12 MONKEYS: 02x04: Emergence: Rambling on the plague and Time…

Collecting some of my thoughts on the pros (for the Witness and his Army) of a plague in the world of 12 MONKEYS after “Emergence” or “How Katarina Got Her Temporal Groove Back.” =)

HOW DOES A PLAGUE HELP KILL TIME?

“Kill Time” as in *destroy* Time, not, like, playing solitaire… =)

If all the Witness wants to do is kill a few mental patients (and thereby destroy Time), why does he have the Army spend decades ensuring that most of humanity is wiped out by a viral outbreak in the early 21st century?

Well, In order to kill those Jenga Primaries by paradox, time travel is needed. To cause a paradox, matter from one time must be made to contact with that same matter from another [more on paradox]. Well, it turns out that the only realities in which human beings develop time travel technology are those in which a catastrophe like the 2017 plague (or whichever year it’s shifted to in the “latest” reality) motivates scientists like Katarina Jones and her team to revive and complete Project Splinter.

That’s some legit supervillainous mastermind calculus right there, isn’t it? Release a virus that kills billions so that you can hitch a ride to the past in the survivors’ time machine. Impressive planning and execution. But, hey, no supervillain believes he’s a supervillain, right? I’m sure we’ll find that the Witness has his reasons [more on the Witness and his possible plans/reasons].

The good of the many…
The life of his son…
The life of his father…
The life of his fiancé…
The end of his own life…
Y'know, something.

Cuz no one believes they’re a bad person.

BUT MAYBE THERE’S ANOTHER REASON FOR PLAGUE…

I can’t remember when I started thinking this, but it arose out of a consideration of paradoxes—Time has a will. It makes choices. It cares about what things mean. I’ve had this loose idea of Time being given this will, this sentience, by the creatures that inhabit it, specifically, human beings.

In “Emergence,” characters finally begin to explain this idea for us. Katarina is right, time has existed and will exist as long as the universe does. But when does time *matter*? When does it have *meaning*? When it’s marked, experienced, lived, anticipated, remembered, shared. Pretty metaphysical, I know, but I like to think that it’s (armchair) quantum physical, connected to the notion that observation affects the observed. I like it.

If a clock ticks in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

It’s a classic conceit, but I’m just gonna go with it since Jennifer Goines is the one who told us: Time only started to matter when HUMANS began caring about it. Jennifer seems to go so far as saying that Time was born with the first human. And I believe that Time becomes stronger as the human population that experiences it grows. So, more humans, stronger Time. Fewer humans, weaker Time.

So, if you buy that bit of crazy talk, what can you say about the state of Time circa 2044? Given the decimation of humanity in the wake of several mutations of the virus, Time is perhaps the weakest its been in millions of years, right? I believe this explains why the instabilities caused by the paradoxidation of a Primary in 1944 manifest themselves in 2044 as these bubbles of chaotic time, and why additional Jenga Primary paradox deaths would intensify the disruptions, further setting the stage for the Red Forest on Earth. Time, and thus, reality, are weakest near the end of humanity, when there are fewer human minds living in it.

WHY KILL TIME?

So, the plague may play multiple roles in the Witness’s design, but why? Why would the Witness and his Army want to kill Time? Or is that not the what he wants? The Witness wants to bring/connect/create the Red Forest on Earth, make it reality, which both Jennifer and Katarina agree would break time, but would it actually kill Time? If we are to believe Jennifer and Tommy, if all of humanity existed at once and forever, wouldn’t Time do the same?

No, because Time is NOT just the minds of humans and primaries, it’s humans and primaries experiencing and living in time. Time is the medium in which Time grows.

Here’s a question that bugs me: Why would one of Time’s synapses (Timey Tommy) willingly sacrifice himself?

The quick answer: He’s destined to. If you think about it, that seems like bull-pucky, tho, right? So, maybe it’s part of Time’s plan. Tommy’s death moves events and characters closer to some moment when Time can be properly defended and saved.

