For a minute or two this week, Zoo seemed kind of … boring. How strange, right? I really didn’t think it possible. Especially after last week’s cliff-hanger, which cut a surprise reunion short with a sudden assault by a flock of hybrid vultures. (I’m gonna need a good collective noun here that’s better than flock. How about a hyperbole? That seems apt. A hyperbole of mutant vultures.) Anyway, you’ve got vulture hybrids, not just attacking the cabin where the heroes are hiding, but also dive-bombing underground for reasons unknown. We don’t find out why until our team gathers their wits and fights their way back to their plane, and then we discover what they were doing underground.
The mutant vultures caused a nearby volcano to erupt.
Good ol’ Zoo.
Unfortunately, things start to drag a bit after that. It’s a weird sort of slowdown — especially since this episode spends most of its time reuniting the entire Zoo Crew, something I’ve wanted to see since the time jump separated everyone. However, outside of a few standout moments — Mitch telling Jackson what he’s been up to is worth the price of admission alone — the reunions feel too anemic, even as they are enlightening. Jackson hates Jamie for her tell-all book, which used pseudonyms but was unfortunately too detailed to keep him anonymous, which forced him to go into hiding once the Shepherds deduced his identity. Abe and Dariela, burdened with Leanne Ducovny’s request that they turn over Clementine, join the crew after Mitch and Jackson decide his expertise is needed to examine a vulture-hybrid corpse they brought on board the plane. And Mitch is perturbed by how dark Jamie has become, as signified by the fact that she drinks a Tom Collins now. Sometimes, I don’t know what’s stranger: Zoo’s ideas about science, or Zoo’s ideas about interpersonal relationships. Whatever. Mitch and Jamie still bang, so I guess Mitch gets over it.
Working together, the Zoo Crew figures out Abigail Westbrook’s plan: to use these weird disk-devices as beacons that cause the new hybrids to propagate in new areas, eventually leading them all over the world. With enough beacons in key areas worldwide, Westbrook can bring about “Hybrid-geddon” and cause hybrids to sweep over the entire world in 90 days flat. They also discover her next target: New York City.
It’s in New York that things finally start to pick up. First, Dariela and Abe have been debating about whether or not they will betray their friends to save their son. At first, Dariela argued against it, but then she secretly arranges to have Clem handed over to Ducovny.
Ducovny, by the way, is having a hard time these days. Her government-sanctioned plan to abduct children for her fertility experiment has not, as you would imagine, gone over well with the American people. Protesters gather around the Reiden office building every day, and she’s getting pressure to subject her project to full government review. What’s more, Jamie gets a message from an informant that Ducovny is actually the Falcon, a.k.a. the leader of the Shepherds and the target she wants most to kill. Hmm.
Meanwhile, the Zoo Crew hatches a plan to stop Abigail, using Logan’s authority to get past the barricade and into Reiden as soon as Abigail arrives in the uniform of a cop she killed. After Mitch, Jamie, and Logan give chase, Abigail activates the beacon and hybrid vultures descend upon New York, giving her a chance to get away. When a countermeasure that Abe and Jackson worked out can’t be implemented by Mitch and Logan, they compromise … by attaching the beacon to a drone so they can lead the hybrids into the ocean.
Problem solved? Day saved? Nope. Everything falls to pieces. In the confusion of the hybrid attack, Jaime ditches her team to go kill Ducovny, and then turns herself in. Clem, who thinks she’s on an errand to pick up a spare part during all this, is in fact abducted by bounty hunters hired by Dariela. But because of the hybrid attack and Ducovny’s death, no one is there to pick Clem up — and now the bounty hunters, being an intrepid bunch, want to take her on the market.
Also, that plan that was going to save us all? The whole “let’s put the beacon on a drone bound for the ocean” thing? Not good enough. The drone battery is dying before it’ll make it far enough out. So Jackson Oz and Abe hatch the craziest plan yet: They’ll fly out to meet it in midair, open their cargo bay, and fire a battery cable at it with a crossbow. But we don’t know if it’ll work, or if any of these plot threads will get resolved, because this is where the cliff-hanger leaves us.
Watching this show, I am beautiful.