As I’ve
already said, the biggest draw on 12
Monkeys is the Cole-Cassie dynamic, but Cole-Jones shouldn’t be sold short. They’re the reason why, while I always prefer
Cole in 2015 with Cassie, I don’t complain when he hangs around the
future. Over the course of the first
season, these two have gone so far beyond a scientist/subject connection.
Jones
is the driving force behind the time machine and the campaign to change the past
and prevent the plague, and Cole is her most prized resource. Prior to the opening of the show, she’s been
looking for him (at the outset of the virus, Cassie left a message with, among
other clues, a plea for Cole to help,) and when he finally meets her, she knows
he’s the one she needs. Despite his
nihilism and skepticism that anything can really be done to change things, he
agrees to join the fight for one major reason:
the hope of rewriting his own tarnished history.
Despite
the many differences between them – she’s highly educated and he’s largely
untaught, she was an adult when the virus hit and he was a child, she lived in
underground and scientific communities in the new world and he scraped and
scrounged to survive – this is the most immediate trait they share. As a scavenger, Cole has done unconscionable
things and hurt people simply for having resources he needed. Meanwhile, Jones’s time-travel experiments
haven’t been without trials and sacrifices, and her subjects, not her, have
always been the ones to pay the steepest price.
Obviously, both want to prevent the virus for other reasons as well; the
restoration of the human race isn’t chopped liver, and both have additional
personal stakes of certain people they’re desperate to save. However, the desire for absolution is particularly
strong for both of them. It’s a vicious
circle, because their obsession with changing the past leads them to do
increasingly immoral things, which they justify with the insistence that, once
they succeed, none of it will have happened.
Much
like Cole’s relationship with Cassie, his interactions with Jones are,
initially, strictly business. She tells
him what to do and chides him when he goes off point, and he views her, not
wholly as a person, but as a fanatical and possibly crazy embodiment of crack
science. Neither really knows the other,
but both sort of assume they do, and there’s a strong sense of detachment on
both sides. For Cole, it comes from his
conviction that everything he is will vanish when he completes his mission,
while Jones can’t afford to get close after the unfortunate results of her previous
attempts to send people back through time.
As the
season progresses, though, both start to invest in the other, despite any
efforts to the contrary. Jones opens up
to Cole, sharing some of her history with him – her personal tragedies from the
plague years, along with her cherished memories of society before the
virus. She begins caring for him in
spite of herself, and although she sees the writing on the wall for the consequences
of time travel, she searches tirelessly for ways to circumvent them. For his part, Cole goes further and further
down the rabbit hole of Jones’s aims.
Ideas he would have earlier dismissed as insane he now accepts without
question. In 2043, he goes to extreme
lengths to protect Jones and the project from those who would do her/it harm,
often risking his own life to do so. For
two damaged people who are both pretty closed-off, that’s a remarkable shift
over a fairly short time – looking forward to seeing where the show goes with
them.
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