Film / 12 Monkeys

"...Five billion people will die from a deadly virus in 1997... The survivors will abandon the surface of the planet... Once again the animals will rule the world..."

— Excerpts from an interview with a clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, April 12, 1990, Baltimore County Hospital

12 Monkeys is a 1995 science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by David and Janet Peoples. It is based on the famous French experimental short film La Jetée. It stars Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt, who won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category.

There is a chance that asylum patient James Cole (Willis) is not insane. That he might really be a time traveler from a post-apocalyptic future. That the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, and the deadly virus he claims they plan to release, are all real. The only trouble is, if Dr. Kathryn Railly (Stowe) accepts this, she will have to accept an even more terrifying truth: that The End of the World as We Know It is coming, and soon.

Beware of spoilers.

The film was adapted into a television series for Syfy, which premiered in January 2015.

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This film provides examples of:

• Adaptation Expansion: Lots, when updating a 28-minute short to a 129-minute movie. Notably, the entire Army of the Twelve Monkeys plot is new to the movie.
• Adaptation Title Change: The movie is an American remake of the 1962 French short film La Jetée.
• After the End: Cole's 'present'. He's sent back to pre-end times not to Set Right What Once Went Wrong but just to collect information they need in their present.
• Air-Vent Passageway: The absurdity of this in real life is lampshaded when Cole vanishes from a locked room, the only other exit from which is an air vent that has not been forced open and into which he could not possibly fit.
• All Just a Dream: Played with for the central protagonist. There are some hints:
  1. James believes he may be delusional and his lack of social skills and ability to remember minute details are evidence. Likewise we get no explanation as to where the voice he hears is coming from and why people from his present keep showing up at random times.
  2. There are a lot of similarities between the present prison and the past hospital, most notably the guards and panel of doctors from each timeline. Plus, the time machine is strikingly similar to the CT Scanner the camera focuses on for longer than seems necessary.
  3. We never get any explanation as to how the few remaining survivors, who have no immunity to the virus, managed to build an intricate underground city and have the capability of building a time machine but have no apparent source of food, water, or even breathable air.
  4. At the very end of the story, it is subverted when James gets over his mental breakdown and tries to attack Peters, which ends with him dead and Peters still alive to spread the virus, completing the Stable Time Loop.
• Ambiguous Syntax: WE DID IT! They're not confessing to the virus, but to the animals they released as a protest.
• Animal Motifs: Monkeys, which appear in the mysterious graffiti throughout the city.
• Animal Wrongs Group: The Army of the Twelve Monkeys is an animal rights group blamed for the spread of a deadly super-virus that killed most of humanity. They end up having nothing to do with it.
• Apocalypse Cult: The film follows a time traveler from plague-devastated 2035 sent back to 1996 to prevent an apocalyptic group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys from releasing the virus. The Army of the Twelve Monkeys didn't actually release the virus; their great act of subversion was freeing animals from a zoo. The virus was actually released by an assistant at the lab where it was developed.
• Apocalypse How: Billions die to a killer virus, released by a mad scientist named Dr. Peters.
• Arc Words: "The Keys are lovely this time of year."
• Bait-and-Switch: In the woods, after Kathryn removed the bullet from Cole's leg, he starts feeling her up and it looks like he is about to rape her. Then we cut to the next scene where he is alone at night and a news report talks about a woman found strangled in a park. However, we then see Cole return to his car where he frees Kathryn from the trunk.
• Bedlam House: Averted. The protagonist is confined to a regular psychiatric hospital, and not to some sort of Arkham Asylum.
• Big "NO!": A bit understated for the trope, but extremely impactful: when Kathryn sees Cole's photo from the First World War.
• Book Ends: The film begins and concludes with closeups of the main character when he was a child.
• Bowdlerise: One edit has a handful of silly-sounding dubbed lines, but they seem to opt for just eliding swears with pauses whenever it'd still make sense. This actually may make the ending of the scene where James and Kathryn fight a pimp, then James is pulling out his own teeth in front of him a bit funnier:
  Wallace: Hey! Is that the cops? I'm an innocent victim here! I was attacked by a coked-up whore and a...a... crazy dentist!
• Boxed Crook: James Cole, a habitual criminal in the future, is 'volunteered' by the scientists to go back to the past to investigate the virus that now forces what's left of humanity to live underground. In return he gets offered a reduced sentence.
