First episode was actually pretty decent. I’ll watch again.
Yes, surprisingly strong. Amazed that Syfy is actually releasing something I want to watch. The last time that happened was Battlestar Galactica. Everything since has been goofy poorly-produced faux-scifi pandering relationship trash.
I thought the first episode was excellent. Good period, not just “good for SyFy,” like Ascension. I’m fine that they changed just about everything, keeping just the core concepts (plague, time travel, the 12 Monkeys name).
Given that the core conceit of the original was that the 12 Monkeys was a red herring, uppermost in my mind is whether it’s actually the group responsible here. When Leland (the always-great Zeljko Ivanek) told him about the 12 Monkeys, he didn’t know either. As far as we know, it’s a loop - he asked Cole about it because Cole asked him about it, and that may be the whole thing. For that matter, we don’t know for certain that Leland was behind anything, even though he was clearly an evil bastard. The fragmentary recording mentions his name, but that doesn’t mean he was responsible.
On the other hand, it could be that the 12 Monkeys means something, just to screw with the preconceptions of anyone who has seen the movie.
I’m not a big fan of “horrible things happen with past / future copies of an object come in contact,” in time travel stories, but it was pretty damned dramatic here, and gave us an interesting side time dilation effect on Cole. Which happened presumably because of his altered state, which they spelled out.
The time travel logic is silly so I hope they don’t dwell on it. But I liked everything else.
Yeah, this is pretty engaging - quite well written and well acted. Curious to see where it goes.
I enjoyed the first episode, decent scripting, good pacing and well acted for the most part. It’s a cut above normal SyFy fare, which has been piss poor lately. I was really interested in Ascension, and it was garbage. This show renews my hope that someone at SyFy knows what they are doing. I hope The Expanse turns out to be as good.
Just watched the 1st episode last night and I would have to agree with the overall sentiment found here of “not bad.” I think for this to work as a series, they can’t simply ape the movie’s plot, and they are indeed diverging from it pretty rapidly (Dr. Reilly seeing Cole disappear and then getting thrown in the looney bin due to talking about it was a good touch). I liked the plot device of altering an item in the past and having it change the future version of it - this has been used before, to be sure (2 example that come right to mind for me are with Dennis Quaid in Frequency where they fiddle with the desk he’s using and the brutal scene in Looper where some dude is getting cut up in the past as he tries to run across a street and escape, and parts of his body start disappearing one by one… ew!).
The only scene that struck me as exceedingly goofy was when he slapped the two watches together, they did some cheap light effect and everyone appeared to freeze except him. But the rest of the show seemed to work pretty well.
I do like the thought that maybe Cole gave Leland the idea about the Army of the 12 Monkeys being behind it. And the fact that Leland remembers meeting Cole but Cole has no memory of it is an interesting twist.
So I’m definitely in for this.
One divergent was that the scientists in the future weren’t interested in stopping the catastrophe, just collecting information to find a cure for their present. At least that was their initial goal. I’d rather they kept that point.
The way I read that scene, the other people didn’t slow down - Cole sped up, and his perceptions shifted accordingly. I believe we’re supposed to understand that he was affected differently because he’s been altered by the Splinter project.
Well I’ve seen the first 3 episodes now and there is a lot to like here. I appreciate how they’ve implemented a “present day threat” into the writing with the scavengers and all, this could really open things up as they move along. Some of the actors seem a bit rough still and they are moving too fast with the exposition for my tastes, though obviously done in an effort to sell the premise to the viewers as quickly as possible.
Because I found this clip playing in the background in episode two both fascinating and terrifying, here is the full scene:
Wow… That thing belongs in the best youtube vids thread. That was… Scarily awesome.
I like how rum events are brewing downstream in 2043 as well now, reminds me of the X-Men movie when enemies were closing in on the X-Men in the future, where the time-travel is being done from, ratchets up the tension.
I’m not willing to call this a -great- show yet, but it’s doing a pretty good job of finding its own path apart from the source material, and it’s significantly better than I was afraid it might end up.
It’s not an all time great show. But it’s great. There, I said it.
I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s definitely grabbed it’s own identity separate from the movie (but still connected enough to make sense in relation to the movie), and the future stuff in the past couple of episodes has helped to increase tension while making the main characters more likeable and sympathetic. This is one of the better shows SyFy has had in the past few years, and I hope it is successful as I would like to see where it goes.
Pairing this with Helix makes for a crazy and fun couple of hours of TV.
So, unless I’m misreading things, this is the first example we’ve had of Cole changing the present. So far we’ve seen a lot of time loops, like Cole going back to betray the location of the tunnels which leads to 7 West damaging the Splinter machine which sends Cole back on a short hop. That one begs the question of what happened in the first iteration. But regardless, here Cole comes back, and in this future there is no time travel project, and 7 West occupies the ruins.
My best guess? He let Cassie get captured by the 12 Monkeys, so she didn’t make the recording that started the time-travel project sending Cole back. Yet Cole is still there, so their theories about him being erased if he eliminates the future which sends him are incorrect.
It’s also possible that the project existed but was wiped out by 7 West, or that there’s no time travel change involved and the project was wiped out by 7 West while he was gone. That last seems unlikely, since it looks like 7 West has had the project for some time. They’re hanging laundry in the Splinter room.
When they first showed the decomposed corpse in the Vault, I was sure that we were looking at another time loop. That the body was from the time travel project, that it was one of Dr. Jones / Werners’ failed test subjects, carrying the virus. In passing though they said the body was “centuries old,” so I don’t think that was it.
I’m really hoping he’s actually changed the future and is in an alternate timeline. Another possibility is that they will reveal he somehow jumped forward in time, to after the base is taken over.
If the whole show is just the end of the movie, where ‘whoops, look like all our efforts to change the timeline were already incorporated into the timeline. oh well.’ I’ll be sad. That worked for the movie but I’ve already seen that version.
Yeah, I thought that too! Seems a bit weird they’d dangle that, and then have it be some plague-ridden corpse from the 14th century or whatever.
I dunno, while I’ve enjoyed the series up till now, this episode was a bit disappointing to me - it felt kind of rushed in some way, with too much random shit happening that just served plot points. Wasn’t as organic and unfolding-feeling as it’s been up till now. Also, the introduction of some Mysterious Dude We Haven’t Heard Anything About Yet, But Is Apparently Terribly Important, seemed a bit Lost-ish, like we’re heading for some labyrinth of perpetual unresolved-ness.