Well, holy hell.
I was hoping 12 Monkeys might give me a minute to recover after that excellent pilot. Instead, S1E2, “Mentally Divergent,” starts piling mysteries on top of mysteries and sends James Cole bouncing through time again like the universe’s least reliable frequent flyer.
A very quick refresher: In “Splinter,” Cole traveled back from 2043 to stop the plague that wiped out most of humanity, killed the man he thought was responsible and discovered he’d solved absolutely nothing. Instead, the trail led to a mysterious organization called the Army of the 12 Monkeys and Jennifer Goines (Emily Hampshire), the daughter of the man Cole just killed.
And where is Jennifer? A psychiatric hospital in 2015, drawing monkeys all over the wall.
Well, I guess we’re going in.
Cole Goes Looking for the 12 Monkeys
Back in 2043, Katarina Jones (Barbara Sukowa) and the Project Splinter team are digging through whatever information they can find about the Army of the 12 Monkeys. They believe the organization may have been operating behind the scenes for years, possibly influencing governments and other powerful institutions.
Their best lead is that monkey symbol.
Cole eventually learns it appeared at the psychiatric hospital where Jennifer Goines was a patient, so back to 2015 he goes.
Except time travel apparently doesn’t come with GPS. Cole splinters into 2006 North Korea instead. I don’t know why I’m laughing, but I am. But still…oh, shit, right? Not the place I’d want to accidentally land.
He’s immediately detained at a military base, questioned by a North Korean officer and beaten. An address Cole has written on a piece of paper is taken from him before Jones and the team realize they’ve screwed up and manage to slingshot him out of there.
He finally arrives at the correct destination in 2015, where he’s planted inside the psychiatric hospital as a patient.
But that little piece of paper? It’s still sitting back in 2006.
That’s one of the things I really like about 12 Monkeys. Cole can’t just bounce through history without leaving fingerprints behind. Every trip creates another opportunity to change something he wasn’t trying to change.
And we’re only two episodes into this thing.
Thank You for Telling Me What Year It Is
There’s another small thing 12 Monkeys does exceptionally well that I’m starting to appreciate even more:
It tells me where the hell I am.
We’re moving between 2043, 2015 and now 2006, but the show makes those jumps clear. I’m not spending half the episode trying to figure out whether something happened twenty years ago, yesterday or fifteen minutes from now.
After the flashback whiplash I went through watching Scarpetta, no thank you.
Time travel is complicated enough. I don’t need the television show hiding the calendar from me too.
Meanwhile, Cassandra Railly is still in 2015, and we’re picking up almost immediately after the events of the premiere. She’s even wearing the same dress from the party where Leland Goines was killed.
Cass turns to her ex, Aaron, for help while she starts doing some investigating of her own.
Jones has specifically warned Cole not to involve Cass anymore because every interaction risks disrupting her timeline.
I’m guessing Cole isn’t going to be particularly good at following that rule, either.
Jennifer Goines Knows Something
Once Cole gets inside the hospital, he’s looking for the patient connected to Room 248 and the 12 Monkeys symbol.
That brings him straight to Jennifer. And holy hell, Jennifer is one very interesting gal…and a badass.
One minute she’s lucid. The next she’s rambling. Then she says something that sounds completely insane until you realize there may be a very real piece of information buried underneath it.
Cole asks her about the Army of the 12 Monkeys. She says she doesn’t know anything. But she does.
Jennifer says she’s not allowed to talk about them. Then she says she set twelve monkeys free — chimps with human eyes that were being experimented on before they were shot. Then the 12 Monkeys become the name of her cover band. Then they tried to kill her.
What the hell is real?
At first I wondered whether some of Jennifer’s behavior might be an act. But the more she talks, the more it seems like something has been done to her. Memories are buried inside her “insanity,” and somebody desperately wants to know what she remembers.
Especially about something called the Night Room.
What the Hell Is the Night Room?
Jennifer’s doctor, Lasky (Murray Furrow), isn’t happy that she’s talking to Cole.
After Jennifer tells him about the encounter, he increases her medication and starts asking questions of his own. He’s particularly interested in the Night Room.
So are the 12 Monkeys.
And Jennifer knows where it is.