• Can't Take Anything with You: It seems the rule is you can't take anything that is external to your body. Cole gets the spider he swallowed back to the future just fine and the bullet that gets lodged in his leg time travels with him as well.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Discussed. Cole can't get people to believe that he's from the future and needs to find the virus sample to save humanity.
  • During Dr. Railly's lecture on apocalyptic visions, her audience has a good chuckle when she talks of a doomsayer in the Middle Ages who foretold that the world would be destroyed by a virus in the same year the lecture is taking place in. It's implied this is another time traveller who got stranded in the wrong century. She even describes this potential illness as a "Cassandra complex" and briefly relates the Cassandra legend.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The medieval alarmist mentioned by Dr. Railly in her lecture appears later in 1996 Philadelphia as an apocalypse evangelist, who reveals to Cole that he, like Cole, is a time traveler. He turns out to be unimportant to the plot.
  • Dr. Peters is introduced as someone who attended Dr. Railly's lecture "Madness and Apocalyptic Visions" and turns out to be the guy who spread the virus.
  • Jose at first seems just like a guy to give Cole some exposition on forced volunteering. Then, he shows up on the WW1 battlefield to highlight the multiple missions and dangers of time travel. Finally, he shows up at the end as the messenger to force Cole onto the suicide mission.
  • The three animal rights protestors operating Freedom for Animals Association—Teddy, Fale, and Bee—initially seem to be unrelated to the Army of the Twelve Monkeys but later show up helping Jeffrey.
• Chewing the Scenery: Brad Pitt goes somewhat over-the-top in his scenes in the madhouse, but it works.
• Contagious Cassandra Truth: The film has an interesting variation of this trope. Dr. Railly doesn't believe James Cole's claims that he's from the future, but when he disappears she investigates his claims and finds corroborating evidence. When Cole returns Dr. Railly has difficulty convincing Cole of the truth, as he has accepted her explanation that he is delusional.
• Convenient Photograph: Dr. Kathryn Railly is giving a lecture on the psychology of doomsday predictions, and pulls up a photograph of a delirious man in a World War One field hospital who claimed to be a time traveler from the future, trying to prevent an apocalypse. Then Dr. Railly meets James Cole, who similarly claims to be from the future, on a mission to prevent The End of the World as We Know It. She initially dismisses this as a delusion, but the consistent details of Cole's story make her start to think he might be right. Eventually she reexamines the materials from her lecture—and recognizes Cole as a background figure in a photograph of the World War One patient, convincing her that he really is a time traveller.
• Covers Always Lie: At first glance it sure looks like a cyborg on the cover. It's not until you look closer that you see it's the symbol of the Army of the 12 Monkeys.
• Crapsack World: The future, where a plague has killed 99% of humanity and the rest live in an underground Dystopia where prisoners are treated like animals.
• Crying Wolf: Part of what convinces Kathryn that Cole's telling the truth is he remembers hearing as a child about a boy who pretended to be lost in a well, only to turn out to have been hiding in a barn. The event plays out as he remembers, indicating he's probably telling the truth.
• Cuckoo Nest: After arriving in 1990 Baltimore, Cole quickly ends up in an asylum, whose doctors believe that his warnings of the virus are just delusions. Much later, after returning to the future from the year of 1996, he finds himself in a hospital bed and comes to believe that he is still at the asylum.
• Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: When Cole exits the police station in 1990, he is blinded by the daylight that he hasn't seen for ages.
• Demoted Memories: Late in the film, Cole starts to believe he really is just an escaped schizophrenic and not a time-traveler. He gets over it.
• Depopulation Bomb: A man-made virus is released that is so deadly that it kills 5 billion people and, 30 years later, the survivors still have to live underground and can only go outside in environmental suits.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Who is the leader of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys? None other than Cole's fellow mental hospital inmate Jeffrey Goines. Ultimately subverted, since he and his Army had nothing to do with releasing the virus.
• Doomed Fellow Prisoner: Zigzagged. Cole is introduced sharing a cell with Jose, speculating about being subjected to the time travel experiment. Cole is the one who gets taken and subjected to this, but then he encounters Jose, also having been sent through time and in a far more precarious situation than Cole himself is. Then it turns out that Jose survived that though, and he ultimately makes it to the end of the movie, unlike Cole himself.
