12 Monkeys series 1.2: Your Future, His Past

12 Monkeys continued its story on SyFy tonight, with a phrase that captured the predicament of Cole and every time traveler.   When he asks his boss, Jones, how someone could say Cole was responsible for a scar, but Cole has no memory of even meeting that person, Jones replies that you'll meet him in your future but his past. That's about as neat an explanation of twisted interconnected timelines as you're likely to get in a time travel story.

And we don't even know the name of the guy that Cole will scar.   We know he's played by Tom Noonan, who has a pretty good beat on the weird, creepy, slightly psychotic, having played one very well back in Hell on Wheels - in everyone's past, that is, in the 19th century, unless you haven't seen the fine series as yet, in which case it also will be in your future.

Meanwhile, there are other significant conversations between Cole and Jones.   He doesn't like taking orders from her, but who does (like taking orders).  And although she starts the episode strictly forbidding Cole from interacting with Cassandra - lest he throw off the timeline that resulted in the future first finding out about a possible way to stop the plague - she comes to realize that the mission may need Cassandra, after all.   So Jones, like all good heroes in time travel stories, including the scientists behind the missions, is willing to risk paradox on behalf of the mission's success.   If they weren't, they likely wouldn't have gone into time travel in the first place.

Speaking of missions, this episode of 12 Monkeys had a brief gambit that was positively prescient about what recently happened in our own off-screen timeline less than a month ago.  Cole ends up for a few harrowing moments in North Korea, in, what was it, 2006?   Now these kinds of misfires are common enough in time travel stories - we saw them in Quantum Leap, and, for that matter, in the 12 Monkeys 1995 movie.   But North Korea?  Are you kidding me?  Unbelievable coincidence with our reality - I half expected to see Seth Rogan in the scene with Cole.   It's a good thing the North Koreans didn't hack the SyFy Channel and start making demands, though maybe I shouldn't be joking about this.

But there were lots of interviews in this episode - sorry, I couldn't resist - the best being the one with Cole and Jennifer, who looks like the best kind of nutcase character, or one with some very serious, not crazy, information.

Looking forward to next week, which I may or may not see in the next 24 hours, on SyFy On Demand.

See also 12 Monkeys series on SyFy: Paradox Prominent and Excellent ... 1.3: Paradoxes, Lies, and Near Intersections ... 1.4: "Uneasy Math"


podcast review of Predestination and 12 Monkeys


 three time travel novels: the Sierra Waters trilogy


 three time travel stories (with more to come)


The Chronology Protection Case movie 

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#SFWApro

The Interview: The Review

Well, I just saw The Interview - on Cablevision - for three reasons: 1. I said the movie was "moronic," based solely on seeing the trailer, in an interview of my own on Arise TV conducted by Francesca Maxime before Christmas (see below for video).   So I figured I had some kind of ethical obligation to see how much my trailer-based review was justified.  2.  I'll be interviewed about "The Interview" again, next week, by Bob Mann on his "Let's Consider the Source" radio show on XM/Sirius Radio, and I thought it would be good to at least know a little about what I'd be talking about.   3. I'm a Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.  The movie will no doubt be discussed in some of my classes in the Spring term - see, again, my above point about it being a good idea to know at least something about what I'll be talking about, a credo I try to follow as much as possible as a professor.

That I felt obligated to write such a long, detailed paragraph about why I saw The Interview itself says a lot, or at least how little I thought of the movie before seeing it.  And what did I think of the movie after actually seeing it?

Though parts of it were moronic, a lot of it was not - indeed, it was funny in lots of places without slapstick - and, moreover, it has a political message, and, most important, a heart.   At its best, The Interview was like a long Saturday Night Live skit, replete with fingers bitten off and blood spurting, which were never the high points of SNL in any case.   But as geo-political humor writ large, as the CIA and potential world conflict both lampooned and taken seriously for important fleeting moments, The Interview was quite good.   I enjoyed it - much of it - and laughed out loud a bunch of times.

The worst parts of The Interview were the incessant "butt" and "poop" jokes - a little less of which would have gone a long way.   But the two wild and crazy guys banter between Skylark (James Franco) and Rapaport  (Seth Rogen) throughout the movie was funny, and the bit of caricatured James Bondian romance with Rapaport and a hot North Korean propaganda minister worked well too, with a nice political payoff for the story in the end.

In short, though The Interview is no great movie or comedy for the ages, it's much better than not half bad, and I'm glad I saw it.   Good that Sony finally did the right thing and made the movie available.



I stand by most of things I say here ...

has nothing to do with The Interview, but it does have an Asian theme