Favorite Characters: Jennifer Goines (12 Monkeys)

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about 12 Monkeys, which ended on a bang with its fourth season earlier this summer.  But it was always inevitable that, sooner or later, I would have to write about Jennifer.  I’ve always loved her, and today is all about our favorite Primary (Jennifer-related spoilers.)

Granted, Jennifer carries on the long tradition of people with mental illnesses in genre shows actually having special abilities (see also, David from Legion, and assorted others,) but the way the show has set it up, I’m okay with it.  I like that introducing the concept of Primaries – people who are uniquely plugged into time and can see visions of both the past and future as well as being sensitive to changes in time – builds up the show’s mythology.  First, it allows for other people at different points in time who are like Jennifer, many of whom, like her, have been institutionalized and/or exploited for their abilities.  That’s something really important for Jennifer – not just the fact that her “hallucinations” are really prophecies, but the fact that there are other people like her.  Even before she meets another Primary, just knowing they’re out there in time has a huge effect on her understanding of herself.

Because Jennifer’s had a rough time of it.  She’s both suffered and witnessed violence, she’s been locked up for her mental health struggles (plus seeing things she shouldn’t have,) she’s been lied to and manipulated by forces that just want to use her, and she’s spent a huge chunk of her life plagued by visions that no one understands.  In her view, simply being her is frustrating, exhausting, and painful, and when she discovers someone who believes that what she sees is really happening somewhere in time, she latches on and doesn’t let go.

She throws herself wholeheartedly into helping Cole, and later, Cassie, Jones, and the rest of the team, with the mission, and that’s one of the best things about her.  Despite how much she’s been kicked around, she still has so much fight in her and thrives on being able to help.  It doesn’t always run smoothly – even though everyone on the team knows she’s a Primary and thus is more clued-in to time than they are, they still ignore her vital information sometimes, and there are occasions when it’s demoralizing for her to feel like everyone’s Primary prophecy machine, just there to spit out answers when they need them – but by and large, Jennifer has found her sense of purpose by taking part in the fight to stop the virus.  And while she can still fear her abilities, what they make her see, and how they make her feel, she’s much more accepting of them and willing to use them to help her friends.

And honestly, 12 Monkeys can be a heavy show, and Jennifer brings a lot of light to it.  Not always, of course, because she has her moments of being very lost, overwhelmed, and heartbroken.  Overall, though, her default switch is set to enthusiasm.  I love her pop culture references, non-sequiturs, and nicknames.  I get a kick out of her first trip in the splinter machine, which she treats like the best amusement park ride ever, and I love her growing fondness for/affinity with the machine.  I appreciate her earnest devotion to her friends, and I like her gung-ho plans and off-beat internal sequences.  She’s such a terrific character, and the show is careful to use just the right amount of her zaniness – it really wouldn’t be the same without her.

12 Monkeys (1995, R)

The movie this time – I was holding off on it until the first season of the show was finished airing.  Both are different enough that I’m not sure how seeing the movie first would’ve impacted my opinion of the series.  Both different, but both excellent.  I can definitely see why movie fans were equal parts excited and anxious when the show was initially announced; some big shoes to fill here.

As in the series, the film follows a time traveler from a plague-ravaged future in which mankind has been all but wiped out.  James Cole is sent back to investigate the origins of the virus and return to the future with a pure specimen that can be used to cultivate a cure and improve the lives of the survivors.  Unfortunately, people in pre-apocalyptic societies don’t believe you when you rage about doomsday viruses that will bring civilization to its knees, and Cole winds up in an institution that gives One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a run for its money.  His only potential allies on the inside are the sympathetic Dr. Kathryn Railly (a psychiatrist in this version, not a virologist) and the twitchy Jeffrey Goines, fellow patient and the son of a prominent scientist (a male in this version – Brad Pitt and Emily Hampshire’s performances are very different and equally awesome.)

