Like a phantom fleeting at the corner of your eye, blink and you just might miss it. With the light bulbs flickering… An audible draining of the air from space that just impossibly popped in or out of existence… That is what 12 Monkeys season three was like for me. Last weekend, Syfy decided to take a page out of the Netflix playbook and drop the whole season at once. They staggered it slightly, airing blocks of shows on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday, but I had it all finished by brunch Tuesday.

Based on the 1995 Terry Gilliam sci-fi film of the same name, both stories are iterations of a 1962 French film entitled La Jetée. A central theme in all versions is time travel from a post-Apocalypse to a time before the disaster, in hopes of averting it. Also central to all three incarnations is causality in time travel, unalterable tragedy, and love that burns eternal outside of time and space.

Season three began in the far future, where the last one ended: with time-displaced scientist Cassandra Railly being held hostage in the year 2163 by the elusive cult the Army of The Twelve Monkeys. Railly, over the last two seasons, had been working with fellow traveler Cole to stop a virus that was released by the Monkeys in about 2016. In late season two, lost in time, untethered from their team in 2040, the two of them had made a simple life in which they finally explored their love for each other. Shortly thereafter, the Monkeys lured her to their base, the time-traveling city Titan, to kidnap her. Their reason was startling: she was now pregnant with a baby that was destined to become the messiah of the Monkeys, the foretold Witness, who has guided them through looping timelines the whole run of the show.

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