We don’t talk enough about how the cast of Zoo lives inside a large, state-of-the-art, unregulated aircraft, zipping around from country to country without so much as a courtesy call to air-traffic controllers, let alone anything that looks like a passport. And yes, this is a show with super-vultures and and wooly rhinos and people who telepathically communicate with animals. I shouldn’t be a stickler for anything remotely approaching “realism.” And I’m not, I swear. I just think a giant airplane that’s always flying around would be a profoundly uncomfortable place to spend a majority of your waking hours. And if I were someone who survived the events of “Stakes on a Plane,” I would definitely want to move the hell out as soon as possible.
Which is actually what Abe and Dariela are talking about at the start of this week’s episode. Following last week’s make-up sex, the couple seems better than they’ve been in a while, but they’re still caught on a central disagreement: Dariela thinks they owe it to Isaac to get him off the plane and away from the violence, but Abe is still dead-set on solving the sterility crisis. Dariela doesn’t seem convinced, so they table it for the time being.
Meanwhile, the Morgans are doing mad science under everyone’s nose. Turns out Mitch wasn’t doing anything particularly sinister when he drugged Jamie; he just wanted her out of the way for a bit while he figured out what to do next. He gives his dad, who is understandably confused about why his son drugged a woman unconscious, perhaps the clearest explanation as to what’s been going on: He didn’t spend all of those ten years in a stasis tank. The bio-drive implanted in his head was a means by which he could be mind-controlled, and Charles Duncan was the evil persona that emerged when Abigail Westbrook turned it on to have him help her with her evil hybrid projects. So now Mitch needs to do something about the bio-drive before bad stuff happens. Luckily, Pop Morgan has a new plan for getting the Bio-Drive out of his son’s head: hitting him up the side of the head with an EMP stick plugged right into the airplane’s power supply.
Unfortunately, the process requires three jolts, and the Morgans can only pull off two before the plane starts to run out of power. But surprise! It isn’t because they’re using it to wallop Mitch in the head; it’s because Abigail Westbrook hid a hybrid on their plane, one that’s clinging to the power supply and causing it to go haywire. If they don’t do something about that hybrid, the plane will fall out of the sky. Making matters worse, the fact that Mitch only got two jolts instead of three means that he’s kind of blind and also his bio-drive is rebooting, which will ultimately let Abigail turn it on and allow Charles Duncan to take over his mind.
Speaking of Abigail, she’s pretty busy. Having taken her brother to Copenhagen, she’s strung the poor guy up in a lab and resorted to torturing him in order to find out how he communicates with animals. She does this by forcing him to control a tiger: First by covering him in antelope blood and getting him to stop the tiger from eating him, and later by showing him the status of his friends on their seemingly doomed plane and reminding him of his dead son. It is all so low. But she gets what she wants. Abigail can now activate the hybrid beacons.
“To do what?” you might ask. For that answer, we go to Logan, who is still on this show. He’s not only starting his first day at the IADG solving the mystery of the dead Black Forest hikers, but he’s also the subject of a really good gag I’m not going to spoil here. Unfortunately, this is a totally underwhelming subplot, as Logan and his new co-workers just deduce stuff from computers and there really doesn’t seem to be any reason for him to be there. Anyway, they find out that the deaths were caused by spores that came from hybrid nests a few miles out, and that there are two other hybrid nests in both Seoul and Atlanta. Long story short: If they’re allowed to hatch, hybrids would overrun the world.
That would appear to be Abigail’s endgame.
The Zoo Crew, however, is too busy trying to survive to figure any of this out. As the plane’s power reaches critical levels and begins to fall from the sky, Abe and Dariela go after the hybrid Buffy-style with axes and blades, while Jamie and Mitch try to reboot everything — only the fight with the hybrid takes too long and Mitch is no longer Mitch, but Charles Duncan. As they free fall and struggle, Jamie is able to get herself free of Duncan, but there are only 30 seconds until their fall is terminal. Man, Zoo really likes its cliff-hangers.