Things looked pretty bad for time-travelling hero James Cole (Aaron Stanford) at the end of 12 Monkeys' second season, but it looks like they will only get worse.
Speaking exclusively to SpoilerTV during his appearance at London Film and Comic Con this weekend, Stanford predicts that it will be "dark days" for Cole once he discovers the true identity of The Witness, the leader of the Army of the 12 Monkeys. In the season two finale, it was revealed that the mysterious nemesis is, in fact, the unborn child of Cole and Dr. Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull).
During an earlier Q&A panel, Stanford called the twist "fantastic," and later admitted his surprise at the choice. "I knew whatever they chose, I would be surprised. That was clearly the whole idea for a long time, they were going to come up with some kind of a twist, and it went through a lot of different versions of what that might be, and they led people down a lot of false paths, like they left a lot of hints that it might actually be Cole who's The Witness. They were very clever about that. But yeah, the fact that it was a character that you had not met and you only discovered one episode before that he even existed was a great way to throw people off the scent."
Ramse (Kirk Acevedo), Cole's closest friend, spend much of season two searching for The Witness to enact revenge on him for causing his son, Sam (Peter DaCunha), to splinter to an unknown time period, and Stanford believes that the reveal will put the two at odds once again. "You can't really avoid being at odds with Ramse. He's a difficult guy to get along with, so yeah, I'm sure that there's gonna be some fights there and some tension there, but what else is new?
Cole, meanwhile, is at a low point. After sacrificing his blissful life with Cassie to save time from collapse, he lost her to the clutches of the Witnesses' soldiers; meanwhile, Ramse disappeared, Deacon (Todd Stashwick), the leader of scavenger group West VII (of which Cole and Ramse were both once a part of), was - unbeknownst to Cole - killed, leaving Cole with "nothing to lose." "I think he's out for blood," Stanford says. "They left him in a pretty emotionally devastated position, so I think that's where season three is gonna pick up - he's on the hunt for Cassie and no one shall stand in his way. He hasn't had very good luck for his entire life: He's had his family ripped away, he's had his friends ripped away, he's had his loves ripped away, so yeah, he's at rock bottom at this point."
The second season spent very little time on dealing with the show's original premise of an apocalyptic plague that killed 93.6% of the population, and instead shifted focus to the Red Forest, the theoretical location where time ceases to exist. When asked about whether the third season would see a return to exploring the plague, Stanford said: "I think it's still going to be part of the story, but the whole point of bringing in this larger element into the picture, making the conspiracy even bigger, really the idea is that the plague that killed seven billion is really only a piece of this master plan. It was only a necessary part of the puzzle. So I don't think they're gonna go back to necessarily focusing on just that. I think it'll still be there, but you're gonna find [that] they're gonna spin off the conspiracy and the plot into whole new realms."
The former Nikita and X-Men star is, however, in the dark about what is set to happen next season, saying: "I don't know anything. The writers keep it pretty tight. They keep it pretty close to the vest. I know they're very excited. I've seen [showrunner] Terry [Matalas] tweeting a lot about how pumped he is and how happy he is with his writers room, so all I know is that the writers are very, very excited, so the fans should be excited too."
12 Monkeys will return to Syfy for its ten-episode third season in 2017.
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