Allright, enough already. Darn this show and its frickin frackin rabbit holes. Not since LOST… *sigh*

ABOUT Time VERSUS time…

I very much like this interdependency of Time and humanity that Jennifer explains to Katarina. Tommy’s analogy of Primaries as gears in the clock of Time and further explanation of them as synapses in Time’s brain is a little less awesome to me. It depends on where it goes from there. Cuz right now I do not want to SEE some entity representing Time, or hear its voice, y’know? Or maybe more specifically, I don’t want our characters to see or hear Time as a creature, unless maybe it’s at some weird temporal singularity moment. Whatever that is. Maybe.

Or that sentient galaxy that Bender meets in FUTURAMA. That would be cool.

Or Apollo from that episode of STAR TREK.

O man, they’re gonna do a CONTACT thing, aren’t they? Where Time will appear to someone “astrally” as one or several figures that are familiar to the character, reflecting the nature of the conversation or message that’s to be delivered. (The Speed Force just did that to Barry this week.) First I was gonna not like that, but in the span of writing the first dozen words of this paragraph, I came around. That would be okay. What would be awesome is if after Time explains its appearance to one of our gang, heh, Cole or Ramse wills Time to change into a cartoon character in mid-sentence. Could also be a way for Cole to speak to his mother, Cassie to speak to Aaron, Jennifer to Leland, Ramse to…himself? Heh.


Hrm… How many primaries are walking the planet at any given moment? I liked the idea of it being one, and roughly one per generation, a la the Slayer, but maybe there’s a need for more. If Time gets its life from humanity and its thoughts “thru” primaries having both increase as population increases makes a kind of sense, right? What happens to Time when a primary fights his/her connection, the way Jennifer did for some time in her life?

I would be more pleased by the idea that Time as Jennifer and Tommy know it is not the same time that Katarina has studied. Time is a…pseudo-consciousness that exists, lives, within time, for as long as humans have been walking around. Time is a hive mind across the millennia, composed of the minds and lives of primaries, a sentience and will that emerged from them.

But maybe that’s exactly what Tommy and Jennifer mean? It could be, I just haven’t heard that yet, at least, not to my satisfaction.

Time will tell, right?~

Hope I didn’t lose you. Too trippy? What did you expect? It’s you’re-your-own-mother-flarkin time travel! =)

Unmake history!~

Keep on keepin’ on~

12 MONKEYS: Rambling on the rules…

This is a ramble on my take on the rules-slash-nature of time travel in the universe of 12 MONKEYS, after watching the season 2 premiere, “Year of the Monkey” (available via Hulu and Syfy). So, if you haven't watched it, turn back now, for here there by *SPOILERS!*

RAMSE: Listen. You believe in the past. I believe in the future. It is what it is.

Honestly, I wanted more to happen, and maybe didn't love the way that some question marks at the end of the season 1 finale have been resolved (I say maybe because I feel like I'll need to give the ep another viewing to properly take it all in), but I love the reinforcement of the rules (or illusions thereof) that we get to witness. More on that in a bit. First off…

I do believe we now know where the Annapurna Remains came from—the first Blue Man to take the Splinter chair. What do you think?

Pretty foolish and naive of the Smurfs to let Jones have the Splinter helm all to herself. Until Rodell (Do we know this guy? I've completely forgotten : P) explains that Jones set the machine to Splinter only part of the subject's body, I simply believed that Blue Man Group set coordinates that were too deep in the past, resulting in spatio-temporal vaporization. In the first season, Project Splinter was pushing hard to get Cole safely back to the 80s, remember? Was it established (and did I forget) that the acquisition of the Spearhead's core increase Splinter's "chrono-range?"

Anyhow, Blue Leader is not pleased with the mistification of their first soldier—LOVED Deacon’s reaction, heh—but I believe that it went exactly as it was meant to (sorry, Blue dude). Of course, few individuals in the world of 12 MONKEYS can see the entire picture (how events across time are connected), so Blue Leader of 2015-2043 couldn't know that the ancient remains of one of his soldiers was uncovered in the Himalayas in the 80s and sold to Markridge.

Hrm… It's totally possible that no one knows that except for us (the audience) and *maybe* the Witness.

If I'm right, this is an illustration of the rules that are at work when it comes to the timeline/history in 12 MONKEYS—basically, that time or history or the past or the future or whatever you want to call it from your vantage point canNOT be changed. Everything happens exactly as it is supposed to (and has already happened). The illusion of change is the phenomenon experienced by those who are told that something is supposedly recorded history in the future and that they've failed to make or allow it to happen.

