between them. It's basically one big story pretending to be episodic, and though jumping in the middle could be confusing, there's so much story crammed into so few episodes, you can start from the beginning and be caught up in a week. (Watch on Hulu or on the Syfy site for the views to count!)

2. Complexity that works
We're two episodes into season two, and there's no signs that it'll be anything less than mindboggling. Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett took the framework of the movie--scavenger from a dying future goes back in time to stop a plague--and blew it up to epic proportions successfully.

There's story happening in our time, in the future, in various points in the past. There's characters who exist in more than one time-frame, even if they're not time travelers, and there's time travelers on both sides of the good-bad divide. There's moral ambiguity starting with "if I kill this one guy, I save billions" and upping the ante through "if I save this one person, it's worth the whole world dying" vs "can I let this one person die if it means saving the world" and onward. There's a lot of character development in just about every character shown on screen, both in real time and in flashbacks--and even, occasionally, in alternate realities. There's time loops, and imposed cycles, and conspiracies, and multi-generational plans in play--and there's Cole, smashing through it like a bull in a china shop, hoping to make things right.

And the world itself! The present day world we know is stranger than we think. The future is a near-perfect apocalypse that's still happening, which feels innovative to me. When was the last time any apocalypse wasn't a postapocalypse? All points they visit are carefully made as real as each other, so that no matter where in time they are, no matter how strange it gets, everything has the same level of clear reality.

And it works. It's like a symphony, it works so well. Or one of those puzzle boxes that's so well made it feels like a gift.

3. The best use of time travel in, like, ever
The best thing: time travel has a cost--it makes you sick and you have to weigh every time you do it against risk and reward, and the only cure so far is literally creating paradoxes inside your own body, which is dangerous, to say the least.

Sometimes time travel is more of a vehicle, getting people from one place to another, but as season one unfolded and into season two, it's more and more an intrinsic piece of the story's structure. Things happen out of order because people who aren't time traveling are stuck in a straight line, past to present to future, and people who are time traveling can hop all along that line, regardless of the usual order of things. People on both sides are working with time and against time while also working against each other, trying to bend history to their own will--and it sometimes works, but mostly it causes more trouble that they then have to work out. It's the main process for several long-games to happen and to play out.

They give us clear indications of which times we're in and there's always a reason for why we're there, and the show as a whole literally couldn't happen without time travel. It's about time travel, not just featuring it.

4. Awesome female characters as complex as the males
The main villain is a woman.

Cassie is the female lead, and as S2 happens, she has switched places in the moral grey-areas with Cole--which is amazing, letting her be as violent and single-minded as he was, something ladies on TV don't get a lot.

The biggest wild card on the show is Jennifer, who is either insane, or the sanest person on the show, depending on where her story goes, but who exists at both ends of the time-travel and is definitely up to something.

The creator of the Splinter Project is wonderful, semi-sociopathic, damaged, brilliant Jones, who is some sort of post-apocalyptic life goal, since I'd be about her age in 2044.

And the only one of the enemy agents we've seen directly so far is a woman.

It's kind of amazing, having so many women around who aren't only love interests, or arm candy, or bit players. There's love in there, but they're also damaged and striving and have goals of their own. They're not defined by the men around them. They're smart and resourceful and as able to take care of themselves as everyone else.

5. An epic love story--literally
Cole and Cassie--Casserole--is a ship that sails itself, but in between them meeting and any confessions they might have in the future, there's plenty of time for story, and it's Big Story. Cole comes back from the future specifically to meet Cassie, Kyle Reece style. Cassie believes in him so strongly that she goes off script to save him more than once. Now that Cassie is compromised, Cole is staying by her side to make sure she's alright, despite differences in opinion about how the mission should work. In season one, Cole saves Cassie's life three times, because her dying always results in history going bad. Their love is literally what is saving the world in those cases. It's a ship for the ages!

6. Anything can happen
Because of the time travel and the way they can rewrite history, they can do insane things like kill a main character three times and fix it. They can have scenes and episodes in any time period they want. They can interact with each other out of order, and characters can interfere with each others' pasts and futures. The entire world can literally be changed, and it will make perfect sense within the story.

It's brilliant!

