Saturday, March 26, 2016

Zoo, Season 1, Episode 3: The Silence of the Cicadas



Jackson and Abe have travelled to Japan to follow the rest of his father’s research. Their first surprise was finding out that Richard married again, a woman called Minako. This causes Jackson no small amount of angst because he realises Minako faithfully stuck by Richard as he was abandoned by his job, his other family and had a complete breakdown – especially now that it was clear that Richard may have been wrong. Of course, Abe is there to make Jackson feel better

Minako takes them to an irradiated island off Fukushima which Richard used for all his research where, after their plane encounters some angry bats, they crash and Minako dies

Really? Already? She was introduced, made it clear she was the perfect, mild, supportive wife (heya stereotype) and then promptly dies? And, again my complaint from last week is that we’re making a big thing about this being a global problem but so far Abe is the only POC and the only non-western character as part of the group.

On the island of Dr. Oz they find he has been pursuing some creepy experiments, including pulling out horses’ eyes when the “defiant pupil” appeared and generally being very ominous without producing much useful data. Seriously, so far every piece of data that Richard produced says the same thing “animals attack! Defiant pupil! End of the world!” no wonder he was kicked out of the academic community. Random assertions are not evidence even if you do repeat them over and over and over again.

In Los Angeles, Jamie manages to convince Mitch to come see a senator she knows with his evidence of telepathic lions. Mitch is unwilling because he’s Mitch and because he doesn’t exactly have a whole lot of evidence but Jamie insists. Of course when they get there, Mitch learns that Jamie has actually been fired from the paper and this is all her pulling him along. But she manages to convince him to go to an emotional tour of the graveyard where there are many deaths from the “cancer cluster” she asserts was caused by Reiden chemicals. This keeps him on side long enough to speak to the Senator – only to see the Senator has pretty much given up. After many many investigations into the company they’ve just failed to make any ground.


Jamie is devastated and gives up completely, heading to get drunk and drop it all. I don’t think Mitch is onside, but she does look very very sad so now he’s deciding to chivy her back into the fight (and smacking down said senator. There’s not a lot of people who make comments about genital size to a politician’s face… is a statement that was true last year. Thank you for that America, by the way). Still, Jamie has completely given up.

And over to Slovenia where Gaspard (the mysterious French man who recruited Chloe) is showing Chloe the dog massacre and asks for her expert opinion. Treating it as a human attacker she concludes that the animals are practicing, honing their skills. How ominous…

He then goes on a tour – he picks up Mitch in the bar where he is watching Jamie’s pity party. Gaspard recruits Mitch – and Mitch insists Jamie gets to come along. Yay pity inclusion!

Gaspard then goes to Japan where he’s found where Jackson and Abe are on their irradiated island – rescuing and recruiting them

I’m not sure where he gets all his information but I guess he’s an ominous spy figure in a suit, fiction loves the idea that these people are all knowing.

Gathering this whole team together Gaspard now has his team (with Mitch snarking) to solve the problem – and he tells them of several more animal attacks so we know it’s escalating with several animals all around the world.


Ok, back to my complaint. I love that the dream team has been established – but this is a global disaster, we’ve established this repeatedly, and we have a team of 6 people. 5 of them are White. 2 are French, 3 are American. This is a damn poor global team, especially since even Abe seems to be there more as a sidekick for Jackson rather than being an expert in his own right