10 TV Finales That Messed With Your Brain

8. 12 Monkeys - ‘The Beginning’

St Elsewhere Ending
Syfy

Terry Matalas, co-creator and showrunner of Syfy’s brilliantly realised adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s warped time travel tragedy 12 Monkeys, never gave viewers an easy out or a quick fix to figuring out all the convoluted temporal twists going on in his show, and the finale, which he wrote and directed, doesn’t deviate from the established pattern.

Throughout the show, we follow James Cole’s attempts to prevent a worldwide catastrophe caused by the release of a virus by terrorists called the Army Of The Twelve Monkeys. In the finale - entitled, appropriately enough for a series based on paradox and circularity, ‘The Beginning’ - they decide that the only way to unravel all the horrendously complex plot developments and actually save the world is to erase Cole from time itself, producing a complete reset.

And this happens: Cole and the Army never exist, the virus is never released and the world is saved. But then Cole reappears, reunited with his lover Cassie at their old farmhouse home as if nothing has happened. He’d been reinserted into an alternate timeline to live out his life - but as the camera pans away, we see the leaves of a nearby tree turning red, signifying that he’s a temporal anomaly…

As ominous cliffhangers go, Twelve Monkeys is a headf*ck, given the reassuring ‘reset button’ ending we’d just experienced, which - deus ex machina though it may be - was as good a way as any of cutting the Gordian knot of a time travel plot. Cole sacrificed himself to save time itself, right? So why was he saved to place everything and everyone in peril once more?

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Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.