A movie obviously isn’t going to be as involved as an ongoing genre show, especially a time-travel show – the pilot of the series basically covers the main thrust of the movie, though it obviously doesn’t wrap things up and features the mental illness angle a lot less prominently.  And that’s perfectly fine.  The film offers up a tight, engrossing story rooted in the strong but cautious bond between Cole and Kathryn.  She comes slowly into the realization that he’s telling the truth, while the wonder of a pre-virus world starts to pull his attention away from his mission.

Directed by Terry Gilliam, the visual style is arresting, gritty, and kind of trippy.  The grimy, cobbled-together future tech reminds me of a sci-fi companion to The City of Lost Children, and Gilliam obviously has tons of fun filming the disorienting institution scenes.  Much like Brad Pitt and Emily Hampshire’s competing Jeffrey and Jennifer, the look and feel of the film is distinctive in its own way.  I can definitely see little details and visual nods to the movie within the show, but overall, they really do feel like separate entities, which is good.  Although I think I can prefer the show for its stronger collection of female characters and the more expansive direction its medium allows it to take, the film is an intriguing, inventive piece of cinema.

Bruce Willis plays Cole, once again very different from Aaron Stanford (so much so that I’m impressed the show cast Stanford.)  I like that he’s blunt and kind of intimidating, but at the same time, he’s enchanted by the ‘90s in an endearing, almost innocent way.  Kathryn is well played by Madeleine Stowe, I already mentioned Brad Pitt’s stellar, unpredictable performance, and Christopher Plummer has a small but important role.

Warnings

Disturbing elements, sexual references, violence, language, and drug references.

Relationship Spotlight: James Cole & Dr. Katarina Jones (12 Monkeys)

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.

Relationship Spotlight: James Cole & Dr. Cassandra Railly (12 Monkeys)

Yep, 12 Monkeys two days in a row!  This pair deserves it, though – they’re easily the best thing about an already-strong show.  Here’s to one of the best time-travel duos on TV (of course, splinter time-travel doesn’t hold a candle to TARDIS time-travel, but whatcha gonna do?)

Cole and Cassie form a great from-different-worlds partnership.  She’s from our time, with all its technology, convenience, and instant gratification.  Though his present is only 28 years ahead of hers, it’s the polar opposite.  His world has no society to speak of, just dog-eat-dog scavenging in the surviving fragments of the plague-ravaged human race.  In this way, they’re a bit like Crane and Abbie from Sleepy Hollow – Cole has no concept of 2015 life, from license plates to cheeseburgers, and when Cassie dresses to the nines to infiltrate a gala, his highest praise of is that she looks “clean.”  On his trips to the past, Cassie introduces him to present-day perks like takeout and helps him experience the lovelier things in life.  It’s great to see his face when he looks at a painting, and almost as great to see her watching him as he looks.

The divide between their worlds extends to more than early 21st-century accoutrements.  Their different experiences have led to entirely different worldviews.  Cole was only 7 when the virus started to spread, and he had to do very hard things from a young age to stay alive as society collapsed on itself.  He’s haunted by his past sins, and his desire to erase them fuels his mission to rewrite history.  At the same time, everything he’s seen and done hardens him, lets him pursue his goal by any means necessary.  He’s stolen, lied, and killed before, and he’ll do it all again; a recurring line of his is, “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”  It’s a sentiment I hear in many stories, but I don’t often see a character express both sides of it as earnestly as Cole.  Additionally, from his perspective, everyone he meets in 2015 is “already dead,” which desensitizes him to any required violence – it was going to happen anyway, right?  He’s ruthlessly pragmatic and always keeps his eye on the prize, the 7 billion people he stands to save.

By turns, Cassie is horrified by his callous relentlessness, both from a “but you can’t!” moral standpoint and from a more personal concern for Cole’s capacity for darkness.  Her chief motivation is to help people, but she’s the one who usually insists that there must be another way.  Cole sometimes sees this as unwillingness to do what it takes, but Cassie comes at it differently.  She never watched the world die or had to kill to survive, and so her absolute beliefs have never been severely tested.  It’s natural that she feels there are lines that should never be crossed, and she gives 110% of herself on her side of those lines.  Her perspective is essential to the show, because sometimes there is another way, but Cole is often so laser-focused on the task at hand that he can’t see it.  Cassie reminds him that not all costs should be paid.

