Screen: CBS
Zoo Steps Up To Bats In Rio
Defiant bats make favelas even less habitable in the latest episode; Dave and Tara discuss!
Our Players
The Talk
Zoo Production Budget Meeting March 2014: Gentlemen, GENTLEMEN. Good job on the CG bats, really. They look like bats this time around...Gary. But there's some bad news. We blew the budget creating them. So the Antarctic scene where the penguins make friends with the lesbian researchers? Now bats are going to kill them. And the parrot invasion of Rio is now bats. For the rest of the series, I've used Final Draft to replace all the Cs with Bs so cats are now bats and there's now an exciting scene in Africa where a character named Bharles is tackled at high speed by a bheetah.
Yeah, this was the week where we really saw how hard Zoo is pushing this bat agenda. It makes a kind of sense -- having nocturnal animals fucking around during the day is, as Marge might put it, "unwholesome" -- and they have a reputation for carrying disease. But mostly, it seems like it's a CG cheat. Plus when we do see some up close, CHEWING ON POWER LINES, they don't look so convincing.
There's a scene where Rio residents are shooting at a bunch of low-flying bats (there are millions of bats, dudes, save your ammo) and I really thought the bats were going to dive down and skeletonize them like piranha. Missed opportunity, if you ask me.
That brings up a great point, Dave, which is, why has it been so long since this show has brought us the gory, violent death of a human perpetrated by an animal? The bats v. lesbian skirmish last week was practically an elegant Agatha Christie-esque murder plot compared to the expectations set by prior lion and wolf attacks. Boo, Zoo. BOO.
It's summer, Zoo writers. Here's the formula for every episode. The Zoo Croo travels to region X to gather data. There's intriguing evidence of fresh animal kills. The Zoo Croo meets human resistance along the way. The Zoo Croo gathers evidence. The animals attack. The Zoo Croo gets away because the jerk humans want to mess with the Zoo Croo but the animals have other plans. The Zoo Croo progress is set back when Charles Animalson arrives at the end to steal whatever they were working it. That’s all you need to do. Every week. Zoo-O-Matic. Everyone is summer happy.
I can't believe you even have to lay out this formula because I feel like it's exactly what we were promised! What was all that business with Agent Dixon putting the Zoo Croo together if they're going to be struggling with annoying bullshit everywhere they go? Why should Mitch have to do his potentially apocalypse-averting research in a high school science classroom he snuck into? Why are they sharing hotel rooms all the time? I'm not saying they should have enough funding to buy their way out of any kind of problems they encounter, but mooching a microscope slide from some Alabama public school and running out before class starts is pretty ridiculous. (Although who knew Alabama public schools even TAUGHT science, right Mitch?)
"Oh no, the high school students are after me!"
"I guess all our plans to figure out these animal-behaviour anomalies and save humanity are off the table because here comes Mrs. Zilinsky and she is PISSED!"
"Oh no, she's got a baseball cat!"
Girl Reporter: "Consider your audience!!! What's a baseball cat?!"
The school was going to buy me a baseball bat if my class got a B average but they only got a C. THUNDERCOUGARFALCONBIRD (Look, Zoo is boring now and we have to make our own fun.)
So boring, and the lack of action scenes really just forces me to notice how dumb all the non-murderous-animal stuff is. Why was Agent Guy From Enlisted riding through a swamp in a wide-open boat in a suit? Why can't Frenchy stop bugging her eyes out on every single one of her lines? Does Girl Reporter really not understand how food chains work?!!??!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I never thought I would say this but this show needs to get much dumber to hook me. Right now it's dumb but it thinks it's smart, and there's just nothing worse.
Yep. This is what Zoo needs to be a couple times each episode.