Well, with all the excitement of a new TV season upon us, Zoo’s finale review ended up being pushed to the back burner. However, with some free time this weekend, I’m now ready to talk about this crazy and definitely weird season finale.
In a lot of ways this finale was frustrating. It had a fantastic and exciting two-hour lead-up the week before and the finale looked like it would be, at the very least, equally exciting. However, honestly, this episode felt very strange to me. It felt more like a season two premiere than a season finale. It started out pretty good, picking up right where we left off, somewhere in the Atlantic ocean after the plane crash. This whole scene was shot from the point of view of one of the main female characters (so either Chloe or Jamie) and it’s exciting because we don’t know which one or the status of anyone else on board the flight. I really enjoyed this opening scene and thought it added a lot of mystery and suspense and set a great tone for the rest of the episode, unfortunately, things went downhill fast. The rest of the episode was pretty slow and all over the place.
Just to recap, we see that it’s Jamie who is alive in the water and she gets rescued by an older man who doesn’t speak any English. At first he seems nice enough but then he seems kind of creepy. This whole intro leaves us with a lot of questions. How much time has passed? Where are the others? Most importantly, for many reasons - what happened to my favorite character, the baby leopard? When Jamie wakes up she tries to escape and finds there’s a fence around the whole property. At first she thinks it’s a fence to keep her in but she soon discovers, when the old man saves her again, that the fence is actually meant to keep the animals out! Meanwhile, we find out that although there were 47 people lost in the plane crash, every member of the team made it out alive! How surprising… however, they did lose the baby leopard in the crash so now they are left without any hope for creating the cure.
After a pretty significant time jump, everyone is way different than how we left them. This is the main reason for the season premiere-like feelings. We check in with everyone months after the crash and they are living in an almost post-apocalyptic world. Jackson is desperately trying to find another way to make the cure and filming rambling videos just like his father. Chloe is working with the government to try to capture another leopard from Zambia. Abe and Mitch have both pretty much abandoned the team altogether. Abe is now part of a security-for-hire operation, protecting citizens when they go out into the world, which is a much scarier place then when we last saw it. Mitch is devastated after losing Jamie (everyone on the team thinks she died in the crash) and he spends his days drinking away his sorrows at a local bar. Overall, it’s just such a bizarre way to start a finale. We just saw these characters a week ago and now everything is completely different. All of this “where are they now?” catch-up would have been so much better if it was the episode after a significant mid-season hiatus or a premiere where it’s more expected. I guess this type of show, based on a book/story or this maybe just this particular book, doesn't really lend itself well to a TV series.
Anyways, the stakes are high in this episode. If they can’t find a way to make a cure, then the government is going to put Project Noah into effect. This plan will use healthy animal DNA to recreate all animal life after cleansing the world of all animals. This plan seems to have a few issues. For example, humans are animals too so how will they kill all animals but not humans? We’ve already seen that this behavior can manifest in humans so are they going to wipe out the whole planet just in case? It seems more than a little crazy. Meanwhile, Jackson seems to think that he can solve problems no one else in the world can and he comes up with the idea to use mosquitos to distribute the cure. This idea seemed weird to me from the start. If a needle to the back wouldn't work on a dog how would a tiny mosquito bite work? All of this turns out to be pointless though because the leopard that was caught in Zambia had been contaminated by venturing into Reiden territory. Now they are out of options and it looks like Project Noah will be happening. At this moment, I wondered if maybe the baby leopard survived and is somehow with Jamie. Minutes later, my predication was confirmed when we saw that the old man had also saved the leopard and it was trapped in an enclosure on the property. Jamie also manages to finally find a working phone and calls Mitch.
This brings me to some of my favorite parts of this episode. I loved seeing Mitch’s speech about love and taking the people around us for granted. He was so clearly talking about Jamie and it was surprisingly emotional. The only scenes that I found particularly moving were the Mitch and Jamie scenes. I actually teared up during their reunion phone call. Neither one of them are a particularly emotional character so it was cute to see this different side to them and how much they’ve really come to mean to each other. I also really enjoyed the “reasons to continue” theme throughout the episode. No matter how crazy or unsurvivable the world or your life may be there will always be little things that will give you a reason to continue living. I thought that was a beautiful, and surprisingly deep, message for the episode to portray.
Anyways, once Mitch realizes that Jamie is alive and she has the leopard, the team gets back together and heads out to find her. Just as they’re on their way, they get stopped in the street by a huge blockade of every animal imaginable. This is a huge congregation of animals taking up the whole street. Just as the team is deciding what to do, the animals start charging towards their car and then it’s over. That’s how it ends?!?!? In the blink of an eye with every character in jeopardy?? All I can say is there had better be a second season! No animal cure/solution? Animals charging at all our characters? No in-person Mitch and Jamie reunion??? I’m actually kind of angry about it! I’m not sure what season two would be about or how it could be different from this one but one thing’s for sure - I definitely still want one! Would I still want one without that massive cliffhanger? I don’t know, but as it stands, I need to see what happens next and seeing as how the theme was reasons to continue, CBS should take the hint and please, please, please continue Zoo!
What did you think of the finale? Do you want a season two? Let me know in the comments and thanks for reading!
About the Author - Kate Sidwell
Kate is a 24 year old, USA based, Psychology/Public Health Researcher - but that’s just her day job! In her spare time she is an avid TV watcher (some may even say addict!!). Some of her favorite shows are Jane the Virgin, Bates Motel, The Flash, Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Rookie Blue, Silicon Valley, Beauty and the Beast, Sleepy Hollow, The 100, The Mindy Project, Pretty Little Liars, Once Upon a Time, The Royals, Orphan Black…so pretty much too many to count and a huge variety! She’ll give pretty much any show a chance! She also devotes a lot of time to her tumblr (
eat-sleep-breathe-tv.tumblr.com) where you can find her reviewing and commenting on most of these shows and just generally fangirling! She’s excited to be writing for SpoilerTV on Complications, Baby Daddy, Proof, Switched at Birth, Secrets and Lies, and Minority Report!
