Man eating rats, a potential traitor and awkward romances threaten the ZOO team.
There’s a really bad TV movie called THE RATS, in which ‘evil’ rats start to overtake Manhattan, including a scene where they swarm into a swimming pool, attacking everyone and everything in sight. This film is a good thirteen years old and as a kid watching it back then it was terrifying. I’m sure now if I was to sit down and watch it, I would laugh. The horrible CGI would look even cheaper now, the acting wooden as hell and the writing sloppy to say the least. Unfortunately it’s the exact same reaction I had to this episode of ZOO, right down to the horrible CGI. I think my favorite moment of the episode was when the rats, after having just finished watching THE SHINING, pour out of an open elevator, replacing Kubrick’s elevator of blood with a hundred or so blurry looking rats.
Instead of settling for having all the action take place on the cargo ship that the rats arrived on, a location that would have made for a welcome change of pace, the team is stuck in what appears to be the smallest hotel in history, as they aimlessly walk around, not really doing anything until the writers need them to. When the team do capture a male rat, they find that it’s also given birth unexpectedly (“Is that normal?” asks Jamie), which leads Jackson and Abraham to think that all the rats are male, with one “Queen rat” around. The mother cell has accelerated the rats population and made them reproduce more than what they would naturally.
And that’s about it for the plot. Jackson has a little moment where he seems to remember that his father existed and there’s an attempt to bring some emotion out of him by having the island the team goes to the same one that his father took him to for holidays, but it’s all superficial. Likewise, him running into childhood friend Rebecca and her telling him and Chloe that they look like “two people that should be together” is just the writers lazy way of forcing these two together. The characters continue to have thin personalities, apart from maybe Mitch, who spends this episode away from the team in Boston. He’s reconnecting with his daughter who he hasn’t seen in eight years. He bonds with his daughter at a park and then leaves to give Reiden Global the mother cell, in exchange for his daughters medicine. There’s hardly enough material there for Billy Burke to work with and his scenes with the daughter aren’t emotionally charged enough to care about them and his scenes only distract from the killer rats at the hotel.
Alongside these two story lines is another ‘animal attack of the week’, which at least turns out to not be just another throwaway ten minutes or so, this one actually seems to have repercussions for the team. While on a date, Xander Berkeley, who deserves so much better than this, is nearly killed when the horse drawn cart he’s on crashes into some bystanders in a park, all thanks to the horse who was attached to it freaking out. Turns out, he’s part of the FBI and he’s worried about an associate of his who has gone missing; that associate turns out to be agent Shaffer, the man Jamie shot and killed. Hopefully now the team will have a real threat to deal with, especially in the form of Berkeley, who is great at playing these antagonistic roles.
Finally, as Mitch is about to give the mother cell over to Reiden Global, he spots the man who helped put the team together in the background. I could tell you his name but I don’t think the shows told us, or they have but we’ve only seen his once. Either way, it’s a twist with little to no impact, besides when your whole cast is forgettable, what’s one more person?
