u/PracticeFlashy8695

I went into '12 Monkeys' expecting a good time-travel show.

By the final season, I realised I'd been watching something so much cooler. A story that understands that the best payoff isn't revealing that something you saw earlier was false. It's revealing that what you saw earlier was completely true, and you didn't yet understand what you were looking at.

That's a distinction I haven't appreciated enough in storytelling. A cheap twist says "Haha, we withheld information from you". A good twist says "You had the information, but interpreted it incorrectly".

12 Monkeys seems obsessed with something even better. You interpreted the information perfectly reasonably, because you hadn't yet lived through the events that would make another interpretation possible.

That's Jennifer summed up in a nutshell.

For most of the show, Jennifer appears to be the least reliable person in the room. By the end, she's clearly the most reliable person in the room operating with the most completely fucked evidence set imaginable.

Everyone else sees time locally.

Jennifer sometimes sees the shape.

So she'll react to a person according to something they haven't done yet, connect two things that appear unrelated, say something that sounds like nonsense because its context hasn't happened, or treat an apparently insignificant thing as enormously important. And the show doesn't eventually reveal that Jennifer wasn't crazy, or that she secretly knew everything. That would be boring. She has a perspective just like everyone else. It's just a perspective containing relationships that other people can't see yet.

That distinction is effectively the entire show. And once I noticed it with Jennifer, I started noticing it everywhere.

Deacon is probably my favourite example. There were things involving Deacon that I initially wrote off as writing convenience, but the trust I had in the writing allowed me to see what was really happening. At one point he misses Cassie and Cole at point blank range when apparently on Olivia's side. I remember just knowing they wouldn't pull this shit, and Deacon must be a double agent. Then suddenly his absence from certain visions, his behaviour, his relationships, tiny choices, things I'd mentally filed as 'eh, TV' started changing category.

That's the trick. The scene didn't change. I did.

12 Monkeys is ridiculously confident about doing this because it frequently doesn't draw attention to the setup when it happens. Something can sit there for seasons before the story gives you the relationship that makes you realise why it was there. That's what makes the show feel so insanely coherent. Not everything needs to be 'foreshadowing' in the conventional sense. Sometimes an earlier event is simply not yet complete without it's future. And that's so much more satisfying as a payoff.

The show also completely changed how I think about predicting stories. I correctly anticipated a surprising amount of the final season. And weirdly, that didn't make it less enjoyable. It made it more enjoyable. Because there is a difference between knowing what happens and understanding how the story gets there. Once a story is sufficiently coherent, prediction stops being "I reckon the writers will do X because that would be cool." It becomes: "Given everything these people have already done, everything this story has already committed itself to, and everything that must still be resolved, what futures are actually available?"

You start seeing the negative space. A character's absence becomes information. An oddly specific word becomes information. Someone behaving apparently inconsistently becomes information because you know the writers understand that character too well for you to comfortably dismiss it. Even pacing becomes information. And this creates this amazing relationship between viewer and writer where you can realise something before the reveal and instead of thinking damn, spoiled it for myself, you think OH FUCK, YOU'VE BEEN BUILDING THIS THE WHOLE TIME.

The pleasure isn't surprise. It's recognition. That's rarer. Cole is where I think the whole thing ultimately becomes beautiful

Without getting lost in every individual plot mechanic, James Cole is a man whose existence is constituted by the catastrophe he is trying to prevent.

That's an incredible problem for a protagonist. Because his mission isn't ultimately just 'save the world'. It's something much nastier. Create a world that never needed you to save it.

The plague gives us Cole. The ruined future gives us Cole. Jones gives us Cole. Cassie gives us Cole. Ramse gives us Cole. Every trip through time, every death, every mistake, every relationship creates the person capable of eventually reaching the point where he can say, effectively, "you need to go back and die when you were supposed to die, and I need to climb into that machine and be erased."

And then Ramse's response is: "Jesus."

Come the fuck on. 😂

That line hit me particularly hard because literally seconds before Ramse said it, my brain had independently wandered into thinking about the weird relationship between protagonists and the form of Jesus.

Not just "hero sacrifices himself." That's everywhere. Something more specific. A protagonist spends the entire story trying to actualise some future and eventually discovers that achieving it may require surrendering their own claim to exist at the centre of that future.

Cole isn't merely willing to die for the world. He's willing to create a world in which James Cole was never required in the first place. There's something extraordinarily beautiful about that. Which brings me to the title

I spent most of the series assuming I knew what the words Army of the 12 Monkeys meant. Why wouldn't I?

There's an Army. There are Twelve Monkeys. Find the people those words refer to.

Easy.

Except by the final season I found myself interrogating basically every word in the phrase.

What is the Army?

Who is actually fighting whom?

Who even counts as being on the same side when somebody can apparently betray you in order to help you?