• Doomsayer: One of these people stops his ranting to address the main character whilst in '96. It's implied that many doomsayers are actually time travelers scattered throughout history who have gone insane.
• Dramatic Irony: The man who is really behind the release of the virus gets on the airplane and is seated next to a woman who, decades later, will send Cole on his mission into the past. When the man asks what she does for a living, she replies, "I'm in insurance."
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Done in a very unique way. The protagonist has a recurring nightmare about a traumatic experience he had as a kid where he saw a man get shot by police after pulling a gun in an airport. It is only at the end that it becomes clear it is both a memory of his past and a vision of his future; the man that got shot is his older self from the future.
• Dream Intro: The movie starts with the pivotal scene at the airport which turns out to be a dream Cole was having in his prison cell.
• Dull Surprise: Bruce Willis, which is very well justified by his character being either heavily sedated or emotionally traumatized for most of the movie. In addition, it provides a perfect contrast for Brad Pitt's maniacal bombast.
• Dutch Angle: The camera is tilted during Cole's time in the psychiatric hospital in 1990, to highlight his losing grip on reality.
• Eco-Terrorist: Evidence points to The Army of the 12 Monkeys being responsible for the release of the virus, but they're just the Red Herring. The actual creator of the plague was Dr. Peters, an assistant at a virology lab — who had spoken before about the "lunacy" of mankind's environmental destruction.
• Eiffel Tower Effect: Philadelphia's skyline, particularly Liberty Place, is seen quite a bit, it's also rather large. The Benjamin Franklin Bridge is inevitably featured as well.
• "End Is Nigh" Ending: Downplayed. The pandemic's aftermath is amply depicted in scenes of the future, and the movie ends with the post-apocalyptic time traveler failing to change events in the slightest, although his boss appears at the end to collect a viral sample and thus, make the more distant future less grim. The person carrying the deadly virus is then forced to open the canister by airport security, which is the exact moment that dooms mankind. We never get to see the virus spread, but we already know that it's inevitable.
• Escaped Animal Rampage: The final act shows the eponymous Animal Wrongs Group releasing the animals of the local zoo, causing all sorts of pandemonium and their "we did it!" message spray-painted all over the city setting them up as the Red Herring for the cause of The End of the World as We Know It.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In her lecture on doomsayers, Dr. Railly mentions that Jose disappeared from the WW1 hospital, which hints that he'll show up again.
  • Dr. Peters first appears at Dr. Railly's lecture and at the autograph session, tells Dr. Railly that the doomsayers have a point since mankind is destroying the Earth with atomic bombs, pollution, etc. Subsequently, it is revealed that Peters is the assistant to Dr. Leland Goines, the virologist.
• Futile Hand Reach: Kathryn's dramatic hand reach towards Cole when he gets shot at the airport.
• Futureshadowing: We see a man being shot in an airport, long before we find out who the man is, what he's doing in the airport, and why he got shot.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The French soldiers when James is accidentally sent to 1917. It's mentioned later that they were countering a mustard gas attack that killed thousands.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: The nuclear war from La Jetée is replaced by a bioengineered virus as the cause of the end of civilization.
• Girl of My Dreams: Cole has repeating dreams of a woman who resembles his psychiatrist, but the recurring dream was caused by a childhood memory of seeing something horrible happen to his time-traveling future self and his lover.
• Go Among Mad People: The protagonist (a man from the post-apocalyptic future sent back in time to try to prevent an unprecedented disaster) can't function in modern society and is quickly institutionalized, where his claims of being a time traveler from the future don't really help. He spends much of the rest of the movie more than half convinced that his memories of time travel are just a fantasy.
• Got Volunteered: The movie opens with Cole being selected for Volunteer Duty, which involves him going up to the virus-infected surface in a Hazmat Suit to gather samples. While ostensibly the prisoners are offered a reduction in sentence, those 'volunteered' either go insane or simply disappear — Cole finds out why when he's asked to join a special program.
  Scientist: For a man in your position, an opportunity not to volunteer would be a mistake...
  Scientist 2: Definitely a mistake...