7. Kicking a squeamish TV system in the shins with awesomeness
TV as a whole doesn't seem to like things like complexity, male-female equality, gleefully being smart and assuming your fans are too, and taking risks with characters and plot and reality. You know, the stuff that the target audience is specifically looking for, and that critics love. By watching 12 Monkeys and making it more popular all the time, you're poking holes in that dumb idea that lowest-common denominator is the best way to go! By not watching, you're proving that only cheap, stupid shows get views.

So watch the good ones and improve TV as a whole!

8. Stopping the Standard Fate Of TV Scifi in it's tracks
Ask any scifi TV fan about shows they're still mad about, and most of the list will be shows that got messed with, ruined, or cancelled before they could tell their whole stories. That's become a cliche--but also a trap. People want good shows, but they don't trust that regular TV will take care of them, so on channels like Fox, lots of the potential viewership just doesn't bother watching. And that means that the show gets cancelled anyway--a self-fulfilling prophesy. Syfy really should be the exception to that, being specifically for scifi, but it's a channel like any other, and even if ratings are an inaccurate way to judge viewership these days, they still want the ratings.

The only way they can get them is if WE watch the shows we want TV to keep making. The only way we can break the cycle is to give them such good ratings that scifi proves that it can support an audience over many seasons the way a show about doctors or lawyers can, even if the numbers aren't as high as those.

Let's not let 12 Monkeys be the next Firefly; let's make it the next Star Trek--seven years and a slew of movies and books!

9. Some of the best fandom and creator-fan interactions around
The 12 Monkeys fandom is a great one, full of smart, talkative people who understand both the show and the genre it comes from. Better yet, the actors, writers, and creators on the show do their best to be very interactive, answering questions and giving hints and reblogging links. It's (so far--knock on wood) a remarkably adult and drama-free fandom with lots of ideas and thoughts and opinions, and it's a great fandom to belong to.

10. Hope
A lot of scifi drama lately gets mean. The heroes can't actually make any headway. People die for no reason (cough - Walking Dead - cough). Things are needlessly grim and violent. The overall tone is nihilistic and soul-crushing, focusing on how pointless everything is.

12 Monkeys isn't like that. The show itself is aware of how cool all of this stuff is, and while it gets a little dark and very dramatic, it doesn't go down the grim-for-grim-sake path. And at it's core, it's not about how people can't change anything, or how Big Events ruin lives. It's about characters interacting with each other and finding better ways. It's about how mercy and love are better than slavish fate. And that's amazing after BSG showed everyone such a dark version of scifi.

12 Monkeys isn't sappy, it's genuinely emotional. It's not mean, it's about being better than meanness. It takes the story about making the world better and looks at it from all sides and strives to actually do what it says. And the existence of the show can make the genre better, too, if we keep it alive.

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.

My 12 Monkeys S2 wishlist

The new season starts in the US tonight! I'll be livetweeting at 9pm along with everyone else, and then reviewing the eps for TV Geek Army and doing weekly Monkey Musings here a few days after each episode airs! But I'm so keyed up, I thought I'd make a list of my total pie-in-the-sky wishlist items that have been plaguing me, to get them out of my head and to sort of play a game with the season. I'll be updating and commenting on the list as things happen!

Let's see where this goes, shall we?

1. "I should have kissed you" (Ha! I know, right?)
2. Cole and Ramse having a proper sit down to hash things out between them. If not that, a proper punch-fest to do it like boys do. (update: No Cole and Ramse, so far, but Cole and Deacon went this route in 2.3, and it got them nowhere.)
3. Cassie being the one who discovers the past with wonder--but probably the sort that makes her life harder rather than easier, the way the show is going.
4. Cassie saving Cole's life over and over. (2.3 she saved him from electro-shock torture)
5. Ramse being a grandpa, all crotchety and annoyed.
6. Sam being a Creepy Kid, so Ramse has to question his devotion.
7. The Witness as a prisoner--maybe not even saying what Olivia says he says, but at least being something other than this all-knowing god she presents him as.
8. Cole's mom.
9. People realizing that Jennifer actually does make sense, and it rocking their world. (in 2.2 and 2.3, Cole is starting to understand this, but Cassie still doesn't like her and it's making her snappish about details)
10. Cassie meeting her own past self, or trying not to, and finding out that her normal life was not nearly as normal as the thought it was, and having a whole new crisis of identity.*
11. Deacon being the voice of reason--because how screwed up do you have to be to have his crazy self be the reasonable one?
12. Playing with the conventions of time-travel stories--I want all of it. Loops, side-tracks into alternate lines, pieces being snipped out. I want them to make a unified theory of time travel out of this show, and be the one that everyone refers back to when talking about time travel shows that come after.

