Notes for Episode 17: "Zoo"

Hi everyone, Hannah here. Notes for this month are a little delayed because I spent the last week of October dealing with a family medical emergency - but that's all on the mend now. My dad is gonna be fine. He's gonna make a full recovery, he's gonna be his usual shithead wisecracking self, and he's still gonna be a superfan of the TV show Lost. His favorite character is Sayid. What he likes most about Sayid is "this guy's kinda sorta a secret agent." I just received an accidental call from him literally as I was writing this blurb up and he expressed his desire to recover from his post-surgery aphasia as "I need more brain." I love him very much. Anyway here's Zoo.

• Plot / Structure Stuff:

  • The lions just chilling with Abraham after dragging him into a tree, that’s sick

  • The way the mystery is handled in this show is oddly straightforward. Three episodes in and I feel like we know enough for ever angle. They just have characters talk very plainly about what’s happening to the lions

  • FIND THE SEVEN MISSING FLASH DRIVES. A QUEST

    • Did not end up amounting to much

  • This show has the absolute flimsiest pretexts for being globe-trotting

  • The wolves are breaking the killer out of prison, that’s. Unbelievably cool

  • The Antarctica Lesbians……..insane development

    • Lesbians Listening to Oasis While Getting Killed by Bats

    • THEY MADE THE BARGAIN AND DIED ANYWAY ??????

      • We’re reaching brave new levels of “The End - No Moral!”

  • Evan Lee Hartley underlined EVERY REFERENCE TO ANIMALS in the Bible

  • Beating up on animal rights guys is something that every show, no matter what it’s about, can agree on. Of course Ray and his guys Go Too Far

  • Took them til the finale but they finally did the requisite Lostalike plane crash

  • Proposed plan: killing ALL the animals

  • The animals made peace. They’re not eating each other anymore

• Character / Performance Stuff:

  • Oh my goodness they fired Jamie on Mark Robinson grounds. She kept writing “I don’t give a frog’s fat ass” on her blog

  • Frog’s fat ass… animal reference

  • Billy Burke (Mitch) looks like old age makeup Bill Hader to an uncanny degree

  • Billy Burke is hot but his character is… not good. His snarky misanthropic nerd dialogue just does not hit

    • Via Esther: Mitch needs to be British. It’d all make sense then

  • They’re acting like this team pulls from all walks of life… seemingly unrelated people uniting in classic Lostalike fashion… when no. To me, it’s incredibly clear how all of these guys got involved in the animal story

    • Yeah they spent 3 episodes explaining it in detail

    • A guy who works with animals… a guy who works with animals… a guy who works with animals… and a lady who writes about animals

  • I don’t think this show has passed the Bechdel test yet. Jamie and Chloe just never fucking say anything to each other

  • I gotta be honest, Abraham called Jackson “rafiki” a little too many times. He could probably cut it down by 40% or so

  • It’s so rare on shows like this that the Group is so strong

    • Discuss the distinction between great character and watchable characters, cf. Amanda Rollins on SVU. This group is WATCHABLE

  • Mitch saying “you don’t even sound like her” when Jamie calls him after six months… that actually got Hannah a little

• Technical / Aesthetic Stuff: 

  • DARK SOULS 3 BACKSTAB SOUND EFFECT AS A SCENE TRANSITION

  • This dog attack scenes in this show are always so “he trying his best to make that mf look vicious”

  • EYELESS HORSES every time you think this show’s sagging with iffy character stuff it just drops in the sickest animal horror image ever

  • We LOVE the rhino in the theme tune scene. Standing in a Parisian street

  • Every episode starts with opening narration, THEN previously-on, THEN cold open, THEN opening theme… it goes on for so long! 

• Notable Quotes:

  • “For centuries mankind has been the dominant species. We domesticated animals, locked them up, killed them for sport. But what if, all across the globe, the animals decided ‘no more’? What if they decided to bite back?”

  • “Animals are predictable, they don’t have fears, they don’t have insecurities-” “They don’t kill themselves”

  • “I can’t think of anything I’d want to do less than get out of this car right now” “So do not!”

  • “You know, usually when a girl gives me her phone number… it doesn’t have anything to do with rampaging lions”

    • Three showrunners huddled around a fourth writing it. “That’s GOLD!”

  • “You’re obsessed with Reiden Global - why?” “Because of what they did to my hometown” She means they airlifted lions into the town

  • “I don’t know which was worse. Being attacked by lions…..or discovering my sister was sleeping with my fiance.”

  • “Senator, I did my thesis on the inverse proportionality of taxidermy wall mounts to their owners’ penis size. my condolences to your wife”

  • “That’s Evan Lee Hartley. He was on death row. If anyone deserved to be eaten by wolves, it’s him.”

  • “In the meantime, to take your mind off some bats, here’s some facts” “Facts about what?” “Facts about bats”

  • “Y’know, I can’t help but notice, for a city under siege by bats-” “No bats”

    • And then the bats are right there, just a lil bit away

  • “Looks to me like you’ve got a bat problem all your own.” (calls in a goon with a baseball bat)

  • Wait I missed that after Jamie fucking wastes the fake FBI agent she said “well…..that happened”

  • Evil French guy threatening to kill Chloe’s sister by saying “That is Tomas… he is, dreadful”

  • “The leopards are gone. So we find whatever is the next leopard.”

• Cute Things We Said:

  • The first blood……the first people ever killed by animals

    • I need people to be constantly talking about animals with really stupid hubris. “It’s just an animal… it’s not strong or smart or frankly ruthless enough to hurt me”

    • “It’d be simple… like taking candy from an animal”

  • I hope they show a capybara just going absolutely ape shit on a human

    • Recurring visual motif where someone in the background is lazily chased by a plump capybara

  • Reiden is Graydon (Greiden?) Carter’s animal feed company. It’s the animal equivalent of a bad food restaurant

  • The Slovenian kid + tigers plot pays off with the tigers saying “young one… you must be wary of the lions… send word to the jaguars, a war is coming…”

  • It’s cool how Chloe has lion blood so she’s part of the lion hivemind. But it’s funny how the only thing the lions send to each other is pictures of lions

    • “Guys… this is what I am. What are you?”

  • They’re in Brazil asking “Do you know a man named Silva” and everyone’s like oh yeah I know the one. Insane. Insane.

  • I think it would be so funny if one of the main characters dies and we see them waking up in heaven and heaven’s being overrun with animals and angels are desperately blasting hordes of bears with light to hold them back

    • Meanwhile hell is FINE

  • There’s a direct flight between Tokyo and Biloxi?? No the fuck there’s not

  • The characters on this show drink more than Mad Men. They’re all alcoholics