Note: Full spoilers for 12 Monkeys: Season 1 follow.

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It seems like a long time ago that the big question about 12 Monkeys was how it was going to stack up against the 1995 film. Syfy's 12 Monkeys has quickly forged its own identity, that identity being one of the most promising Sci-Fi shows in years. This is especially welcome from Syfy, a network that has lately been better known for campy originals like Sharknado, rather than genre-defining series like Battlestar Galactica.The premise of the show sounds simple enough. A terrible plague has wiped out most of the Earth's population but there's a time machine, so someone can be sent back to stop the plague and make everything right. That person is James Cole, an antihero who goes along with the plan because he's done a lot of bad things to survive the post apocalypse and would just like it all to go away. Cole is really part animal when he joins the time travel project, and is so determined to erase himself there's really no attempt to develop his character. That made scruffy Aaron Stanford (X2, The Hills Have Eyes) the perfect choice for the role. Those of us who watched Nikita know him as an actor who can make you love a guy that's hard to like.The evolving Cole has two partners in his quest, Cassie in 2015 and Ramse in 2043. They are both more complete people than he is. They each have a code. Cassie is a healer before anything else. She's willing to follow Cole down a path she knows leads to her death because it's more important that her fellow man survive. Amanda Schull is terrific as the good doctor, who is confronted with the impossible and rises to the occasion every time. She also has crazy chemistry with Stanford, which is a highlight of the show. I only wish there were more episodes in Season 1 so we could have seen them take a road trip and learn a little more about each other.Ramse only takes what he needs to survive, maintaining a moral compass in a broken world that has fallen into the hands of the most brutal and selfish people mankind has left. Kirk Acevedo plays Ramse with a destroyed world-weariness that shows us just how hard its been to be one of the last good men on Earth for decades. He's still done plenty of things he wish he hadn't. Even when his character makes a dramatic change in allegiances and ends up fighting against Cole, we buy it because he's clearly still being true to himself.The series is bursting with great characters. Noah Bean took the rather thankless role of Cassie's misguided boyfriend and made us care about him. Tom Noonan's Pallid Man made us wary of flowers. Jennifer Goines, a mental patient who hears voices, is a true wild card who impacts the storyline in unpredictable ways. Emily Hampshire is utterly delightful as Jennifer and while she often serves as comic relief, Jennifer can also be heartbreakingly vulnerable. Cole works for Dr. Jones, a Yoda-like chain smoker who leads her people on a quixotic quest to save the past. A key theme of the series is how far a person will go for the people we love. Jones talks a lot about the 7 billion lost lives and the culture (music, literature, art) that can never be rebuilt, but she's really driven to save the child she lost to the plague.Many of our characters at one time or another make major decisions that effect countless lives, all to protect one. It's easy to say the needs of the many outweigh those of the few...until the few end up being your kids or the woman you love. Jones (played by the brilliant Barbara Sukowa) is also fascinating because she believes in God but clearly believes He needs help getting things just right. Supreme-ish being, I guess.Plan or not, should we change it? We're wired to move forward and face the future. Living in the past isn't something that's typically healthy. Many of our heroes have been caught up in an endless cycle of bargaining, because who needs acceptance when you have a damn time machine? I'm reminded of the line in Jurassic Park when Dr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) says the scientists that brought the dinosaurs back to life were "so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."I love anything to do with time travel (I don't necessarily understand it, but I love the idea of it) and 12 Monkeys continued to up its game throughout Season 1. At first we're shown Cole as someone who can jump into the past and back into his own time, but we were gradually introduced to more and more complex scenarios. In "Atari", we were told a self-contained story in which Cole is send back only a few days during a raid on the facility, and learns that he is actually responsible for the raid because of information he gives them after the jump...because it happened before he jumped.

12 Monkeys Co-Creator on Where Season 2 Will Go

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As twisted as that sounds, it set us up for "Shonin" and "Divine Move" which showed us how Ramse had in fact been influencing the timeline the whole time, after jumping back to 1987. And he actually oversaw the research that led to the time machine being built. It took time travel to create time travel, as he says. And since I believe Virus Meat Man is actually Cole, the loops just keep getting bigger and bigger. We still have a lot of unanswered questions, (Who is Cole's mother? How does Jennifer come to have so much knowledge in 2043? Why is Cassie so important to the Army of the 12 Monkeys?) and those answers will probably negate what we think we know has already happened.For me, the best moment of the series was Cassie's death in "Tomorrow." The show started with Cole taking her watch off of her skeleton, so it wasn't exactly a surprise, but like Cole I was hoping we'd be able to get around it. But even now, with Cassie improbably sent to 2043, it still looms over the landscape of the series as a terrible landmark - feeling as though no matter how many trips we take past it, back through time and forward again, it's always going to be there. Whether Cole will be able to change this will continue to be a key question of the series. Even if he can save humanity, can he also save her? Or will time take what it's owed, to paraphrase the always ominous Jones?In the season finale, "Arms of Mine", Cole seemingly takes a different path than he was "supposed" to. Every day we make hundreds of little decisions, and sometimes it's going back to get your jacket that puts you in the path of the distracted driver. Sometimes it's what takes you out of that path. History (at least as it's understood by the bad guys) had Ramse dying alone but "this time" Cole picked heads instead of tails. He opted to look for another way to do things. One that's about moving past the sense of betrayal both men feel, not going back to undo anything.