Zoo: Murmuration Recap

Synopsis for 1×09: Mitch’s betrayal doesn’t go exactly as planned as he unearths the fact they’re all working for Reiden after all. The team has to learn to trust him again while a bunch of birds begin to attack.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Last week left off with Mitch poised and ready to commit the ultimate betrayal. However, moments before the hand off, he saw the man behind their entire team talking to another Reiden worker. Realizing that they’d been betrayed, he shoved the mother cell back into his bag, stole the pills, and made a run for it. Delavenne joined in the chase as he revealed his true colors as a man loyal to Reiden Global. Thankfully, Mitch got away, but not without costing the team a certain measure of safety.

The FBI guy who had been on a date ended up on the hunt for Jamie. Schaffer had really worked for the FBI, which is why the guy is so interested in finding his killer. Little did they know, he was working off the books on a mission (that mission being, no doubt, to work with Reiden Global). They were able to track his last whereabouts and realized he’d been with Chloe and decided to look into her.

Back in Boston, Mitch admitted what he did and that Delavenne wasn’t who he initially seemed to be. The entire team was pissed, but they had other things to worry about unfortunately. What with Chloe being wanted by the FBI and Mitch talking about not being completely sure he can come up with a cure, things seemed sort of hopeless. Though, in a moment of brilliance, the team had an idea: if they could find an animal that had mutated without being touched by Reiden, they might be able to begin to form a cure.

Mitch left with Abraham to go deliver the pills to his daughter while Jamie, Jackson, and Chloe went off to investigate their next step to finding the animal they needed. Though Jackson stopped them and insisted that they needed to get out ahead of the chaos, and claimed he had an idea. They split ways. Jamie went off to arrange a meet with a friend who works for a newspaper, while Jackson and Chloe decided to pay Delvanne a little visit to talk to him about their discovery.

The meeting with Delvanne doesn’t really go as planned. They made an offer, he made a counter offer, and both parties walked away with nothing except the knowledge that their bridge had been officially burned.

Chloe, Jackson, and Jamie ended up at a bar where they began to map out where animals that hadn’t been touched by Reiden could be by doing all sorts of cross referencing. While they worked, so did the FBI, and the FBI managed to track down the phone she’d used to call her friend. No doubt they planned to use it to track her down.

Mitch managed to get the medications to his daughter’s house, but not before he noticed the birds all around them acting up. He called his ex wife only to hear that the birds were attacking everyone at the park he and his daughter had visited a couple episodes ago. Panicked and not quite sure what to do, he and Abraham acted fast while at the park, Clem and her mother hid under a play structure to stay safe from the birds. They called out to a mother trying to get herself and her baby to safety, only to watch the mother get devoured by birds.

Back with the team, they went out to meet Jamie’s contact in a warehouse. Unfortunately for them, the FBI guy found them. They had their first altercation, and they tried to tell him that Schaffer had been dirty. He didn’t want to hear about it and refused to believe that the man he’d “loved like a son” could have done such a thing. They managed to subdue him and escape, but just barely.

Clem, after she watched a mother get killed by the crows, watched as one of them landed on the stroller and looked at the child. They all seemed to be waiting, but for what? We found out when Clem rushed out from where she’d been hiding to try and rescue the baby. All of the birds descended on her and her mother, and they were only rescued last minute by Mitch and Abraham who had brought the fire department. They used the hoses to spray the birds and had a temporary victory.

The rest of the team met back up at Mitch’s ex wife’s house to regroup. Jamie’s friend couldn’t run the story, so their plan was sort of stuck. Simultaneously, viewers were shown that a police unit accompanied by the FBI agent were on their way to that very house to take them down. Unknowingly, the team continued to discuss their next move. It was Mitch who came up with the next idea, thanks to his daughter’s stuffed leopard, and pointed out that Jackson’s dad had pointed out something about leopards that might be the lead they needed.

With a new lead, they decided they’d head to a part of Africa that hadn’t been touched by Reiden to try and locate a “clean” specimen so they could take a stab at a cure.

The FBI and police converged on the house, though when they entered they found it empty. Apparently the team had just managed to escape by minutes. They had a police scanned they’d been using to try and stay ahead of the police and were on the road, headed to God-only-knows-where to try and get to Africa to move onto the next phase of their plan.

Only, things became dangerous as Delvanne and a head member of Reiden Global discussed them. Delvanne was ordered to put a hit out on the team, and things definitely seem more dire than they may realize.