This Week On ‘Zoo’: We’re Having A Baby On A Quarantined Airplane!


Folks, we have a problem. There is so much I need to tell you about Zoo, but there’s no time. There just isn’t any time. Because if I start down the whole “Jamie pretended to turn Duncan back into Mitch because she wanted Duncan to kill Abigail but then Abigail came back to life and killed everyone and also Jamie almost couldn’t change Duncan back to Mitch later because a baby invisible snake hatched on the plane and ate the controller but then she chopped the snake in half and ripped the controller right out of the snake’s digestive system” rabbit hole, well, we’ll never get to the important stuff, like the fact that Clementine is in labor on a quarantined airplane and the baby is humanity’s only chance of survival.

See what I mean? It’s a problem. So, in an attempt to simplify things (lol), I’m going to break it all down into sections.

Clem and her baby’s father have to run around and bring everyone back to life using the ooze from the stasis tank that somehow kept Mitch alive for 10 years and saved Clem’s fetus.

This whole thing was kind of amazing, for two reasons:

– Clem is just pregnant as all heck and dragging huge tanks of liquid around an airplane, and she knows exactly how to use all the high-tech science/medical things despite being a 20-year-old non-scientist/doctor because everyone on this show is an expert on everything, which I love dearly.

– They literally ended on a cliffhanger last week with everyone dead on the plane and they revived everyone during the cold open and yada-yada’d the science behind it to such a breathtaking degree that the magical life-giving ooze they extracted from the tank to do it was referred to as — I swear to God — “tank serum.”

Also, after bringing Abe back to life, Mitch realized he still had a gaping wound that was getting worse, so Mitch patched up the wound using 1) a scorpion’s sting, 2) a credit card, and 3) what appeared to be duct tape. This show gives me more life than any tank serum ever could.

The plane is under quarantine because the hybrid spores in the area have contaminated the air to an unhealthy degree.

How unhealthy? How about “So unhealthy that some dude’s head exploded”?

[extremely science voice] Pretty unhealthy, in my opinion.

While all this is going on — the tank serum, multiple people cheating death before the opening credits, some poor guy’s brain splattering on the outside of the airplane — Clem’s water breaks and she goes into labor.

A few things:

– Clem’s pregnancy was sped up — a lot — by Abe, who injected her with hybrid goo to help save the baby (because of… science?), so she went from like three months pregnant to full-term in maybe a week, all while floating in a stasis tank on an airplane that was traveling all over the world, sometimes with an evil octopus on board. Somewhat less than ideal.

– Things were looking rough for a minute during labor because Clem was under too much stress (lol, well, yeah), so to calm her down, Sam — the baby’s father who was evil as of one episode ago but is cool now — walked in playing a cover of “Wonderwall” on an MP3 player, and it worked.

– Diehard Zoo fans may realize that this is actually the second time Oasis has factored into the show’s plot, with the first being the time kamikaze bats took out a solar panel in Antarctica and two lesbian bird scientists froze to death in each other’s arms while listening to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” on repeat.

– I would pay up to $10 a week for a podcast in which Noel and Liam Gallagher break down episodes of Zoo. Imagine just explaining it to one of them. I want to do this so badly I might throw up.

– In easily the most shocking moment in the history of this show (which is saying a lot), the baby born on the quarantined airplane after being injected with hybrid DNA while floating in a stasis tank full of ooze came out… normal? Like, it looks like a regular human baby. I was flabbergasted. I was sure it would come out and then suddenly reveal it had pterodactyl wings, or laser eyes, or something. I mean, there’s still time, I guess. But yeah. Blown away by this.

Jamie is locked in the cell now because no one trusts her after the Mitch/Duncan ruse and Mitch’s dad died while installing a filter to keep the contaminated air out of the plane, both of which would have been things I covered in depth if Tokyo didn’t get vaporized.

This is also amazing. They were trying to figure out how to stop a beacon from sending a signal to all the hybrid spores, which was causing them to hatch all over the globe, which is bad, so their big plan was to cut the big red wire supplying the power to the beacon, but when one of the agents snipped it — using what appeared to be hedge trimmers, because why wouldn’t you have landscaping tools with you while trying to save the world from high-tech plots involving mutated hellbeasts? — this happened…

… which caused everyone to stare at the screen in silent shock for a few seconds before Logan turned around with a solemn look on his face and said this.

Yup, the entire city of Tokyo was just wiped off the planet. Because someone chopped through a wire with hedge clippers. Millions of people dead. Buildings turned to ash. A catastrophe unlike anything the world has ever seen. And it was barely mentioned again for the rest of the episode. Seriously, Jackson was sad about it for a minute on the phone, but then everyone was like “Okay, moving on.” Which, I mean, I do kind of get, I guess. If you were stuck on a quarantined airplane that was recently inhabited by an evil octopus and a baby invisible snake, and was also just used to lead a dozen demon vultures to Mexico so they could be tricked into committing mass suicide by volcano, and has some guy’s freshly splattered brain on the outside of it, and the guy trying to deliver a baby that could save humanity was saved from death two times that day, once via “tank serum” and once via a scorpion and a credit card, I mean… maybe you’d find a way to compartmentalize some things, too.

Still, probably worth noting.

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