Down the rabbit hole tonight, guys!

EDITED TO ADD: I have new additions to my wishlist!

• Cole and Cassie dancing again! Preferably twice: once, the classic "let's dance to get closer to our mark, oops, are those feels getting in the way?", and once just because they can and they want to.
• Flashbacks to Ramse's time with the Army! Who did he know? What did he do other than stand by windows in expensive suits? How did he fit into the hierarchy? How much did they actually tell him and how much did he figure out on his own?

*Like, what if her breakdown, and her sense that everything was wrong in Haiti was because that's a pivotal time-point and people keep going back there? What if this-season-her has to protect her own past breakdown?

Hunters 1.1 - In which we meet a bunch of weird people and get no answers

Hunters airs at 10pm on Mondays (and will be paired with 12 Monkeys starting next week!)

The latest entry in Syfy's We Don't Suck Anymore initiative feels like it's going to continue the trend of actually being good! I feel like I shouldn't be surprised anymore--they've proved with several shows now that they're serious about it--but it still feels new. Maybe because all the shows still are new? And I am still surprised.

First off: the Hunters are the possibly-but-not-definitely-aliens who manage to live among humans as terrorists and, apparently, DJs, not the people who are out to stop them in another poorly-lit government office.* The humans are the Exo-Terrorism Unit, ETU, out to stop them from whatever totally unclear nefarious plots they have going on.

In this episode, we meet Flynn Caroll, an FBI agent who will be our in--he's got pretty bad PTSD but hasn't been benched for it, so I guess he works through it, and if we're lucky, it'll make him better able to handle something having to do with the Hunters. He's married to Abby, who has hearing aids that seem to actually do the opposite of usual ones; when she gets kidnapped, the baddie, McCarthy**, takes them out and hits her with a sonic barrage that makes her ears bleed (and happens to be built around remastered OMD songs from the 80s?). Flynn and Abby also have guardianship of a dead friend's daughter Emme who has a "spectrum disorder", so I guess she's Autistic in some form? She's not handling her dad being dead and Flynn being sort of unintentionally awful to her very well, and he puts her in a boarding school, but she's about the only one who speaks her mind directly and to the point on the show, so hopefully she'll be back. And rounding out the family is a kitten that wandered in and so far hasn't been named, but also gets a lot of screentime to not be important.

So Abby gets kidnapped and held in a tiny cage with constant music making her catatonic, and as Flynn goes looking for her, he meets the ETU who are hunting these terrorists. They've just lost someone from what looks like their only strike team, and Flynn gets into that spot because he's the main character. The team is weird, too. Reagan flirts by beating people up and no one seems to trust her, and she can sort of do what the Hunters do. The other guy is on loan from Australia and is not very nice to anyone. Their boss seems to be allergic to humor and throws a lot of words at Flynn without a chance to process any of them. The guy who seems to be spokesman for the scientists is nerdy and the most relatable of the team; he won me over when he was explaining OMD to everyone. 

And the aliens are creepy and gross! They wear human skins, but human ways of killing won't stop them and barely slow them down--they have to get hit with a sonic blast right in the head. They communicate with creepy clicking noises and McCarthy has been embedding them into his remixes as a way to communicate with his scattered operatives. This is the first time the ETU has caught one of these transmissions, and it's a manifesto with things like "love will swing the hammer" and "you will cry and you will die" and no real details about what they're actually going to do.

As a pilot, it sets up a lot, moves people into place pretty well, and then doesn't answer any of the questions it asks, but it's classed as a thriller, so I'm assuming the point of the show is to chase those questions till the end. It's intriguing, though. Reagan is snarky and closed off, and has all those quirks that make her a big interesting question mark. Flynn is in way over his head and knows it, but needs to find his wife--and hasn't yet found out that there's something going on with her. The baddies are bizarre and creepy and up to something we've barely discovered yet.

The show as a whole is dark and atmospheric, and scored with a great soundtrack and background music spooky enough that even the kitten scenes and the romantic ones are tense. You're always wondering what's going to happen next--when the next problem is gonna drop. 

