So last season took the original concept of Zoo - the sinister idea of completely normal animals rising up and killing humanity and the terror that could bring down human civilisation and decided to throw a whole bunch of random nonsense at it instead. We had the idea of rats swarming from the sewers, of animal agriculture becoming impossible, of the terror of pets and instead we got… Earthquake sloths and electric ants. Contrary to how it may originally appear, singing Earthquake sloths do not make everything better
At the end the animals were cured - at the cost of rendering humanity sterile
Which means we enter season 3 with the original concept not just dead, but the body has been burned and the ashes scattered across several large bodies of water. At this point Zoo could just say “UNICORN ALIEN CANNIBALS!” and I’d shrug…
…
If this season actually has unicorn alien cannibals I’m going to get so drunk.
We also have hybrids invading, which are like mutant animals. Apparently the entire west coast has been abandoned to them and a big big Trumpian wall has been built. To which I have to say “huh”? I mean these animals have escaped from labs - how many were they?! They’ve have to breed like the world’s horniest rabbits to have enough numbers and more super powers than Superman’s-Gary-Stuest-collection to possibly be threat enough where the expense of abandonning and walling off the ENTIRE WEST COAST of the US is somehow economically preferable to shooting them with America’s many many many many many many guns. C’mon that maniacal gun culture has to be good for something?! And how do you even build the wall? If these hybrids are so scary you are writing off California, Oregon and Washington then how do you get them to back off long enough for you to build 1,500 miles of wall?!
And they’re building secret labs on the west coast? These secret sinister base people have poor choice of location - there must be much cheaper real estate and much easier chance of doing this without oversight in, say, rural Montana (is the “rural” redundant when talking about Montana?)
The show hasn’t even started and already it’s making my brain hurt!”
The new season opens with a nice explanation of all this, re-introductions to everyone (as well as the possibility that Mitch isn’t dead and the actor has not said “oh hell no” to the script yet). Everyone has split it up since it’s now been 10 years since the events of the second season, so time to catch up with them all
Jackson and his new girlfriend Tessa are in the new monster filled Pacific zone trying to get people our, introducing a poor west coast boy into the horror of moving to Tennessee. They’re still being attacked by hybrids - Ridgebacks, basically big hyenas, but that’s fine because Jackson has a pride of tame lions: male lions - which save their lives and drive off the hybrids
Ok, back to my point about how the hybrids don’t seem like such a threat? Lions are fairly endangered creatures - the only reason they’re not more endangered is because humanity has actively decided to refrain from slaughtering them. A pack of animals that lions can match does not make for an apocalypse. It’s target practice. Humanity is GOOD at killing things. We make entire species extinct by accident - step up your big scary enemy game
So they do with… a big scary bony rhino. And it’s big and scary but Jackson also confines it in a lorry - which doesn’t even seem to be reinforced. I mean it looks scary. But we have RPGs. And tanks. And bombs that destroy cities.
He sends a sample off to Abraham and lets the IADG come collect the big scary rhino.
Oh, he also seems to control the lions with his mind (as he himself was a weird infected monster man at some point, I’m guessing).
So let’s join Abraham and Dariela, living together with their son Isaac and all being happy-ish. Abraham is focusing on trying to cure humanity’s sterility (and there’s a nice moment where they talk about there not even being dolls around any more since there’s so few young children) and there’s a suggestion that he left several prestigious research institutions under Less Than Ideal Circumstances. Dariela is also stealing and sending off some of his research to someone without his knowing - so expect drama
More drama may come from the hybrid sample actually starting to grow - when Jackson only sent him a small amount of blood.
They’ve been joined by Clementine, Mitch’s now adult daughter who they haven’t seen in years. She wants them to join her in freeing Mitch - who is alive and apparently in a “stasis tank” (which is apparently a thing) in Siberia and she wants to go and rescue him before IADG does which is happening right now
I don’t know why IADG Is the bad guy, nor do I know why Dariela and Abraham are willing to accept the idea that IADG is super bad. Because we simply have to have an evil government conspiracy thing apparently. When Clem learns that Jamie is not answering their calls and they can’t contact Jackson she decides to leave - and holds Abraham at gun point when he tries to go with her
Ok…. so that was just convoluted info-dumping? She drops in to see them just so they can explain everything then she leaves them behind?
Jamie wasn’t answering her phone because she was at a fancy shindig (she’s now a super famous author) recording a man’s voice so she can put together a pass phrase to open up a safe and steal a hard drive (after beating someone up most thoroughly to get it).
She also still has their ridiculously shiny plane
If Jackson is focused on the hybrids and Abraham on the sterility issue, then Jamie is focused on hunting down Falcon, the last member of the Shepherds - the naughty people who unleashed the sterility plague in the first place.
Logan is also still around and apparently working with the police despite his criminal past. He and Jamie are definitely not a thing any more. He wants her to stop hunting the Shepherds because he believes they’ve all been hunted down and Jamie has a nasty habit of getting very very illegal when hunting them and someone died on her last hunt. Since they were a Shepherd, she doesn’t care over much. He threatens her to behave and takes the hard drive she’s just stolen with, I assume, a Shepherd symbol on it
But when he takes it to the experts to examine - it explodes.
We get a bigger and scarier explosion when a woman, supposedly from the IADG comes to collect the armoured rhino… only she apologises to the rhino first? Then everything explodes. Ok… I’m not even going to hazard a guess at this point. I mean I could make up a decent conspiracy and only find out that telepathic llamas are actually behind it.
Clem may have abandonned Abe but she heads to Jamie, after shaming her until she agrees to help free Mitch - and lies, pretending Abe and Dariela couldn’t come. I think she’s here for the plane and there’s definitely something off about her: Jamie even remarks she looks different
To Mitch - yes he is alive, yes he is in a stasis pod and yes the IADG does find him and revive him - almost killing him in the process. It’s clear the IADG are up to something Nefarious. But unfortunately for them, Mitch is in a bad way after 10 years of floating in a vat and having trouble communicating which the IADG finds very frustrating. He also doesn’t trust them because why not
So they pull out ANOTHER Clementine to try and earn his trust. They’re not clones because they’re played by different actors - one or other is faking. I think the IADG one is the fake one she was a bit too insistent on the “do you recognise me?” while other Clem didn’t really expect anyone to recognise her after 10 years
This season is already set up to be confusing… i blame those telepathic llamas and their alien cannibal unicorn masters. Or whatever it is the writers are smoking
