Another week, another missed opportunity for ZOO. This week we had horses with missing eyes, bats taking down an airplane and a wolf attack on a prison.
If anything, ZOO’s third episode felt like a lot of stalling just to get to the last 10 minutes, where Jackson, Abraham, Jamie, Mitch and Chloe are all finally brought together by our mysterious Frenchman who recruited Chloe at the end of the previous episode. Jackson and Abraham’s trip to Japan takes an unexpected turn when they find out that Jackson’s dad remarried, fortunately his widow turns out to be helpful in taking Jackson to an island where his father was finishing his research.
There could have been an interesting dynamic between the two, with Jacksons obvious feelings of guilt over not being there for his father before he died being brought up by the introduction of his second wife, but unfortunately the show kills her off immediately when the plane they are on crash lands on the island. Luckily we have Abraham by his side and the two have an easy going chemistry which keeps the scenes on the island afloat, even when the threat of radiation exposure seems to just disappear half through the episode, only to appear again at the end when convenient.
There was some more teasing about Jackson’s father’s unorthodox nature and his uncovering of the animals changing behaviour that caused him to go slightly insane. The island, or better yet his research shack, was suitably creepy, as were the horses who had no eyes.
Slightly less creepy was a video that showed a woman losing some fingers after said horses bit them off, the scene straining to come across as eerie and disturbing but unfortunately veered into laughable territory, something which I feel is going to continue to be a problem for this show.
When it comes to animal attacks the show can’t escape the fact that it all looks so goofy and, especially on a TV budget, fake. Fortunately the wolf attack at a prison this episode fared a little better, taking some cues from the lion attack in the first episode that less is more when it comes to these things. A brief shot of the prisoners doors opening up and the wolves just walking in was fairly scary. But again, the show struggled to make a viscous animal attack seem plausible or even scary, and that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the show if these attacks start to become more often and on a larger scale.
Travelling to New Orleans, Jamie and Mitch are looking to present what little evidence they have to a senator in the hopes that he will help them take down Reiden Global, who it turns out poisoned Jamie’s hometown, resulting in people dying of cancer, her mum included. Their plan doesn’t exactly work however and the senator ends up kicking them out, not before Mitch makes an unfortunate comment about the senators animal hunting habit.
Both story lines didn’t really amount to much this week, as I mentioned before it just seemed like the show was wasting time until everyone was brought together. Hopefully now the show will really start to pick up and take its characters in some interesting directions.