• Graffiti of the Resistance: The Army of the Twelve Monkeys is a terrorist organization blamed for spreading a deadly super-virus that caused the destruction of most of humanity. When James Cole is sent back in time for intelligence and attempts to stop them against orders, he uses the Army's graffiti depicting twelve monkeys in a ring to locate them. In the end this trope gets subverted, since the Army is actually just an animal rights group that had nothing to do with the virus.
• The Hero Dies: Cole is killed before he can stop the virus from being unleashed on the world.
• Hey, Wait!: A rare villainous example. After Dr. Peters passed the security check at the airport and is walking towards his gate, a security guard calls after him which shocks Peters. But it turns out the guard only pointed him to a piece of underwear he forgot at the checkpoint.
• Idiot Ball: The airport security guard. When a scientist has a specially sealed case and tells you the vials inside contain "biological samples", what in the name of sanity would make you want him to open it, especially if one can see that there is nothing but colorless gas inside.
• Infectious Insanity: Discussed by Jeffrey and defied by the authorities.
  "Telephone call? Telephone call? That's communication with the outside world. Doctor's discretion. Nuh-uh. Look, hey - all of these nuts could just make phone calls, they could spread insanity, oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all these poor sane people, infecting them. Wackos everywhere, plague of madness."
• Irony: "I've done my job, I did what you wanted. Good luck. I'm not coming back."
• I Surrender, Suckers: Cole pulls this trick on an assailant at the theatre. He crouches and feigns surrender screaming "Please don't kill me!" and when close enough he kicks the guy in the nuts.
• Just Before the End: The entire film is a Stable Time Loop that has one of the main characters seeing the first few minutes of a viral infection that will cull mankind in the flesh, and see his older self being assassinated by airport security in a futile attempt at stopping it. The only true change he brings with his time travel is providing information to the scientists that did it so they can maybe create a vaccine many years later.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: During Dr. Railly's speech she briefly shows an etching of a man from the 1100s proclaiming the end of the world in 1995. Later on when James arrives in 1996 you see that man preaching on the side of a street corner. Also another example is a phone message heard by Cole in the 'present' is later found out to be made by Dr. Railly.
• Locked Room Mystery: The staff at the asylum is puzzled after Cole escapes into thin air from the isolation cell. The answer, of course, is time travel.
• Mad Oracle: It's implied that at least one such oracle is actually a time traveler who landed in the wrong era, since he sees James and says: "You! You are one of us!"
• A Match Made in Stockholm: Cole hooks up with Kathryn, whom he kidnapped when he was sent to 1996. Although they fall in love long after the kidnapping, during which Kathryn is nothing but terrified of him and tries everything to escape. Verges on a Discussed Trope when Kathryn's explanations of her experience are met with derisive skepticism from the police, who muse about Stockholm Syndrome without ever naming it. Kathryn even acknowledges it as a common psychological response to this kind of situation.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: There are characters communicating with scientists in the future with a business's answering machine in the "present", which a team of scientists spends months and years recovering from the decayed magnetic tape. Since the movie is based on a Stable Time Loop, they should have all the messages from Cole in one batch, however, the narrative treats each message sent from the past as a new event in the future.
• Mickey Mousing: When he's introduced, Jeffrey Goines pops his head out of the collar of his shirt synchronized to a BOING sound effect from a cartoon playing on TV.
• Mind Screw: For the viewer, although by the end it becomes comprehensible. Also, for James, who starts to think he really is insane and that he imagined traveling from the future. It's mentioned that this happens to all time travelers. Finally, for Katherine, first as she starts to realize that James must have come from the future, and later when she starts to "remember" things that never actually happened (when they put on the disguises and she says he looks familiar.)
• Misplaced Wildlife: Cole encounters a bear in the city while collecting samples in the future. Releasing zoo animals was the Army Of The Twelve Monkeys' real plan.
• Mobstacle Course: The climax takes place in such a scene at the airport.
• Mooning: Jeffrey Goines does this to the security staff at a mental institution while acting up.
• Musical Spoiler: The first clue of Brad Pitt's involvement with the Army of the 12 Monkeys is when the "12 Monkeys" leitmotif plays during one of his rants.
• Never My Fault: Cole has no control over what year the machine sends him to, but when he ends up in 1990 instead of 1996, the scientists blame that mistake on him.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Cole delivers one to an aggressive pimp for threatening Reilly, which horrifies her even more.