What does "Twelve" identify?

What does "Monkeys" identify?

Is the phrase naming twelve people?

A faction?

A family?

A causal structure?

A role?

A complete set?

And I suddenly realised something hilarious about the word army. For most of the war, basically nobody knows who they're actually fighting. Jones thinks she's fighting one thing. Cole thinks he's fighting another. The Army believes something else. The Witness changes meaning. People who appear to be enemies become necessary allies. People can apparently join the enemy as part of fighting the enemy. Everyone keeps interfering with time to repair damage produced by people interfering with time. They're an army whose members don't completely know who belongs to the army or what the actual war is. In other words: monkeys.

Give a bunch of traumatised apes access to causality and tell them to fix history.

What could possibly go wrong?

And yet, viewed from far enough above, apparently chaotic actions begin forming a coherent shape. Which is basically Jennifer's entire existence. That's why Jennifer might secretly be the most important character in the show for me

Everybody else is trying to solve the puzzle while standing on one of the pieces. Jennifer occasionally seems capable of looking down. Not from nowhere. Not omnisciently. Just... less sequentially. That's why her apparent insanity becomes so interesting.

Imagine somebody responding rationally to evidence you haven't encountered yet. They would look insane. Imagine them knowing that the person standing in front of them matters because of the person that individual will become after events neither of you has experienced yet. They would look irrationally loyal. Imagine them recognising the significance of something whose causal relationship won't become apparent for thirty years. They'd sound like they're talking shit.

Then thirty years happens. And suddenly: Oh.

Jennifer wasn't necessarily giving you the wrong answer. You just didn't have the question yet. And that brings me to what I think 12 Monkeys does better than almost any complicated story I've watched.

It respects its past.

A lot of mystery-box television consumes its own setup. Something mysterious happens in season one because the writers need you to keep watching. Three years later they invent an explanation. Technically, the question has been answered. But you can feel that the past was merely raw material for the future. 12 Monkeys increasingly gives me the opposite sensation. The future seems to return value to the past. An episode you've already watched becomes better because of an episode that didn't exist yet from your perspective. A character you thought you understood becomes another character without anything about their earlier behaviour needing to be deleted. A line changes meaning. An absence becomes presence. A mistake becomes a decision. A coincidence becomes causality. An enemy becomes an ally without necessarily ever having stopped being the enemy. And that's the crucial thing: the earlier version isn't erased.

When I thought Jennifer was talking nonsense, she was talking nonsense relative to the information available to me. When I thought Deacon was behaving like Deacon, he was. When Cole misunderstands what he's fighting, his actions still make sense from the world available to him at that moment. Later information doesn't say "You idiot, you should have known." It says "Now look again."

That's what makes a rewatch exciting rather than merely informative. And I think that's the real test of an intricately plotted story

Does knowing the answer destroy it?

If yes, the mystery was doing most of the work. If knowing the answer makes the beginning better, then you've built something else. Because on a second viewing I'm not going to be asking "What's going to happen?" I'm going to be watching Deacon when I'm supposedly meant to be watching Cole. I'm going to listen differently when Jennifer says something apparently ridiculous. I'm going to notice who isn't present. I'm going to pay attention to the exact words people use for things they don't understand yet. I'm going to watch characters confidently model situations that I know exceed their information. And, most importantly, I'll know where all these people end up while watching versions of them who genuinely don't. That isn't the same story with the suspense removed. That's another story. And I think that's perhaps the highest compliment I can give 12 Monkeys:

A first viewing seems to be about people travelling through time trying to change events.

A second viewing might be about watching those same people unknowingly create the conditions through which the events you already know become possible.

Same scenes. Different causal universe.

I haven't quite finished yet, so for the love of God do not spoil the remaining episodes for me. 😂

But I've reached the point where I'm no longer primarily excited to discover whether my theories are right.

I'm excited to discover how I'm wrong about what I'm right about.

Because this show has repeatedly given me the same experience: I see something.

I construct the best explanation I can. The show gives me more information.

And suddenly I realise: Oh.

It was showing me the answer the whole fucking time.

I have just finished a binge of 'The 100' after discovering it accidentally. I didn't even know I was watching it (I thought it was the next episode of the last show I was watching), until a few minutes into the first episode. I was hooked pretty much immediately, and I've just finished the finale! Fell a bit flat for me, but I tend to appreciate things like 'The 100' in their entirety rather than how they ended. I absolutely loved the show. Solid 9/10 for me.

I have loved reading all of your contributions, and I wanted to make one of my own that I'm quite passionate about. I've been reading a lot of discussions about John Murphy lately, and one thing I keep seeing repeated is that he starts the show as 'the asshole character' before eventually earning a redemption arc.

