I Love Time Travel - Part 24 - 12 Monkeys

Part 24?  Yes, really.  I haven’t made an entry for four years, and I was waiting this one out until I saw the series finale.  Almost no one reads the time travel blogs, so if you are reading this you are in an elite fraternity.  Or, part of a small gaggle of weirdos.

12 Monkeys is the best show ever made about time travel.  There, I said it.  It was a Syfy show that lasted four seasons and its final season aired in 2018.  Through some odd deal with Hulu, we had to wait until 2019 to see the fourth season.  I knocked it out on a single Saturday. It’s all there now and I recommend it. 

With a few caveats.

First of all, the show is a real time travel show. It doesn’t have some story going on in the background and every once in awhile, someone does some time travelin’ for fun.  This is a well-plotted, organized, and smart show where time travel is a central character.  There is love and loss, violence, treachery, surprises and a handful of laughs here and there.  But it is 100% time travel from beginning to end.  There is no jumping in at any given point and trying to catch up.  The breadcrumbs are laid from the very beginning, so you have to pay attention.

My only knocks against it are minor ones and shouldn’t keep you from watching if you find your interest piqued.  There are an abnormal amount of machine guns in this show.  I guess they needed to show the intensity and severity of the drama, but even I noticed the amount of shooting scenes.  And I’m a John Wick fan, to be sure.  The other knock is the same one I have with a lot of sci-fi shows.  There are too many humorless characters.  All shows need lightness here and there to break up the monotony of the life or death moments.  I like it when those moments are spread around.  Sci-fi shows, and a lot of shows in general allow one screwball character to carry that burden.  It’s dumb.  Look at the Marvel movies.  Everyone gets a light moment.

The plot?  Now that is tough to broach without spilling the beans.  Just like the Bruce Willis/Brad Pitt movie, a man is sent from the future to stop a plague from spreading that wipes out most of humanity.  As far as I can tell, that’s where the comparisons end. It is an exploration into Loop time travel. The cool part about it is that the characters don’t realize that for quite some time.  They don’t know how it works.  They only have the desperation of their bleak world and the hope to fix it.  What makes it interesting are the decisions they have to make at each step along the way.  There are so many of these stories that lay out a narrative that time travel is important because of the benefit to humanity.  Within the confines of a larger show where time travel is the centerpiece, you learn that all of these moves are personal.  Sometimes selfish.

(Not unlike those made by Tony Stark in a recent superhero movie.  I’ll get to that one another time.)

A show that wasn’t good, that I watched anyway, was Timeless.  It went 2 seasons with a two-hour TV movie to wrap things up.  It was also time travel, but as an NBC show, I guess they reverted back to the old model. Go back in time, stuff happens, come home.  (12 Monkeys has plenty of that but the show changes as the trips begin to pile up.) Timeless had an overarching plot that was somewhat interesting, but it felt caught up in too many modern TV tropes to get off the ground.  Also, the main character was a history professor who got to zip around trying to chase down the bad guys attempting to manipulate world events.  The real plot was more of a lesson for the forgotten or overlooked people in history.  I guess that was cool, but I don’t know if it made the show more interesting or not.  The main thrust of the show seemed to be getting the lovely Abigail Spencer to dress up in period-specific outfits each week. 

I’ll put this way.  Fresh and inventive time travel? 12 Monkeys.  Classic, light-hearted time travel? Timeless.

Rating shows based on niche criteria? Jim Mercurio’s Dimeangry blog.