10 Binge-Worthy SciFi/Fantasy TV Shows You Need to Watch

This ain’t no fancy TARDIS. (12 Monkeys promotional image, Season 1, image via SyFy Channel)

12 Monkeys

(SyFy)

“You are walking through a red forest and the grass is tall. It’s just rained. Most of the blood has washed away. There’s a house in the distance, cedar and pine. You’ve been there before. You’re not alone. There’s a man. You see him, you go to him. You know him, like a memory of tomorrow.” This is the vision at the center of 12 Monkeys. Of a clapboard house that collapses and rebuilds in an endless loop. Of a forest of deep red trees.

Like the house, the plot of 12 Monkeys collapses in on itself and reforms the future and the past. It’s 2043 and earth’s population is a tiny fraction of its current size, killed off by a viral pandemic in  2017. Physicist Dr. Katarina Jones lost her daughter in the pandemic. To save her, and most of the human race, she learns to unravel time itself. From the scattered data she has on the time before the plague, she knows she needs to find two people. One is Dr. Cassandra Railly, a brilliant virologist who was the first to recognize the danger. The other is James Cole, the man who traveled through time to tell Cassie in the first place.

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12 Monkeys is one of the most well-realized time travel plots I’ve seen. Its internal logic is tight, even as it gets more and more convoluted. As they jump back and forth through fluctuating pasts and futures, they don’t shy away from showing the consequences of changing the past, the future, and the fabric of time itself. It’s a real credit to the original 1995 movie from Terry Gilliam.