Zoo: The Cheese Stands Alone Recap

Synopsis for 1×08: Rats. Rats everywhere. And we’re not just talking about the animals.

Rating: ?????

From Paris back to the states, the team set out on the next mission. This time, they ended up tracking some rats. Apparently, off the coast of Massachusetts, the rat population on a vessel exploded. The rats proceeded to kill the crew members and swim to shore, onto an island nearby. Chloe, Jamie, Abraham, and Jackson headed off to the island to investigate while Mitch stayed behind after claiming he was going to do some digging. Of course really he was staying behind to give up the mother cell, but no one else seemed to have any suspicion.

Before meeting up with the representative from Reiden, however, Mitch decided to go visit his daughter. Apparently at some point he’d arranged a visit to see her for the first time since she was a baby. The poor girl didn’t seem to know what to make of him, but with a little help from her mother, they decided on a picnic in the park.

The rest of the team made it safely to the island, though the island turned out to be anything but safe. Jackson ran into an old childhood crush who had managed to become Sheriff, and tried to express his concern about the rats. She, naturally, thought he was being a bit ridiculous and couldn’t seem to understand exactly what was at risk. When he told her to evacuate the island, she just shrugged him off and sent them toward an old hotel that was being renovated.

At said hotel was an exterminator who met a grim end at the teeth of a lot of angry rats. Naturally, the team had no clue and entered into the hotel to hunt down the rats. Their goal? Capture one male and one female to figure out how they are reproducing so quickly. After all, the crew on the ship that had been killed hadn’t noticed a huge number of rats before taking off. Therefore, the conclusion they came to was that the rats had rapidly reproduced on the ship, causing the insane spike in numbers.

Back in a place that is rat free except for himself, Mitch and his daughter hung out at the park and ate sub par sandwiches. She talked about the fact that she wasn’t allowed to go out on her own anymore due to her diagnosis, and that the park was the only place her mother did allow her to go alone. That’s why it was “her” park. Mitch, being the awkwardly sweet man he is, gave her a gift in the form of an old parking ticket. Apparently it was from the day she was born, when he’d parked illegally just so that he could be there when she came into the world. How heartwarming. It isn’t a surprise then that he’d be willing to go through with betraying his team in order to get medication for her.

Meanwhile, in New York, a mystery man was out on a date with a woman he met via a dating service. Of course this story seemed quite random in the midst of everything going on, but the writers on Zoo have a way of tying everything together. He gave some spiel about how so many women on the dating site had used an “emergency” excuse to get out of the date, and the current woman seemed charmed and turned down her own opportunity to use the age old trick to get out of a bad date. They seemed to enjoy each other and continued http://www.montauk-monster.com/pharmacy/antibiotics their date out on a walk.

Jamie, back with the rat issue, had another heart to heart with Abraham while he tried to restore power to the building. He asked her a simple question: once her revenge plan was over, what would she do? What would be next? He tried to show her that focusing on one single thing for so long wasn’t healthy, and it probably wasn’t going to make her feel particularly better even after it was all over. Naturally, Jamie disagreed.

The team returned to find one of their traps had caught a male rat, but they still needed to catch a female. Unfortunately for them, after a quick power surge, the elevators came up and opened. Jackson thought it would be Becky, his Sheriff friend, but instead it was thousands of rats that poured out of the elevator and set out to attack the crew. They had to run, and in the process Chloe was separated from the rest of them. Of course, after they were separated, Becky finally did show up and put herself in a precarious situation where she was vulnerable to rat attacks.

Back in New York City, Mr. Mystery Man and his date went on a carriage ride right after he received a phone call from work. Apparently there was someone who went by the number “12” that he worked with who hadn’t checked in in some time. Well, turned out that “12” was Agent Shaffer, who Jamie shot a couple episodes earlier. As the carriage ride began, the horse lost its cool and began barreling forward toward a street fair. The carriage driver and both passengers were forced to bailout, and Mystery Man’s date had to be taken to the hospital for her wounds.

It was then that he got information about the death of “12,” and was going to begin the investigation himself.

Mitch and his daughter finished up their day together, and his ex-wife essentially told him off after he’d put Clementine to bed. She reminded him that they didn’t need him. They’d been fine without him for so long, that him reappearing now didn’t make any sense. In a way, it seemed like she realized there was something bigger at play but Mitch simply excused himself.

Team Rat Trap was still split up, Chloe with Becky somewhere and Jackson, Abraham, and Jamie trying to find the “rat queens,” that had to exist to feed all of the pups. Apparently it was the males who had somehow been asexually reproducing, so in order to get the female they needed they had to go deeper into the hotel. They found the queen rats, and Jackson came to the conclusion that perhaps the rats were not changing to survive but rather to promote the destruction of another species. Animals were changing in ways that would help them destroy humanity.

In the depths of the rat nest, things became dicey until Becky and Chloe showed up with the flamethrower the exterminator had been using earlier in the episode. They burned the place down and were all thankfully able to escape with what they needed in hand.

While all that happened, Mitch finally met with the guy at Reiden Global. They were going to make the pass off, though Mitch realized as he pulled the mother cell out of his bag that the man behind their little team was standing in another room. They made eye contact and the look on Mitch’s face was devastating as the episode closed off on a bit of a cliffhanger.