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!