The cast is nicely diverse--not just in race and gender, but also in neurodiversity; if they handle that stuff well, it might wind up being important for that alone, regardless of what happens in the rest of the season. 

So much is introduced and so little is answered that I could have used a 2 hour premier, but also it seems as if it's going to be an ongoing story rather than an episodic one, so if you're watching this baby, don't miss any!

I'm definitely coming back. Did you guys see it? What did you think? Let's talk in the comments, or come over and tweet at me on Twitter!

*Seriously, that's one of the trends in weird-TV right now--lighbulbs are so last decade or something.

**Julian McMahon who always makes me want to punch him within thirteen seconds of being on screen. I'm actually happy he's a baddie on this show, because it makes my gut reaction to him easier to handle--you're supposed to want to punch bad guys! I don't even know what it is; he's been around my shows for decades, and I just always want to punch him.

So it's been a week since 12 Monkeys concluded its first season

And this is the only photo I still have on my phone.

It was an amazing first season. When I heard about it, I'll admit I was a little "why, tho?" about the whole idea. But Syfy doing actual science fiction? Made by the guys who made Nikita and partially made Terra Nova? Starring that guy who was Pyro a million years ago?

Yeah, I was gonna watch it, even if it was horrible. And it so wasn't. I was basically hooked by the end of the opening monologue, but it really got me when things got weird--scratched-watch paradoxes, dudes disappearing shot and showing up two years later still shot, a Mission (capital-M, always) that immediately turns out to Not Be What It Seems. I love an ambitious show, and this one had some of that breakneck, holding-nothing-back energy that Sleepy Hollow had its first season*, and it just dove into piles of story. These thirteen episodes had as much story as, like, three seasons of an old show might have, and it was glorious.

And also, it was smart. It's not just that there was a lot of story--it's that the story was incredibly well crafted, with further episodes changing the meaning and context of everything that came before. Especially in the third act, every episode could have been a finale, and when the actual finale happened, it changed everything again. 

And it was real scifi. Time travel and viruses weren't just plot points, they were structural pieces necessary for the story to happen at all--which is how Big Scifi Pieces should be. And because time travel is awesome, it was used awesomely, to give us these phenomenal non-linear stories that uncover a little more each time we pass by them. This is how you handle a revelation-of-mystery plot. Take notes.

But the core of the series was the relationships--which were so human and flawed and tragic that they added both weight and normality to the increasing and delightful weirdness of the series. Cole and Cassie and their immediate connection (and how he can't seem to keep her alive), Cassie and Aaron and their failed normal life (and how he can't seem to let her go--or stop trying to control her choices), Cole and Ramse and the bromance to end all bromances that goes horribly awry (but still changes the world), Ramse and his family, everyone and the Monkeys, Jennifer and her dad, Jennifer and Cole, Jennifer and Cassie, Jones and Cole, Jones and Cassie, Jones and Whitley, Whitley and his dad, everyone and Spearhead, everyone and West Seven... There's a tight and thick weave of interpersonal relationships that all come down to love. Romantic love, platonic love, desperate love, familial love, lost love, love that is strong enough to change fate and alter all of history. It's amazing. It's epic. It's wildly personal and also universal in the way that Big Important Literature is. It's the relationships that ground te show and also make it universal.

Now, when I look back at the early episodes, it's with a mix of that feeling you get looking at baby pictures, knowing how everything goes wrong for those babies--and this pervasive wonder at how very much information was crammed into 45 minute chunks without damaging how understandable or accessible the immediate plot was. Those early episodes mean something else now that we know more than we did when we watched them the first time, but it adds to the re-watch-ability of the season. Now, there's new layers. Now, there's stuff that was always there that we missed tw first time.

And that's amazing to me, as a fan and as a writer. I feel like we've been given this really awesome gift, and I hope with every fiber of my being that they can keep it going at this high, complicated (but clear) level of story, plot, character, innovation, and joyfulness.**

Is it time for season two yet?

Notes:

* Please, holy mother of Fandoms, don't let season two of 12M go off the rails the way season two of SH did!

**Its weird that a show that gets so dark is joyful, but that's my main feeling--it's creating and experiencing joy in its own existence, and it's created this wonderful fandom that's been an amazing and unexpected addition to my life.

#12MonkeysThemeWeek SamiHolloway Masterpost!

