Screens: CBS
How Many More Homicides-By-Animal Does Zoo Need To Be Truly Great?
Also: how many different animals need to get into the mix? Dave and Tara discuss.
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I was kind of rolling along with the stupidity of "Fight Or Flight," the second episode of Zoo, until we saw how things shook out in Slovenia. Domesticated cats turning on humans? Of course: the average domesticated cat is just one bad salmon kibble meal from eating its owner's face off.
But dogs? I don't think so.
Don't confuse our dog (Gordon Lightfoot) with all dogs. I take Gordon for a walk down the street and a block away there's a demon dog who always tries but just fails to jump over a six-foot fence. He'd eat my face without hesitation. I assume dogs will be the scout/hunter class of the glorious new Animal Kingdom (which, by the way: more apt title). So far the we've had lions, tigers, dogs, and cats and only one of them had any real representation in a Zoo. I call zooshenanigans!
I would say that Zoo, in this case, is the generic phoneme for "animal thing," as in "zoologist," but that's almost certainly giving James Patterson/this show's producers too much credit, particularly since he has more than one supposed zoologist character describes lions as "acting liony," and that's just in this one episode. These are the humans who are supposed to defend us all against the animal apocalypse? I say the animals have already earned it.
And that brings up an issue. Who am I supposed to root for here? If I were in the Zooniverse™, I'd probably be on Team Humans because -- to paraphrase the great Philip J. Fry -- Earth is where I keep all my stuff. As a viewer, I assumed at the start of this epic summer TV event that I would be in the bag for some Rise Of The Planet Of All The Animals, but according to my Terrible TV Bible, we should have had a comically cruel human's balls bitten off in a karmically satisfying kill by now. Instead, everyone is just is bad at their jobs. That's not a reason to be eaten: that's just America.
Hey, yeah! What about that jerk with the $200,000 hunting license from the pilot? He's rich and wants to kill wild game: he is way overdue for some lion comeuppance. (Maybe they're saving that for the climax of the season finale and he's going to have to prove even more what a shithead he is by starting a savannah fire and then kicking The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency girls into it.
You're also right that for a show that tries to have this much scope, we're seeing a comparatively tiny number of different animals, and even fewer if you count tigers, lions, and housecats as basically the same. I want to get excited about this big trip Jackson's taking to Japan, but what's going to menace him there -- goldfish?
Can I go deep on animal tactics here, Tara?
I wish you would.
We now know the animals are communicating. Where does it stop? Do we think they can talk to spiders? Mosquitoes? Those have brains too, just smaller. If they want to kill us, just get locusts, rats, and the like to eat our crops while lions secure armories around the planet. Boom: all dead within two years! If the insect kingdom is too dumb to play along, then I think they next best play is to General Amherst the humans by sending us smallpox blankets in the form of animals with all sorts of new fancy jungle diseases. Hamsters with Super AIDS, that sort of thing.
Totally. What human can resist resist banging a sexy, sexy hamster?
What I would like to see is more stampeding. A slow death by severed femoral artery is fine, but I can think of three cast members on this show I'd like to see smooshed into human pitas in a coordinated musk ox/giraffe/hippo attack. That French girl GOTS to go. No one cares about your slutty fiance'! (That's how this show thinks you spell "fiancé.")
Wait, I say the animals send AIDSy hamsters into the world and you assume people are having sex with them?
...You don't?
Uh huh. We don't agree on the sex appeal of hamsters, but we do agree that not enough humans are dying. Also, when the show wants us to believe people are in peril, the scenes are laughably low-key. There a scene this week where Jackson retrieves Abraham, whom the lions (acting most unliony!) dragged up into a tree alive. The police who accompanied them are screaming, SCREAMING for him to hurry because they are closing in and OMG THE PERIL! Remember the scene from Monty Python And The Holy Grail where Sir Lancelot is running towards the castle? That's how far away they are, and Sir Lancelot was about ten times as fast. It is a glorious testament to the cashing-a-paycheck endeavor that is Zoo.
Were you at least happy to see that Dracula's buddy wasn't really dead?
Blaaaah! Not really. What I want in no particular order is:
- Human deaths by the boatful
- A dog and an elephant slyly nodding to each other before they cause coordinated mayhem
- A muskrat on a charging ox, Master Blaster-style
- For the zoologist to keep on referring to the behaviour of various species as [species]-y. "Hawky." "Mongoosey." "Orca-y."
- For a weasel to double cross a human
- A scene where human sex is interrupted by colony of naked mole rats
- Guest appearance by the chimp from The Simpsons who went in space and says "No, I don't think we'll be telling them THAT."
I can't disagree with any of that but would also add:
- Girl Reporter has a crazy hallucinogenic trip after a Reiden operative puts tainted feed in her chili
- Jackson gets sidetracked on his trip to Japan to recover his crazy dad's flash drives, ends up on a crazy game show for a few weeks
- Frenchie discovers she has the power to command birds and trains a peacock to attack all the people other than her sister who were boning her ex
- Mitch The Veterinary Pathologist who prefers animals to people changes sides, Dances With Wolves-style, and kills former human friends in an extremely liony fashion
Oh: and they're all in a Dome.
If we crossed the streams of Under The Dome and Zoo, the result would be a black hole of stupid so powerful that we dare not tempt fate. You take that back.
You're right. Oh, hold on, can we pause for a second? Someone just knocked on my office door. ...Oh my god, it's the most adorable little terrier and he brought me a toy!