Over the course of the show, both greatly influence the other.  Cole softens more, learns to take quiet moments to enjoy what life used to be and more greatly value human life.  Meanwhile, Cassie grows both stronger and tougher, opening her eyes to the reality of the virus and going to ever-greater lengths to prevent it.  Both characters develop so much that, by season’s end, each has stood in the other’s position at least once, with Cole calling for moderation while Cassie insists on drastic measures.  It’s a terrific, engrossing dynamic, and any episode with significant Cole-Cassie interaction is immediately a cut above any that keeps them in separated.  I won’t discuss what happens to them in the season finale, but I’ll just say, I can’t wait for season 2!

12 Monkeys (2015-Current)

Late update tonight, since I wanted to wait for this sci-fi series’ first-season finale to air.  Inspired by the Terry Gilliam film of the same name, 12 Monkeys first came on my radar due to its male lead, Aaron Stanford (Birkhoff from Nikita); after finishing Nikita, I was jonesing for more from its cast, and the prospect of Stanford was enough to overcome any presumptions about the quality of SyFy originals or apprehension about the show’s premise.  Lucky I got past both of these hurdles, because it’s a terrific show.

The premise that gave me pause?  A worldwide pandemic that wipes out 7 billion people.  Brrr…  In a post-apocalyptic 2043, a single-minded scientist reignites a long-abandoned project to save the present by changing the past.  With the aid of a rickety, temperamental time machine, she sends world-weary survivor James Cole back to 2015 to prevent the virus.  His mission changes the life of Dr. Cassandra Railly, a dedicated virologist, in the process; initially, she’s his only lead on the virus’s origins, but shaky temporal tinkering throws them together too early in her timeline.  Despite her early skepticism, Cassie is soon converted to the cause, and she works with Cole to uncover the conspiracy behind the virus’s release.

No, it’s not a perfect show.  It sometimes gets tangled up in its own intricately-crossed timelines, it takes occasional detours that, while still entertaining, distract from the central story, and a few episodes suffer from separating Cole and Cassie for too-long stretches.  However, it’s pretty darn great – savvy sci-fi with a geeky eye for detail, strong characters at its core, and lots of stylish design elements.  There’s some terrific dialogue, weighty without being overwritten, and all the various character voices are distinct and engaging in their own ways.  The show takes full advantage of its time-travel framework and, so far, seems to be maintaining as reasonable an internal consistency as one can expect of a time travel show.  Best of all, thoughtful character work and themes remain at the heart of the story.  In the midst of all the action, conspiracies, and timeline shenanigans, we’re anchored by the growing connection between Cole and Cassie, and the show always takes time out to explore larger issues.  When nearly the entire world is dead, how far can one go to change the past?  If someone died of a virus anyway, is it wrong to kill them in the past?  Will creating a new future absolve the sins it took to get there?

Aaron Stanford is excellent as the brusque, obsessive Cole.  He conveys the weight of the ravaged life Cole has lived in 2043 while still bringing humor and heart to his lighter moments.  Amanda Schull does a fine job as Cassie, carrying us on her journey from disbeliever to crusader.  She’s intelligent, strong, and caring, and her scenes with Cole sparkle.  Other notable performances include Barbara Sukowa as Jones, the scientist desperate to change the past, and Emily Hampshire as Jennifer, an unstable young woman with secrets about the virus locked within her fractured mind.  A lot of Stanford’s friends from Nikita along for the ride as well.  Noah Bean (Ryan) plays another major character on the show, and Xander Berkley (Percy) and Peter Outerbridge (Ari) both make guest appearances.  How long before Maggie Q or Lyndsy Fonseca show up?  Season 2, please?

Warnings

Violence, swearing, sexual content, murky moral quandaries, and disturbing content.