Come back each day or so to see this page updated as I post new stories!

Day One - AU

1. Too Late

He was supposed to splinter in to just the right time, just when Dr Raily knew everything he needed to know. He was supposed to get the information out of her and then leave, find Frost, end the future. But something was wrong.

2. Caged

Cassie never thought Aaron would go this far. He made it very clear that he didn’t believe her when she came home, shaking and traumatized, with the cops. She’d been attacked, kidnapped, tied up—but it was the future that scared her. And she said the man disappeared before her eyes. And she said he’d be back in two years. And she believed him.

3. Cat

Cole lands in the alley, two building over and busts his knee, but he hardly even notices. He’s had a hell of a lot worse, he’s come here with worse, and what matters is that he’s here at all. Where Cassie is. And she’s alive now.

4. Married

“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t like to me, Cole. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong, it’s just–”
“Cole?”
“It’s just that we’re now considered married by scav tradition.”

Day Two - Extended Scenes

1. Abandoned

The bastard left her. They’d been together for this long, and Cole just left without telling her he was going to, without even saying goodbye.

Without even asking if she wanted to go, too.

2. [untitled]

“You’re alive.”
“So are you.”
Cassie didn’t mean to rush forward and throw her arms around Cole, but seeing him there, right in front of her, living and breathing–it was too much.

3. [untitled]

Aaron stomped off and slammed the door behind him. She could hear him still yelling on the way to his car, but she knew he’d be back soon enough. They had work to do.

4. Practice

Cole stared at the cement arch over his sleeping alcove. The mattress was hard and flat, like always, but it was still better than the ground. He’d seen the fat, springy bed Cassie slept on, though, and all he could think was: how do I get her to understand that this is better than I’m used to?

Day Three - Missing Scenes

1. Proof

“Jones has a lot to answer for but she wouldn’t lie about–”
Elena cut him off before he could finish his sentence. “No, look, I brought the files with me! We had a cure!

2. Reactions

“I don’t–I just can’t understand why he would do this! Why would he turn on us like this? He knows what’s at stake!”
“I can.”
“What?”
“I can understand. I want to punch him until he doesn’t get up for it, but I know why he did it.”
“Why?”
“Because he loves you.”

Day Four - Casserole

No Rest -

They both had nightmares after that night. Cassie dreamed of betrayal and death and not being able to know who she could trust. Of a thousand black-clad arms with pale hands grabbing at her. Their touch was always cold, and she always woke up chilled to the bone and shaking. Usually, she woke because she’d called out and woke herself up–or because Cole woke her. His hands were always warm.

Casseroles -

“What’s this?”
“It’s called a casserole. It’s a whole meal in one dish.”

(untitiled) -

They met up again at the door to the motel room they were living in, and as soon as they were inside, they fell into each other’s arms. It was always a relief to be back together after days apart, and for a long time they just stayed like that, as close as they could get while still standing.

Bending History -

Cole watched himself splinter out, and tried not to remember what it felt like then, two years ago, when Cassie had died in his arms. He’d spent a fairly large portion of the time since then trying not to remember, trying not to worry about when this moment came around again. They had a plan, he and Cassie. 

Scars -

Cole was back, and this time he was as whole as he was when he’d left only a few days ago. It was ridiculous that him coming back in only three days, covered in scabs, rather than weeks later and half dead, was a blessing, but she’d take what she could get when it came to Cole. Anything was better than nothing. And nothing was too much of a possibility.

Failure -

Cassie got sick in the spring, and that’s how they knew they hadn’t changed history enough. She survived the first night, so they knew she had the slower strain–and Cole knew the previous version of him, the one concurrent with 2015, would soon surface and s brought here. The plan was that he’d leave first, that he’d keep fighting.

Day Five - Finale Wishlist

Fork In The Road

They came to a branch in the hall and were forced to stop holding hands.
“Which way?” Cassie asked.
“That way–should be the third door on the left. Go there, cut the power, stay hidden. Then get out. Don’t follow me.”

Insurance

“We have to at least try!” Cassie threw her hands up in the air and did her best not to throw something, but he was being stubborn and it was scaring her. He’d never turned that wall of solid denial against her before; it was always for her, with her. Against everyone else.

