Jan 16, 2015 2 min read

Anyone have the time?

It’s 2015, or is it 2040? Maybe it’s 2006 and this is North Korea, or maybe Philadelphia. Time travel and the end of humanity are the subjects of the SyFy Channel’s knockoff of the 1995 Terry Gilliam film “12 Monkeys,” premiering Friday night, and you may need a chronometer to figure out what time period it is. If you’re really smart, though, you’ll get an alarm clock.

The film, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was pretty gripping. The TV series stars Aaron Stanford as Cole, who flits back and forth between decades trying to stop a plague that kills – or killed, or will kill – 7 billion people. On one of his journeys, he meets a young virologist named Dr. Cassandra Raily (Amanda Schull) who becomes his ally in the frantic effort to stop the mysterious Army of the 12 Monkeys from unleashing the virus that will decimate most of the world’s population. You get the idea they could have more than a professional bond, if only Cole could stick around for any length of time.

At first, Cole’s assignment seems easy enough. Find a creepy guy named Leland Frost (Zeljko Ivanek), said to be behind the plague. Once Frost is eliminated, the plague will not have happened and Cole will disappear.

There’s only one problem: Frost is only one of the 12 Monkeys.

The first episode isn’t bad as Cole’s handler, a female Dr. Strangelove character named Jones (Barbara Sukowa), sends him back from 2040 to 2013 to find Frost. Cole and Cassie meet cute, he tells her he’s from the future, she thinks he’s nuts, then she doesn’t, there’s lots of action and stuff happens. A resolution of the situation is suggested, but that wouldn’t give us any reason to tune in the following week, now, would it?

The second episode falls apart like a rusty wind-up clock. Cole and his pal Ramses (Kirk Acevedo) are in an abandoned mental hospital in Philadelphia, fighting off unidentifiable zombie-like creatures. Then it’s an earlier time and Cole is a patient in the hospital where he meets a young woman named Jennifer Goines (Emily Hampshire), Frost’s disturbed daughter.

It’s too bad SyFy didn’t invest more in a better script and direction.