I think 12 Monkeys might be one of the most coherent stories I've ever watched
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.