For a brief moment, Zoo almost became a horror show. It was the perfect setup: Clem wakes up from her future freezer and she’s way more pregnant than she was when she got in there, which is freaking creepy. Then there’s blood seeping through the door to her stasis chamber … and when she opens it, the blood belongs to her friend Jackson Oz. But wait, everyone is bleeding out on the floor. Everyone except her baby’s daddy, Sam Parker, who’s locked in a cage for some reason. What is going on?
A mother-lovin’ episode of Zoo, that’s what, baby.
If you had any doubt about that, just wait a minute: When Clem frees Sam and gets in touch with Dariela at the IADG, she lets her know how screwed they are. Sam is about to open the plane’s door to let some paramedics in, but then Clem gets a warning from Dariela — don’t do it. The toxic spores from the hybrid nest in Seoul have contaminated the air, so they need to stay quarantined in the plane. Clem races to stop Sam from opening the plane door to the paramedic, just before the paramedic freaking explodes. Because that’s what these spores give you. Exploding head disease. Yeah, it’s real bad.
With no help from medical personnel and only Sam to help her, Clem comes up with a plan to save the Zoo Crew: Using the serum from her stasis tank, she makes a solution that she then fills respirators with to pump into her friends’ lungs, healing them from the inside out. It is the most Zoo thing ever, and of course it works.
With everyone back from the brink of death, there’s a lot of catching up to do. It’s pretty much a Festivus-style Airing of Grievances. Namely, toward Jackson for wanting to save Abigail so much that she continues to get away and unleash her hybrids on the world, and also toward Jamie, who intentionally let Charles Duncan maintain control of Mitch’s mind so he would kill Abigail, which, to be honest, is pretty hard to walk back from.
Clem then tells everyone they can’t catch Abigail or help with the hybrid crisis because they’re quarantined on the plane until the IADG can disperse a cure over Seoul. Trouble is, with the beating the plane took a few episodes back, it can only stay pressurized for two hours. They’ve got to find a solution. Then Clem’s water breaks.
So much stuff happens in this freaking episode, guys.
Oh, and by the way — it’s not just Mitch that hates Jamie for what she did. Jackson does, too, so much that he locks her in a cage because he can’t trust her. That’s where Mitch finds her, later, to confront her for what she did to him. He tells her about how he thought their relationship was something good that they could maybe rekindle after his ten years in stasis, but nope — those plans are dunzo. Mitch tells Jamie that she’s not going to help him escape the darkness, because she is the darkness. Welcome to the Black Parade, homie.
We’re not done with bleak stuff, either, because one of Abigail’s beacons just goes absolutely off the charts and wipes out all of Tokyo.
This sends Jackson spiraling straight past Mitch’s Black Parade and straight to, I don’t know, Brand New’s entire discography? He calls Tessa, devastated that he failed to stop his sister, and she gives him a talking-to that isn’t quite Michael Caine–in–Batman good, but good enough to get him off the floor and looking at the beacon data from the booby-trapped chip they found in Abigail’s neck. (She does this by telling him to stop looking at the data as Jackson, but “as an Oz,” and I can’t get over how silly that is.)
Ultimately, he can’t do much with the data without getting it to IADG HQ, and that can’t happen until the plane is airborne again, and there’s also the problem of air filtration keeping all the spores out. Luckily, Pop Morgan has a plan for fixing the air filters. Unfortunately, it’s going to expose him to the spores. He goes off to do it as Clem starts to go into labor, with only Jamie knowing he’s on a suicide mission.
And I kid you not, a cover of “Wonderwall” is playing. This cover of “Wonderwall”.
Max Morgan collapses after fixing Zoo Force One’s air filters, and his son helps him back to the lab, where Clem’s baby is now meeting the Zoo Crew for the very first time. Max Morgan gets to hold his great grandson, tears in his eyes, right before he dies.
Dammit, I don’t know how Zoo does it, but I’M SAD TOO.