What I’m Watching: 12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys: Season 1, Episode 8 “Yesterday” (B-)

Another episode, another puzzling focus. Having Cole trapped under rubble in Chechnya for the entire hour while Jones tried desperately and unsuccessfully to bring him back to 2043 wasn’t particularly enthralling, though the end of the episode, which we’ll get to, made it much more worthwhile, as tends to be the case. Worrying about whether he was alive because he would have spread the virus wasn’t the best way to help Cassandra’s grief, though it does seem that she and Aaron have managed to reboot their romance and end up in a pretty good place. In the future, we got to see a new player far more influential than West 7 or any of their people, played by none other than Xander Berkeley, Aaron Stanford’s former costar from “Nikita,” known to me forever as George Mason from “24.” He and Jones certainly have history, and they both have extremely different ideas on how to fix the future. We didn’t see Jennifer, who’s been out of the picture for a few episodes now, or the 12 Monkeys at all, but we did get a well-executed surprise in the episode’s closing moments, as Cassandra arrived just as Cole was coming out of the blast site. He wasn’t in a different timeline, but a different time, waking up in 2017 after the virus has already been exposed. Can time be rewritten? Of course, but it’s going to take considerable effort and some clever manipulation of time travel on Jones’ part in the future.