We eventually learn that she worked at her father’s company, Markridge, and that the Night Room was an off-site laboratory hiding some kind of secret. Men led by the mysterious Pallid Man raided the lab, people were killed, and Jennifer was blamed for the murders.
One scientist apparently escaped.
Suddenly the plague, Markridge, Jennifer, the Army of the 12 Monkeys and the Night Room are all starting to connect.
Not enough for me to know what the f*ck is happening, obviously. But enough that I desperately want to.
And there’s an especially nasty little wrinkle here: Markridge is heavily involved in vaccination research.
I’m not going to turn that into some COVID conspiracy theory. Relax. 😂
But within the world of 12 Monkeys, the possibility that a company connected to the plague is also involved in vaccines certainly gives me something else to wonder about.
Oh Look, It’s the Stewmaker
Cassie’s investigation isn’t going particularly well either.
She goes to see Jeremy (Robert Wisdom), a friend she’s contacted for help investigating the 12 Monkeys, and finds his door open.
She finds Jeremy is dead. And waiting for her is a very familiar face.
The Stewmaker!
Okay, technically he’s the Pallid Man here, played by Tom Noonan, but after watching him dissolve people in acid on The Blacklist, I’m going to need a minute.
The Pallid Man wants Cass to stop asking questions. More importantly, he knows about Cole.
Now we’ve got people in 2015 who apparently know considerably more about the time traveler than the time traveler knows about them.
That’s never good.
Later, Aaron turns up with information of his own. He’s investigated Cole and found evidence placing him in North Korea in 2006 — including that address Cole accidentally left behind.
There it is again. Cole is changing things. Maybe only a little. Maybe a lot.
But every time he splinters into another year, he risks leaving something behind that wasn’t supposed to be there.
The mission may be to change history, but how the hell do you control which parts you change?
The Reverend Kane Has Entered the Building
Cass eventually figures out where Cole is and arrives at the hospital posing as a virologist so she can get him released.
So much for Jones telling Cole to stay away from her.
Before they can leave, Cole wants Jennifer too, and that’s when everything goes sideways.
The Pallid Man gets to Jennifer, Cole goes after them and we get a confrontation that also gives me another completely unrelated thought:
With that hat, the Pallid Man looks like Reverend Kane from Poltergeist II. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. But really, don’t they almost look the same?
The Pallid Man gets away with Jennifer, leaving Cole and Cass with even more questions than they had before.
Eventually Cole returns to 2043 and tells Jones what’s happened but she’s not exactly thrilled about his continued involvement with Cass.
Jones is quickly becoming another character I want to know more about. She was already an adult when the plague hit, while Cole was still a child. What happened to her? How did she wind up running Project Splinter? And why is she so determined to control every piece of Cole’s interaction with the past?
Cole finally convinces her that working with Cass isn’t optional anymore. If they’re going to find the Army of the 12 Monkeys, they need her.
Remember Waiting a Whole Week for This?
Back in 2015, the Pallid Man has Jennifer.
He gives her some kind of hallucinogenic concoction, apparently trying to force the buried memories of the Night Room out of her. Jennifer starts seeing things, like scary Slender Man types of things
And then —
Black screen.
Oh, f*ck you.
I have Prime. I can hit the next episode right now.
But watching this made me think about what 12 Monkeys must have been like when it originally aired weekly. You’d get that ending and then you’d have to wait. A whole damn week.
But maybe that wasn’t such a terrible thing.
You’d spend seven days thinking about Jennifer, the Night Room, the Pallid Man, the Army of the 12 Monkeys and that piece of paper Cole accidentally left in North Korea. You’d come up with theories. You’d argue about them with somebody else watching the show. You’d change your mind three times before the next episode aired.
Then television gave us binge culture and instant gratification.
I’m not saying I want to surrender the ability to hit NEXT EPISODE. Let’s not get crazy. But I do think we lost something when television stopped making us wait.
Because right now? I really want Episode 3.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE. 12 Monkeys isn’t slowing down. “Mentally Divergent” expands the mystery, raises the tension and leaves even more questions than the premiere. Jennifer Goines is turning into one hell of a wild card, the Night Room has me hooked, and Cole may be screwing with history every time he tries to save it.
Yeah.
This show just keeps getting better.
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