What I’m Watching: 12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys: Season 3, Episode 6 “Nature” (B)

This episode was substantially creepy, with an important origin of the 12 Monkeys being showcased with our time-traveling friends at the center. Casting Christopher Lloyd of eternal “Back to the Future” fame in the role of the acting father of the young witness and the wife of Scottie Thompson’s eternally eerie Vivian Rutledge was smart and cool in one sense but also jarring because of the villainous nature of his character. It’s hard to get the image of the chain-locked exit to the tent in which the meeting of the mourning took place and a child destined for great time-destroying evil showed just how far down that path he had already gone. As usual, Cole and Cassandra weren’t going to let themselves be taken out, seizing the opportunity to travel with the advanced new technology to a separate place so that they could escape certain death and then head back to the future to decide what to do. It was good to see Jay Karnes’ Agent Gale again and to watch him start to accept his fate, doing his best to intervene and save the lives of all the innocent people inside that tent only to realize the inevitability of his existence. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the end with the witness, and I’m still curious, as all viewers are I’m sure, who the witness ends up becoming when he grows up and if we’ve already met him. I was less taken with Jennifer’s freaky hallucinations, and I’m really not sure where all that is headed.