From French New Wave to SyFy Original Series, The Strange Journey Of 12 Monkeys

Twelve Monkeys – SyFy Television Show

And now this tale of time travel and romance ending in death makes it’s way to the small screen. The scientist destined to unleash a world ending plague has been gender swapped, and Cole now exists in multiple times at once, with interactions like bullet wounds migrating through time. It’s best not to dwell too heavily on the time paradoxes, or the idea that the same object from different time periods can’t touch without exploding. In good faith to the source material it’s been made clear that our hero is eventually doomed, as he can only endure so many time jumps.

He’s left pursuing dead end after dead end in time period after time period, slowly discovering/creating the circumstances around the release of the plague. As the period of time the action takes place over stretches it out it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that nobody says, “Hey, maybe we should knock it off. We seem to just make things worse.” It seems likely that the plague might even have been brought from the future to the past in the first (last?)place.

This changes our intrepid time traveler and his slightly mad scientist handlers from clumsy heroes into obsessed historians unwilling to not know exactly what happened, even if that means that they cause most of it on the way. It’s a bizarre wrinkle that’s unlikely to get the attention it deserves on the show as it pounds down blind alley after blind alley of fruitless, often destructive heroics.

Thematically it’s not too far off from its forebears, but the extended television format isn’t doing it too many favors right now. A grand scheme may rise up out of the building block now present though. I’m not writing the show off. It’s easily earned its chance to carry the standard of the Army Of Twelve Monkeys just a little bit farther into history.