Screen: CBS
The Zoo Croo Assembles, But Who's Most Expendable?
Dave and Tara have your rankings for the episode!
Our Players
The Talk
After last week's assembly of the animal superfriends in Japan, Zoo has made the Zoo Croo official by introducing each of its members in the new pre-credits narration: "An expert in animal behaviour [Jackson]; a journalist [Girl Reporter]; safari guide [Abraham]; foreign intelligence agent [Frenchy]; veterinary pathologist [Mitch]." And now that they have their marching orders and have been sent on their first assignment -- to deal with the wolf attack/wolf arson at the prison in the last episode -- it seems like the best way to address the show is by putting the Croo members in order from most to least useful.
They are one assembly call away from the most annoying Voltron ever. So the head of Zooltron would be Jackson, I suppose. Someone has to champion the Defiant Pupil theory and bring the rest of the group around. Once they all are on board, we'll see a shake-up in the rankings but for now Jackson is the glue waiting to set.
He also has the only marginally interesting backstory/current motivation with his poor old dead (probably secretly alive) crackpot father Robert, and his inner conflict about having to revise his many years of disavowing Robert only now to have to defend Robert's crazy ideas to Mitch.
Runner-up prize goes to Abraham. When he's the guy who can defuse a pissing match between a gun store full of hillbillies and MSNBC pundit-level Liberal, you know he's got some marketable skills beyond being an able hunter. Point deducted, however, for choosing a net gun over a tranquilizer dart gun to capture one of the Lupine Prison Break wolves. Did you see the fine brush in that forest? No way a net is going to properly deploy in that.
True, although I don't discount the idea that he was buying a net gun for the fun factor. Even if he couldn't catch any wolves with it, it could still be amusing to wait until someone in their hotel room gets really involved in the latest episode of The Good Wife and then FOOMP! NETTED!
Or save it for those Black Friday doorbuster specials. There's only one 60" TV priced at $500? FOOMP!
Next in line is a marginal third-place showing for Mitch, the ever put-upon animal pathologist. First of all, he and Jackson have some animal expertise overlap, and Mitch doesn't have the person motivation. Second, yes, he's always acting put-upon (which he is, by the way) and that's not good for team dynamics. I'm putting him in third place because of his MacGyvered lab in the hotel room where he using a coffee maker to something something animal science. His gun store run-in also puts him at the top of my Zoo Croo dead pool. After the Defiant Pupil mojo is isolated, what is he going to do? He's going to die.
For sure. This episode they tried to give Mitch more dimension by establishing that he has an ex and a child, but if they haven't come up before now -- not even so Mitch can call them and tell them to avoid any mean-looking squirrel packs or marauding kitties -- I still think the show hasn't quite nailed it in terms of dramatizing Mitch's humanity. Maybe if he had more of Jackson's skills with regard to understanding how animals work when they're still alive, he'd be better equipped himself to handle unpleasant interactions with other people and not just pick fights on principle like he did in the gun store, like an idiot.
Now for the women. The ladies need to step up their game. Coming in second-to-last is Frenchy. Ordinarily, I'd put her higher on the list if only because she's the head of the team and as such probably has to approve team expenses for remittance. I suspect we are going to agree that the actor's amazing eyeball-based acting skills break the fourth wall and hurt the character's standings. That may not be fair but in a world where bats freeze lesbians to death, fair doesn't enter into it.
The actor's weirdly mime-y choices are definitely a huge part of why Frenchy is ranked so low, but this episode also gave her Bryce Dallas Howard-in-Jurassic World-level Dumb Girl Shit to do. She didn't tell Jackson or Girl Reporter to help her sell the lie that they're all from the French Embassy by not talking like the Americans they are; she didn't even have plausible fake papers to try to trick the prison guard with (allowing Agent Pete-From-Enlisted to see right through her ruse); and then she bragged to Jackson that she's as sure-footed as a mountain goat one second before falling right into ungulate guts.
All that and she's making everyone double up on rooms? Unpinch a penny for the sake of forestalling the apocalypse, lady, damn.
Last place: Re-employed Girl Reporter. She uh, well...hmm. She wrote "Reiden Global" on a piece of paper. She might have underlined it.
As I said last week, she's already a liability because she's come to a conclusion about the question they're supposed to be investigating. On top of that, she required Jackson to explain to her what "scat" is. But I guess she talked her way into the Wolf Whisperer's cell and recovered his Bible complete with "intriguing" photo of himself with Robert Oz, without which we wouldn't have an end-of-episode cliffhanger.
Non-Zoo Croo mentions! "Enjoy your Antarctic death trap, ladies," said Homer Simpson to an estranged couple working out their issues at the South Pole.
And they did. To the strains of Oasis. On repeat. I also want to give a shout-out to our aforementioned Wolf Whisperer, who from now on we will be calling -- for obvious reasons -- Charles Animalson. He's the claw on the edge of the world!!!