12 Monkeys final season getting rush treatment from SyFy
By Shawn Lealos
SyFy doesn’t seem to know what to do when it gets a critically acclaimed show like 12 Monkeys.
At this time, fans should not be surprised to know that SyFy seems more than ready to end the time-traveling show, no matter how brilliant it has been up to now. That is SyFy’s style — dumping shows with huge fan followings in the most insulting ways possible.
At least, unlike Dark Matter, which was dumped without warning and finishing it in the middle of a cliffhanger, SyFy is letting 12 Monkeys get a real finale to finish its story.
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The bad news is that they are dumping the entire season in a short period of time.
Deadline reports that the first three episodes of Season 4 will all air on Friday night, June 15, from 8 until 11 p.m. EST. The show will then run for three more weeks, with three episodes on June 22, three more on June 29, and a two-part series finale on July 6.
That is 11 episodes in four weeks. Of course, with the love of binge-watching streaming shows on Netflix, maybe fans of 12 Monkeys won’t mind getting everything in a one-month period of time.
This was very similar to season 3 of 12 Monkeys, which aired the first four episodes on a Friday night, the next three on Saturday and the final three on Sunday, releasing the entire season in one weekend.
As mentioned, at least SyFy is letting 12 Monkeys run its course. The showrunners planned for the TV series to be a four-part story, so this is exactly how they envisioned it — outside of being dumped on the worst television-watching night of the week over a four-week period in the middle of summer.
Based on the Terry Gilliam movie, which itself was loosely based on an experimental French film called La Jetée, the TV series is about a man named James Cole (Aaron Stanford), who is sent back in time to try to figure out what caused the plague that brought about an apocalypse.
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Unlike the movie, which saw Cole looking for the cause so scientists in the future can find a cure, the TV show is a time-traveling epic with Cole and De. Cassandra Reilly (Amanda Schull) trying to stop another time-traveler known only as The Witness.