• No Mere Windmill: An understandable instance occurs. Windmill Crusader James Cole has to try and prevent the near-extinction of mankind by lethal virus; however, the reason nobody listens to his warnings is that he claims to be from the future, and even Cole himself begins to question if people are right about him being insane.
• Non-Indicative Name: The film isn't about twelve monkeys, nor is it about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys that the title alludes to. The organization and the title itself are red herrings.
• No-Tell Motel: Cole and Railly visit an hourly hotel to work out just what the hell is going on with their lives in privacy. The clerk assumes that she's a prostitute and that they're role-playing some sort of doctor/patient fetish. Later, a pimp arrives and accuses her of turning tricks in his territory.
• Oh, Crap!: Near the end of the film, Railly calls the phone number Cole gave her. She comes back and starts reciting the message she left...only for Cole to remember it as the tape recording in the future, reciting it with her. This causes both of them to realize that he was telling the truth and that the world is about to end.
• Ominous Multiple Screens:
  • Cole is questioned and briefed by the panel of scientists while strapped to a Shackle Seat Trap as a sinister globe holding a confusing array of cameras, microphones and video screens is held in front of his face.
    Terry Gilliam: You try to see the faces on the screens in front of you, but the real faces and voices are down there and you have these tiny voices in your ear. To me that's the world we live in, the way we communicate these days, through technical devices that pretend to be about communication but may not be.
  • When Cole and Dr. Railly see a news program identifying them as wanted fugitives, they have an Oh, Crap! moment on realising a camera in a nearby video equipment store is projecting their faces on a huge multiple screen.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The damaged phone recording is cryptic and eerily distorted, but later we watch it being made, revealing who recorded it and why.
  • The ending is a repeat of the beginning, cluing the audience in that the film is a Stable Time Loop.
• One Phone Call: When Cole gets apprehended in 1990, he demands his phone call which the police don't grand him.
• Past Experience Nightmare: Cole is Plagued by Nightmares of a shootout at an airport he witnessed at a young age.
• Person as Verb: Cole is referred to as having "pulled a Houdini." He was a time traveler, and got pulled back out of impossible-to-escape restraints.
• The Plague: The virus, which is virulent enough to force the remaining survivors underground.
• Poke the Poodle: It is revealed that the horrifyingly evil plot of The Army of the Twelve Monkeys amounts to releasing some animals from a zoo, which stops traffic, but no more.
• Population Control: Suggested by the fact that Cole lives in an Underground City with limited resources, and his rap sheet lists "anti-social sex" as an offense.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: NO! MORE! MONKEY! BUSINESS!!!
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Protagonist James Cole, a time traveler from After the End, dies trying (and failing) to stop the villain from releasing the virus that triggers The End of the World as We Know It. But in the next scene, another time traveler appears in disguise to speak with the villain — implying that, thanks to Cole's work, the scientists of the future will finally get a pure sample of the virus so they can make a vaccine. The past can't be changed, but the future can still be saved.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: The French soldiers in the WW1 scene are not subtitled.
• Red Herring: The Army of the Twelve Monkeys didn't release the virus.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: At the start, James Cole Got Volunteered to leave the Underground City in a Hazmat Suit to collect samples from the ruins of Philadelphia. This serves to establish the post-pandemic world he lives in before he time-travels to the past.
• The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: Jeffrey Goines is a paranoid schizophrenic, while James Cole is a man sent back in time to save the Future from a viral plague but everyone assumes he's a paranoid schizophrenic because he claims he was sent back in time to save the Future from a viral plague. Additionally, most of the other patients at the hospital Cole was at were quite paranoid or delusional.
• Shackle Seat Trap: When James Cole is brought in to meet the panel of scientists, his guards caution them about how dangerous he is. A scientist assures them that Cole isn't going to do them harm, and asks him to take a seat. Cole sits in the only chair available, whereupon metal clamps close over his wrists and the seat elevates halfway up the wall.
• Shout-Out: Cole and Railly attend an Alfred Hitchcock movie marathon just before they go to the airport and catch a viewing of Vertigo. It gives Railly the idea to dye her hair blonde.
• Sigil Spam: The Army of the 12 Monkeys tags the walls around their base with graffiti shaped like a ring of 12 monkeys.
