This season of Zoo has been loaded with twists, often involving family. A brief sampling:
- Mitch came out of the stasis tank and was introduced to the daughter he hadn’t seen in a decade, only to find out that it was an impostor
- Mitch’s real daughter was carrying a secret fetus
- Abigail, the supervillain who created the hybrids and appears hellbent on ending the human race, turned out to be Jackson’s secret sister
- Abebdagos, the half-human half-ape hybrid that Jackson stole from a trailer with the assistance of a pack of lions he controlled with his mind, was actually created using a part of Abigail’s DNA, which makes it kind of Jackson’s brother.
And so on. There were more, probably, but you’ll forgive me if they escape me as I type this. A few weeks ago we saw a 60-foot invisible snake that lived in an abandoned Peruvian funhouse. A few weeks before that, someone pushed a car out of an airplane and into a volcano. Zoo is not a show that you watch while charting plot points like Breaking Bad. Zoo is a show you watch while holding on for dear life.
Which brings us to this week’s episode, the one that sets up next week’s season three finale, and the one that gave us our biggest and weirdest twist yet.
But first, some housecleaning.
This, to be clear, is Abigail — who is still not dead, despite almost dying twice and actually dying once — firing an EMP at the science plane, which kills its electronics and forces the team to make an emergency landing on the wrong side of the barrier, in what the show calls “the hybrid zone.” This means that our team — including the miracle baby Clem had last episode — has to get to the safe zone without getting eaten by the hybrid razorback wolves roaming the terrain. Which is a problem. Do we got hybrid razorbacks menacingly roaring off-camera to signify this?
Oh, hell yeah, we got hybrid razorbacks menacingly roaring off-camera to signify this.
And they have to hurry, too, because inside the safe zone there’s a giant clock on the wall that’s counting down to when all the hybrid spores around the world will begin hatching, and if the team doesn’t get the “dead man’s switch” to them in time to put a halt to it all, the head military guy at the facility is going to order internationally-coordinated missile strikes all over the globe to take out the spores before they hatch, killing millions of people in the process. Do we got a video board full of generals from around the world?
Oh, hell yeah, we got a video board full of generals from around the world.
This brings us to our twist. To lure the hybrids away from the rest of the team, Jackson and Sam — the father of Clem’s baby, who was working with Abigail until recently– drive off into the wilderness on an ATV with a gas can filled with pheromones dripping behind them. Which works. Yay.
But then.
We find out that Sam had still been working with Abigail and he led Jackson into a trap so Abigail could ambush him and get revenge for taking their father away from her.
But then.
Jackson and Sam begin fighting and Jackson kicks Sam down a hill into the razorback-filled quarry the just threw the pheromone juice into, and turns the tables on Abigail by holding her at gun point.
But then.
Abigail starts giving one of those big “Don’t you see?” speeches that supervillains give, during which she reveals that this had all been part of her plan, and that Sam wasn’t “Sam,” a young man whose parents were killed during one of Jackson’s previous plans, but actually “Connor,” a young man who she raised to believe was the child of these now-dead parents, and is also…
Yup. Jackson’s secret sister had been secretly hiding the son he thought he lost in a gas station explosion 20 years ago, and all of this has been a long-simmering plot to force Jackson to kill his own son so he could feel the pain she felt when their father died. And by all of this, I mean, apparently:
- Getting Sam to fall for Clem and have a baby, which we still don’t know the details of, what with the whole sterility thing, and hey, I just realized this means that the miracle baby’s two biological grandfathers are Jackson and Mitch (lol)
- Letting herself get captured and rising from the dead
- Basically everything that has happened to date with the hybrids, whose planned global domination she refers to as “a consolation prize.”
This is, without a doubt, the single most unnecessarily elaborate revenge plot in all of history and I love it so much. The lady is out here bringing about the end of the world via lab-made giant invisible snakes and playing matchmaker to make miracle babies with the secret children of her brother and his buddy, all for the purpose of making her brother really sad. That is… my word, that is something.
Like, imagine the angriest you’ve ever been at one of your siblings. Did you ever once — even for a second — consider a plan that involved creating a giant invisible snake in a laboratory? And not making a giant invisible snake just to have it eat him, either. Making a giant invisible snake as ONE PART of a multi-step plan. Damn, lady. That is almost as ruthless as it is overly complicated. I’m fascinated by it. It’s like if you ask someone to build you a mousetrap and they show up two years later with a huge Rube Goldberg machine that has 400 working interconnected parts, one of which involves an invisible snake. I’m sorry. I appear to be stuck on this. But still.
So anyway, Jackson leaps into the quarry to try to save his son, and the last thing we see as the episode ends is freaking Bob Benson from Mad Men saving his secret son by going full-on John Wick on a pack of bloodthirsty hybrid razorbacks wolves.
Finale next week. Hell yes.
