12 Monkeys Season 1 Questions That Burn a Hole Through Time

May 4, 2016

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During a gruelling 12 month wait for season two to return, 12 Monkeys fans were plagued with many unanswered questions. Who is the Witness and how does he know about fate? What is this Red Forest? Does it exist outside of time? Who are the Druze, these custodians of time? Why is the plague so important to the 12 Monkeys? Why is Cassie important to Olivia? Is the mission to change the past going to break the world? How does Jennifer sense different timelines? Is she the Witness? And whose side is Jennifer really on? There are more questions than answers.

A number of characters seem to have special relationships with time. The big bad Olivia is one of them. Apparently at the helm of the Army of the 12 Monkeys in 2015, she manipulates events to preserve a ‘pre-ordained’ timeline. She drugs people with red forest tea to get inside their heads with disturbing images to influence their decisions. Are these images glimpsed through time?

In webisode 7 ‘Time Message’, Olivia smashes an ancient Druze artefact from Chechnya to find a USB key from her father. Who is Olivia? And does she have a more complex relationship to our main protagonists? Is she Cole’s mother? Or his daughter? With all timelines up for grabs, scenarios like these remain possibilities and could be real game changers.

As much as 12 Monkeys is a show about time travel, it is also a show that closely examines the themes of love, loss, and transformations. At the start of season 1, apoco-Cole botches every attempt to change history by resorting to violence, taking two steps back each time. As Cole spends more time in 2015, he falls in love with Cassie and her world, and in the process finds a better man within himself. We watch as Cole finds remorse, compassion, and the search for a version of events to keep Cassie alive. Taking more from the source material ‘La Jetée’ than the 90’s Gilliam movie did, the open question of Cole and Cassie’s time-crossed relationship hangs heavily in the air. We are left with the big question of just how far Cole is willing to go to be with Cassie, and whether the very thing about Cassie that made him better could be a double-edged sword.

Just as we think Cole finally has a chance to be with Cassie, she gets herself shot besides a time machine Ramse helped to create in 2015 (‘it took time travel to create time travel’). Cole had to do the only thing he could – send a gravely wounded Cassie off to the future on a wing and a prayer, in hope that she will be saved there. It was one of the most beautifully executed and heartbreaking moments of TV history. Time stood still as they said goodbye. And then we watch Cole change fate by saving Ramse, instead of leaving him to die. Saving Ramse didn’t undo the plague, but it did defy the Witness’s account of what fate had pre-ordained. Is this the start of an important butterfly effect?

In webisode 12 ‘The Next Cycle’, Olivia turns Cole’s opening monologue on its head:

“When are you right now? Somewhere beautiful? Serene? Close to what you love? And what if all of that could be destroyed? You’d do everything in your power to protect it, wouldn’t you? No matter how awful it seemed at the time? Even if you had to compromise everything. Yourself. Humanity. You would. Every time. Over and over again. And when time is broken, when it stops working correctly, all it needs is a little help to make sure that all the gears inside continue to turn, and all those intricate pieces work together, as they should. Beautiful circle. The cycle.”

It is little gems like this webisode that have some fans questioning if it isn’t actually Cole that is the Witness in the red forest. Cassie keeps seeing the Witness and a house ‘she has been in before’ in the red forest, through her tea-induced visions. We know that our characters have long transformations to get through, and this show is a parable of cycles and symmetry. Perhaps Cole’s transformation will end at the beginning, returning him to a version of himself where the end justifies the means; a way of being typical when cynicism sets in after seeing too much hard-won progress fall apart. Somehow it’s a running theme to see Cole snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, time and time again.

We see this cynicism manifest most acutely in Dr Katarina Jones, the physicist at the helm of the 2043 time machine. After many years of working at Spearhead to try to find a cure, and being repeatedly outfoxed by an ever mutating virus, she hardens into a chain-smoking general hell-bent on resetting time by any means necessary. No longer interested in healing the apocalyptic world, she will only accept restoring the past along with her daughter’s life. We see parental love drive Jones (and Ramse) to monstrous choices, which leaves us questioning whether love is a gift or a madness.

Jones has lied barefaced to Cole about the true extent of her foreknowledge of events, as it was revealed that she knew time-traveller Cole since at least 2015. She even has a time map plotting his future jumps. Jones will actually kill anyone who gets in her way, placing no value in their lives because she will not commit to their timelines. To her, everyone is dead already, and she won’t apologise to ghosts. She leads a massacre at Spearhead to take their power core, and destroys their cure for the 2043 virus.

If a person is killed in a timeline that later gets erased, does it even matter? Perhaps one of the most intriguing questions of this time travel story asks if who gets to be the good guy depends only on which versions of events survive. At the moment, everything is up for grabs. The future – and the past – is open wide.

Watch Season 2 of 12 Monkeys on Mondays at 9/8c, or on Syfy.com, Hulu, Amazon Video, and iTunes.