Letters From The Past

The scavs would be through their defenses soon, and if Jones was to die, she wished it to be on her own terms. And so she retreated to her own chambers, locked all the doors between the hall and her office, and opened her trunk. All that remained of her old life–all that remained of her whole world, and of the only few things she’d loved–was in this trunk. Hannah’s blanket, the one she’d brought her baby home from the hospital in. Pictures of everyone who had died around her. Her favorite books. Her parents’ wedding bands.

And an envelope she’d never opened.

Courting

Jones had just decided not to smoke another cigarette and was still sitting on the porch when the man in the suit stepped out of the car and strode up to her. She’d never seen him before, but he looked like he knew where he was going, and she saw recognition on his face. She didn’t know him, but he knew exactly who she was.

The Days After

They hadn’t been able to get much from the bookstore–and there wasn’t much to get anymore–so they’d left as soon as they were sure no one saw them. Cassie drove, looking straight ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Behind her, Cole scrabbled into new clothes in the back seat. He moved easily for the first time in who knows how long. Weeks. And his skin was smooth and undamaged, all his scars smoothed away. All but a solar-flare shaped burn on his chest where the needle had gone in.

And that is every fic I wrote for Theme Week! Probably almost all of them Easter Weekend in between eating and wrangling kids. Enjoy!

#12MonkeysThemeWeek here on my ol Geeky Blog!

All next week, I'm going to be posting little fanfic stories I've been writing for this week-long celebration of the best new show this year--since I can't draw well enough to do art for five days--and I'm going to link them up here on the blog! I'm posting them mostly to Tumblr, since that's Where The Fandoms Live (tm), but I'm crossposting here and on my writing blog, and when there's a master-post, I'm going to link that here too!

I haven't written fanfic in at least a decade, since I left Livejournal and started going to school for my original writing, and I'm actually really excited to be participating!

So keep an eye on #12MonkeysThemeWeek and #12 Monkeys Theme Week on Twitter and Tumblr, and come join the fun!

@pirategirljack liveblog roundup for 12 Monkeys 1.7 "The Keys"

(i couldn't find the promo video this time)

Holy flying fuck you guys. I was expecting the dance thing to be sort of sweet after that promo picture was released, but actually it was so much more adorable than I expected. Cole likes art and has never seen it before! He likes music! He's never danced before but he wants her to teach him! There's food* just being handed to him and he takes it all! And look how sad he was when Cassie doesn't know that he's intentionally trying to make the best of what he's got because he's basically dying because he didn't tell her about that!

But we also got Cassie being traumatized and Cole being so concerned and sweet about how she's coping and whether she was burned. And when things got bad, he called her, more than once--she's probably the only phone number he knows, even. And then when he was dying / about to be exploded, he let down all his guards** and finished the conversations she hasn't had yet and it was heartbreaking and I'm still reeling and flustered and swinging between OH MY GOD in a good way and OH MY GOD in a bad way.

This show, you guys.

I don't think Cole is really dead. 1. He's the main character, the one with agency even over linear storytelling and time itself. And 2. He hasn't gone to 1987 yet. And 3. We're only just past the half-way point of the season, so we know they did not manage to completely stop the virus. But I wouldn't pt it past these writers to have him splintered out after the fire got him so he has to heal, and he's not able to come back for a while. Or have this create another storyline and another Cole comes back and tries to change his own death or something. And I wouldn't be surprised if we have a whole episode stranded in 2015 with a grieving Cassie before we see him again, because they like to kill us like that. Although, if they do that, I hope she's actively grieving and not sobbing alone in the dark--like, they have contacts and stuff now, and without Cole, she's gonna have to make deals and talk to people.

But really what I'm hoping is that she was upset enough that Cole realized this time around that something was up, and took precautions so that this time he didn't die--it just seemed like he did so the timeline is intact.

New stuff to worry about this ep:

• They had that very personal, very intimate conversation while the bombs were coming in right in front of the leaders of the CIA. Someone in that room is going to have to be like "that stuff only makes sense if there's time travel"--and then will that person be drummed out and upset, or will be be an ally in their fight?
• What the heck happens in 1987?
• What did Wexler leak that might hurt them or harm them? How long before that blows up and messes things up?
• What will a US bombing in Russia do to the state of the world?

What did you guys think about this week's ep? Because I really want to talk about it until next week, and it needs as much public discussion as it can get!

NOTES:
*The real OTP is Cole x food.