Friday, August 12, 2016

Zoo, Season 2, Episode 8: Zero Sum


Our new animal of the week – a Lizard which causes ice. Of course

And some kind of stealth device that lets evil Davies and his squad of men sneak up on a jet while in flight without anyone noticing until they managed to take all the power off without affecting any of the instruments.

So Davies and his squad attacks and quickly subdues the crew despite Jackson’s super rage strength. Thankfully Mitch has the master plan of releasing the Earthquake-causing sloth. In a plane. In mid-flight

Shockingly this doesn’t kill them all (or even seem to cause irreparable or even severe damage to the plane) but does allow the gang to quickly overwhelm their captors. (Oh and release the ice lizard which Mitch now has to save because the cure can only be extracted from living animals. Oh and can we have an aside – they’re piecing together all of the animals the need based on the bones they dug up last episode – yes they were buried for no reason but moving on – but they’ve already found one animal that doesn’t have a skeleton. Was the jellyfish the only creature that was x-rayed with the woo-woo machine that didn’t have bones?)

So with Mitch duly distracted, the rest of the team can address various other terrible plot lines

Firstly, Logan is revealed as a traitor and Jamie outright murders him. Wow, that was a super abrupt end to this very abrupt storyline and totally pointful. But let’s return to this whole murdering thing – Logan is trying to jump out the plane never to be seen again – there is no benefit at all to killing this man beyond vengeance. This is new edgy Jamie who I’m just so tired of that (she also has a little tantrum with Mitch which serves the purpose of establishing her as REALLY annoying).

This may be examined in how her character is turning to the dark side but, alas, that will mean focusing more on her character. Alas.


While Abraham has captured Davies and decides to question him about where Robert Oz is – and by question I mean torture. All this torture reveals is that Robert Oz is behind everything (are we shocked?) and that apparently Abe knew him before he knew Jackson and their meeting was not a coincidence

Also we learn that ants can be used as defibrillators

But can we look at this character assassination? What has Abe’s role being? Beyond shoulder for everyone to lean on, Abe has been the conscience. Even when acting as a guard for people crossing the city he only used tranqs to fend off the animals. Even when surrounded by gun wielding gang members in South America, he responded with minimum violence. Abe is good. Abe is the golden shining light in this episode. Mitch, Jackson, the not-even-lamented Chloe? These characters I can see torturing people. But not Abe. This is not Abe

And to reveal this huge epic friendship he has for Jackson is now built on deceit? It’s a clusterfuck of character assassination here. Abe deserves better than this.

But part of the reason why they’re keeping Davies is it turns out Elizabeth, Jackson’s mother, has disappeared in Botswana and Jackson has decided to threaten to kill Davies unless Allison convinces the US military to try and rescue her

She warns him that this act of terrorism will look like terrorism and be totally awful for PR. Of course Jackson isn’t listening to sense and she goes along with it. Thankfully Allison uses the threat of investigating the general for his illegal use of impossible stealth technology to raid passenger planes to convince him to not pursue any consequences for the whole torture thing.

So actual plot line development of all this? Robert Oz is alive (we knew this) is terrible (we knew this) and knew Abe before (oh Abe you poor character) and Logan has been quickly dumped from the equation

Oh at least one writer is fully aware of the bullshit he’s writing – because they have Mitch announce that the plane will be magically cleaned up despite it having zero staff. Oooh love that snark.

Anyway in Botswana many many people are dead – and it seems Elizabeth is the one doing the killing. Yes, Jackson’s mother has also embraced her inner mutant (and killed lots of Black people but the focus is Elizabeth of course)