Introduction

I am just off the back of the show, and my immediate reaction is that I completely disagree with that framing. Not because I think Murphy was secretly a saint or a great guy, but because I honestly don't think the show ever gave me a good reason to see him as uniquely bad in the first place.

I think the audience has bought into or been captured by the rest of 'Skykru's perception of Murphy without ever really asking themselves whether the group was actually right about him.

People talk about Murphy like he starts as 'the asshole', and slowly becomes more human or 'good' over time. That was never how I experienced the character at all. Maybe it's my natural bias for the underdog, but watching the show, Murphy felt less like the dangerous outcast and more like the group punching bag, the easy target.

The Hanging Scene

While it didn't affect my enjoyment of the show and I understand why they did it, the hanging scene completely broke my suspension of disbelief.

The group falsely accuses Murphy of murder, literally hangs him for something he did not do, and after that the social framing of the show STILL acts like Murphy is the one who needs to earn everyone's trust back.

Realistically, a group that literally lynched someone unjustly would either fracture over it or become deeply apologetic to the victim. Instead, everyone basically moves on and Murphy somehow remains the 'sketchy, untrustworthy one'. I can't even remember if he got a damn apology for the whole incident xD No one seems traumatised over it, and yet everyone demonstrates a capacity to be traumatised at their actions, Bellamy in particular. If John had died, Bellamy would been a murderer from that point forward. I never felt the 'weight' of that from anyone but John himself.

Bellamy

Ballamy and Murphy BOTH participate in the early 'Lord of the Flies' spiral, but Bellamy gets framed as a conflicted leader while Murphy gets framed as fundamentally rotten. But if you actually strip away the music, the charisma, the narrative framing, and the plot requirements, I struggle to understand why Murphy is treated as or seen as uniquely awful compared to basically everyone else. John is also framed as uniquely sadistic during this period, which was something I kinda judged him for earlier until the Pike flashbacks, but at the same time a huge amount of that comes from presentation and charisma rather than an actual comparison of actions and motivations.

Let's also not forget before ANYTHING was said or done, Bellamy shot Jaha. As much as I love Bellamy, I don't understand why I was supposed to root for him or assume he's any better than John.

The Pike Flashback

The Pike flashbacks just reinforced the view that John was never uniquely or fundamentally bad. Murphy wasn't some uniquely broken sociopath dropped into an otherwise healthy social environment. The Ark had already turned him into the kid everyone was comfortable humiliating and abusing long before they ever reached the Earth. He lost both his parents, which again I'll come back to, but that meant he was vulnerable. From his perspective, his teacher beat the living shit out of him, literally pummelled the guy, and his classmates mostly stood and watched.

I just never bought into the idea that I was supposed to even expect John to act in the groups interest.

John's Parents

Granted this happens much earlier in the show, but on the ground there are a few scenes where John is treated with contempt for the crimes of his parents. I think one or both of his parents were floated for stealing medicine for him, one of the most sympathetic 'crimes' committed in the entire show. That's not greed. It's not ambition. Not violence. Desperation. And yet I vaguely remember a few snide remarks being made to John about him thinking he 'deserves to live more than anyone else'.

A crime, by the way, that Abby committed too when she saved Jaha. That is framed as tragic, compassionate, morally difficult, whereas Murphy's parents doing the exact same thing gets lumped in with the general perception that Murphy comes an inherently selfish or criminal background.

Almost every other prisoner receives sympathy from one another for whatever draconian rule landed them in jail. Octavia for example, is framed as a victim of Ark law. The audience is encouraged to see her existence as evidence of the system's cruelty. Murphy's family are also victims of Ark law, but somehow the emotional framing around Murphy often remains "he is selfish, of course he's trouble". Heck, if John is gonna be treated as selfish because his parents stole medicine to keep him alive, why on Earth does Raven get redemption for her spacewalk?

Conclusion

What actually makes Murphy uniquely bad?

A lot of people say Murphy became trustworthy later in the show. I felt almost the opposite. Murphy was one of the ONLY people I would've trusted from early on, because he was emotionally legible.

He usually says what he means. He rarely hides self-interest behind morality. He reacts to betrayal like any human being actually would, and whenever someone genuinely treats him like one of their own, he almost always responds accordingly by becoming more dependable, more group-oriented, and he demonstrates with Emori that he can be fiercely loyal and actually completely selfless, if he feels someone has earned it by giving that back to him. It would have been unreasonable for me to expect him to act in any other way at virtually every point in the show based on how other people treated him.

John usually became exactly what people expected him to be. Treat him like one of yours, and he acts like one of yours. Treat him like an outsider and he acts like an outsider.

The more I think about it, the more I feel John wasn't a force for bad in the show at all.

He was a mirror.

I posted this purely to generate discussion and to share my thoughts - please let me know what you think!