• Sinister Tango Music: The title theme is also the leitmotif of the Army of the 12 Monkeys, the Animal Wrongs Group believed responsible for causing the apocalypse. It's written and performed by legendary tango musician Astor Piazzolla.
• Stable Time Loop: As a child, Cole witnessed his own death, showing that everything that he does was already going to happen.
• Temporal Sickness: The process of time travel seems to cause psychological harm. This is explained early, as Cole relays rumors that the other inmates who Got Volunteered for the trip wound up in the psych ward.
  • The scientists responsible for the project tell Cole that he possesses a mental resilience that makes him a good candidate for time travel: an ability to remember facts and details. He is not unscathed though, as he can Go Among Mad People and fit in perfectly. One might even attribute his growing doubts about his own sanity to his repeated jaunts through time.
  • Before his final journey to the past, Cole tries to excuse his declarations that the scientists aren't real by theorizing that the human mind isn't meant to exist in two different dimensions, that the experience is very stressful and it's difficult to tell what's real.
  • Dr. Railly's research draws attention to the phenomenon of Doomsayer prophets: strange people spouting half-coherent Cassandra Truth about an incoming plague and the end of the world. It is suggested (but not confirmed) that every such Mad Oracle in history is like Cole: flung into the past, driven mad, and doomed to babble about a half-remembered reckoning.
• This Is My Chair: Candidate for Trope Namer is the y insane Jeffrey Goines, who reacts like the loon he is when he sees another patient seated in his favorite chair.
• Tracking Chip: Cole is told by a Crazy Homeless Person that he has a tracking chip in his teeth. He removes them just in case this is true, but Jose is later able to track him down without difficulty, and asks why he took his teeth out.
• Trunk Shot: The shot from the car trunk on Cole when he releases Kathryn.
• Trust Password: A first pointer to Kathryn that Cole is indeed telling the truth about being a time traveler from the future is him correctly predicting the Timmy in a Well story on the news to be a prank. Later he tells Kathryn to make a phone call for him to a phone he knows will be monitored in the future. Kathryn leaves a message that Cole can recite together with her from his Photographic Memory.
• Unreliable Narrator: Cole's memory of what happened at the airport is hazy because he was a boy at the time.
• The Unreveal: Who, or what, the voice who keep addressing Cole as "Bob" are is never revealed.
• Unstuck in Time: Happens with Cole getting lost in the past because the time machine used is very unreliable and unpredictable.
• We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: Kathryn's reaction when she learns about Cole's leg wound.
• What Year Is This?: Cole gets sent to the wrong year several times, so he has to figure out when he is a few times.
• Whole-Plot Reference: To La Jetée, a French New Wave film made up entirely of still images.
• Wig, Dress, Accent: Used at the end, when the protagonists use store-bought disguises (a glued-on mustache for the man and a blonde wig for the woman) to get through airport security and escape to Florida.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: All the time travelers go insane from the stresses involved in time travel; hence government use of expendable prisoners for this task.
• Write Back to the Future: As Cole prepares to travel from the future, he is given the telephone number of an answering machine whose tape was found in archaeological research; the whole end-of-the-world problem ensured the tape was not erased for reuse. Although a team of scientists spent months and years recovering from the decayed magnetic tape.
  • Later, Kathryn uses what she's learned from Cole to draw attention from the scientists, spray-painting the message "Is there a virus? Is this the source? 5,000,000,000 die?" on the wall of the 12 Monkeys' headquarters. Cole emerges from the forming crowd of spectators mere moments after she's finished her message.
• You Are Too Late: Even if Cole hadn't been shot down by airport security and had succeeded in taking down the rogue scientist, the virus had already been released to the Airport Security Guard.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Time-travelling protagonist Cole recognizes a scientist and concludes he is directly involved with the virus that wiped out most of humanity. Cole runs trying to stop him, and is shot down by airport security. Said death is witnessed by young Cole, becoming one of his most vivid memories, played over and over in his dreams - it was already set that he couldn't change the future.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: James Cole finally figures out who the Army of the Twelve Monkeys are: Relatively harmless pranksters. Convinced that the Bad Future was just a figment of his imagination, he books a flight to the tropics with Kathryn. But before he can board the plane he receives another message from the future: The End of the World as We Know It is at hand and he can still stop it.

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