What I’m Watching: 12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys: Season 4, Episode 2 “Ouroboros” (B)

As I write this, I’m well aware that the final season of this show has already completed finished airing, but I still have a full nine hours left before I’m all done with this wild time-bending adventure. We’ve reached a point typical of shows at this point close to the end of their runs, which allows characters to relive past moments and see better, or at least naiver times, once again. Often, shows have transformed so much from their starts to their ends that newly important characters play an overly crucial role in current events even if they haven’t been stalwarts the whole time, and this show is a fortunate exception. Not only can its characters actually travel through time, but we’re getting to see them go back to the formative moments that got everything started, with the reintroduction of Ramse as a particularly sentimental inclusion. Cole suggesting that Jones should walk around as herself since their former selves were only looking for scavenging intruders and not their mirror images was clever, and it’s incredible to see just how much Jones knows about her own future as a result of repeated non-paradox visits from those with information about what will come in her life. Cassie going back to 1971 to kill Olivia with no tether was made all the more impactful by her appropriation of Cole’s “This was always a one-way trip” catchphrase, cementing the fact that she’s become the most hardened of all these time-travelers, a major difference from how she was when she first started. As I stated in my review of the season premiere, I really do wish that Jennifer’s hallucinated self who evaporated into oblivion had died a real death, but I’m on the edge of my seat with curiosity after her latest move to fall back onto the train platform with a certainty that she wasn’t alone.