One Modern Sci-Fi Classic Delivered The Ultimate Time-Travel Twist
The biggest twist of 12 Monkeys was also its darkest.
One of the most compelling time-travel tropes is the idea of parents meeting their children before those children are born. It's the sort of brain-twisting thing we love about Back to the Future, and that notion also fueled much of the appeal of the River Song storyline in Doctor Who in 2011, as well as aspects of the film Looper. But, arguably, the idea of a future-tense child creating their own birth was best explored in the TV version of 12 Monkeys. And 10 years ago in the Season 2 finale, “Memory of Tomorrow,” which aired on July 18, 2016, 12 Monkeys gave fans a gut-punch of a twist in the season finale in a storyline that still holds up today.
Here’s why “Memory of Tomorrow” was so incredible, how it raised the stakes of the show, and paved the way for what became the show’s best run of episodes in Season 3.
The original Terry Gilliam film, 12 Monkeys, mostly operated on the time-travel premise that changing the past was not in fact possible, and that the attempts of James Cole (Bruce Willis) to do so were simply a series of preordained paradoxes that caused the timeline to exist as it already had. Relatively speaking, this is much more straightforward and less chaotic than the TV series version, which runs multiple types of time travel plays all at once. While all four seasons deal with various predestination paradoxes — Cole (Aaron Stanford) and Cassie (Amanda Schull) were always responsible for saving Katarina’s (Barbara Sukowa) daughter in “Lullaby”, Cole always encountered his future self as a time traveller in “Paradox” — the show isn’t just limited to these kinds of time-travel twists.
Season 1 presented at least one accidental alternate timeline in which Ramse (Kirk Acevedo) was the leader of the West VII. Season 2 is really when 12 Monkeys made it clear that both Team Splinter and The Army of the 12 Monkeys were capable of actually altering the established facts of the past. The 2040s, the relative present of 12 Monkeys, is, in fact, an alternate one following the events of the Season 2 premiere, because the outbreak of the plague was pushed back a few years. And, the penultimate episode of Season 2, “Blood Washed Away,” begged for an alternate timeline, as it featured nearly all the heroic characters being murdered in Titan City, or, in the case of Jones, getting burned up by the temporal storms.
Brilliantly, “Memory of Tomorrow” presents a false happy ending for Cole and Cassie, hiding away in 1959, in the much-foreshadowed “house of cedar and pine,” which, it seems, at first, was perhaps not the sinister location we’d previously believed. Going into this episode, the audience knows what Cole and Cassie don’t: That all their friends have been slaughtered in the future, and hiding in the past won’t prevent the plague, nor stop the rise of the Witness, whoever that time-traveling person might be.
Madeleine Stowe returned to the 12 Monkeys universe in 2016, after having played the original Dr. Railly in the 1995 film.
But, of course, things don’t work out for Cole and Cassie at all, and in a nice nod to the original film, actress Madeleine Stowe makes a memorable appearance as Lillian, another “Primary” who can see through time and basically tells Cole that this happy-ending timeline can’t actually be the end of the story. In short, in the previous episode, Cole and Cassie reconnected in 1959 and finally got together as a couple. And at the start of “Memory of Tomorrow,” Cassie reveals she’s pregnant, which means she and Cole will, in theory, raise a child in the past.
However, Cole soon learns that this timeline is not the correct one, and so, using the tea with the Red Forest leaf, he sends his consciousness back a few years and prevents the explosion in 1957, thus erasing the past two years and his and Cassie’s idyllic life in the house of cedar and pine. Cole assumes, as does the audience, that this also means he’s erased the existence of he and Cassie’s child. But...no!
The moment Cassie discovers that she is the mother of her greatest enemy.
Because the final twist in “Memory of Tomorrow” turns a time travel twist into a kind of reverse Darth Vader Empire Strikes Back moment. Turns out that timeline wasn’t entirely erased because Cassie is still pregnant, and the evil Witness is… her unborn child!
In Season 3, when Cassie and Cole’s son, Athan Cole (James Callis), appeared as an adult, the show was firing on all cylinders. Athan’s eventual role as the Witness, of course, became more complex in Season 3, but at the end of Season 2, it seemed that anything was possible. The two heroes who hoped for a nice little life, instead, through a paradox, created their greatest enemy. Which meant, going into Season 3, keeping the secret of their offspring proved to be one of the best storylines of the entire show.
