CBS’s Zoo, a series about animals rising up to try to overthrow the human race through methods ranging from a) sending bloodthirsty seafaring rats on a New England invasion, to b) sending kamikaze bats to kill two lesbian bird scientists in Antarctica, to c) sending millions of electrocharged ants to blow up a Swiss particle accelerator, airs its second season finale this week. There is a lot going on with this show right now. Some might even say “too much.” But those people would be wrong, and jerks. Zoo is at its best when so many things are happening that you don’t have time to stop and think about, say, how one character started out as an innocent reporter and recently injected a double agent — who she was in love with, and who chopped off her frost-bitten big toe for her with an axe like two episodes earlier — with paralyzing venom and threw him out the cargo hatch of a multimillion-dollar science plane. That is a thing that happened.
But even though you don’t want to think too much about all of this, it is helpful to think a little about it, just so you’re not lost when things start going down. So what I’m going to do here is give you a little primer so you’re ready and fully inforWHHHHHOOOOAAAA Russian Embassy gorilla attack! There’s a gorilla attacking the Russian Embassy! Look!
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Ah, well this is embarrassing. It appears I have uploaded a GIF from Mr. Go, a Korean movie about a circus gorilla that learns to smash home runs with the help of the teenage girl who trains him, instead of the one of the Russian Embassy attack from Zoo. I am terribly sorry.
(NOTE: I am not sorry.)
(SECOND NOTE: I feel great about it, actually. I will go to great lengths to bring up Mr. Go. It really is an incredible piece of cinema. I mean, spoilers, but it ends with a showdown between the dinger-smashing gorilla and a second, evil gorilla that has been signed by another team to pitch to him, and after Mr. Go hits a walkoff home run off the other gorilla — in which the ball explodes on contact and the other team tries to round up all the pieces of the ball from the infield to tag him out before he rounds the bases — the two of them engage in a brutal fight on the field in front of thousands of horrified spectators. Watch Mr. Go.)
Anyway, here’s the correct GIF.
Now, here’s what you need to know about this gorilla attack:
– It was orchestrated by a villainous United States general who was trying to stop the people in that elevator — a Russian diplomat; the nine-toed reporter; and an alcoholic veterinary pathologist who just slept with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who is also both his ex-girlfriend and ex-stepmother — from convincing the Russian government to pull support for his method of defeating the animals, which involves gassing the entire planet to kill almost all of the animals and trying to repopulate it. That was his plan. He released a furious gorilla in the Russian Embassy. And guess what: It worked! Something to remember the next time you have a problem at work.
– This general is the same one who was slapped by Bob Benson during a sloth heist, and who had his heart restarted by electrocharged ants after the team used the paralyzing venom to torture him in an attempt to get information about Bob Benson’s thought-dead mad scientist father, who is alive and is now a member of the team, and who also just created a machine out of scraps on the science plane that blasted an electric pulse out the cargo hatch strong enough to fry two fighter jets that were chasing them.
– You should always watch Zoo with the subtitles on.
That about catches us up. Haha, just kidding! That does not come close to catching us up. That just brings us to the thing where the team, in a furious search for a cure, both to save humanity and to save Bob Benson, who is turning into a wild-eyed hellbeast because of something his father injected him with as a child, is heading to Jurassic Park. I mean, basically. We discussed this last week, but it really is an incredible development, so I’m going to do it again.
There is an island. The island is called Pangaea. We learned about it a few episodes ago when the team realized they needed a sabertooth cat to complete the cure. The problem being, of course, sabertooth cats have been extinct for thousands of years. But! Pangaea! Which was thought to be an urban legend, but is actually real, and is populated by lunatic scientists and animals the rest of the world thinks are extinct. So that means we have…
– an island
– run by crazy scientists
– and filled with otherwise-extinct animals.
… which is such a brazen… let’s be nice and go with “homage” to Jurassic Park that I don’t even think I can get upset about it. A few episodes back, a gang of wild horses outran a motorcycle and tried to clop a pregnant Army Ranger to death with their hooves. There is nothing this show can do at this point that I won’t just blindly accept.
So, to recap: The team is racing to Jurassic Park in a borderline magical plane in an attempt to find a cure for an animal mutation that threatens society as we know it, and they are being chased by an evil military official who has recently used a gorilla rampage to influence U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations, and their best hope at pulling it off is a perpetually drunk vet who is currently involved in two love triangles (1 – him, dad, ex-stepmom; 2 – him. ex-stepmom, nine-toed reporter), both of which involve the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and they need to do it before Bob Benson from Mad Men — who is with them on the plane — completes his transformation into a black-blooded monster and kills them all.
I think that sums it up. Good chat. Here is another GIF from Mr. Go.