So, the Witness has a note in his future diary that Ethan Seki is found dead in 2015 next to the Time Machine he helped build. But, we see Cole rescue his bro-from-another-mo, thereby giving fate the finger, right?

OR… We understand that the Witness's future diary is wrong. Or perhaps inaccurate in just such a way that it sets the Army of the 12 Monkeys to tracking him, which for some reason is the truly significant outcome.

I like thinking of the 12 MONKEYS Witness's predictions like THE MATRIX Oracle's readings: people are not necessarily given the truth, but rather, what they need to hear to get them to do or be or understand what is needed at just the right time.

Oh—Another example! Right after Blue Man one is turned into time traveling jerky, Blue Leader attempts to motivate Jones to cooperate by threatening Cassie's life. Jones plays the very awesome time traveling card of "You can't kill her because you need her to live long enough to leave us the message that leads to us being here in the first place!"

Awesome. =)

I have to admit, I was surprised that Blue Leader would threaten Cassie's life, as if they didn't know who she was. I have this vaguely remembered impression of the season 1 finale showing us that the Blue Man Group seemed to be awaiting her arrival… Am I way off on that? Frack. I'm gonna hafta do a season one rewatch, aren't I? *sigh* I need a Splinter device of my own.

But, it seems he does know who she is. He is ready to use a threat on the life of an individual who is crucial to the events that lead to the plague and Project Splinter as a lesson, challenging Jones to stand by her abstract intellectual understanding of time in the face of a deadly threat to a friend and ally.

BLUE: Your philosophy is still marred by your simplistic notion of causality. If something is meant to be, it shall be.

BLUE: If causality is your religion, madam, have faith in it.

Jones believes that the Smurfs can’t kill Cassie without punching a hole in spacetime. Blue Leader believes that he can execute Cassie and somehow, a message will be recorded that leads to the creation/resurrection of Project Splinter. To misquote JURASSIC PARK’s Dr. Malcolm: Time finds a way.

We'll never know if Jones caves in to Blue Leader's threat because Rodell serendipitously manages to crack the encryption on Jones's Splinter programming. This is another demonstration of history being unchangeable. In this case, the universe itself steps in to keep history and Cassie's personal timeline intact and continuous. It does this by nudging Rodell to try exactly the right algorithm or whatever to bypass the encryption before Blue Leader can kill Cassie.

Crazy talk? Perhaps. But I don't think so. I like it.

I'm certainly still open to the possibility that history can be changed cuz who doesn't love free will and saving the world, right? But between Cole and Cass and Ramse and Jones living thru history one day at a time, without only clues and not true foreknowledge of events, and the Witness and his monkey army being unreliable fortune tellers, the net experience of this story in a universe in which history canNOT be changed will be just as rewarding (like season 1—SO good =). And—hey!—the future beyond 2044 is still wide open and "unwritten."

Okay. I'm gonna hafta wrap this up. I hope to get around to really digging into the action of the ep in a later post, cuz I definitely need to gush over crazy lovely Jennifer Goines and her end-of-the-world speed dating session!

JENNIFER: Stock tip—invest heavily in very deep holes.

Would be a-MA-zing to see Dale in 2044 among the West 7, talking about his now-worthless investment portfolio… =)

Hopefully, I'll get around to it before the second ep of the season airs! =)

Keep on keepin' on~

12 MONKEYS: “Pallid Man Wants You” at TeePublic and RedBubble!

Pallid Man wants * YOU * for the Army of the 12 Monkeys!

@TeePublic (black fill)
@TeePublic (red fill)
@RedBubble (black fill)

This bit of 12 MONKEYS propaganda is now available on various shirt and case options via TeePublic and additional nouns at the RedBubble! =)

Available in both RED fill and black at TeePublic (red shown below, black fill above). For the next three days, these are *discounted* at TeePublic, which for standard-sized tees means $14 compared to the regular $20.

So get one now! Or twelve (even though it’s not primary, I won’t tell)—and help the Army of the 12 Monkeys recruiting drive! Cuz, man, it is really hard to get anyone to join up. I mean, who jumps at “Be all that you can be… right up until we unleash a plague that kills off most of humanity!”—right?

Join the army and unmake history!

Keep on keepin’ on~