The Bite is a 2021 television mini-series set during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It was produced as a collaboration between CBS and Charter Communications and released via the latter as a Spectrum Original.
Rachel (Audra McDonald) is a doctor in quarantine while her husband Zack (Steven Pasquale) works for the CDC at their headquarters. Her upstairs neighbor Lily (Taylor Schilling) is a dominatrix who's recently written a memoir on her profession. Rachel continues to consult with her patients over video chat. One of her patients complains of a bite he received from a bagboy at a local store. Soon after, the patient collapses and dies...then revives as a zombie and kills his wife. Soon, more cases of people dying and resurrecting crop up (from an infection the CDC dubs Sun-9) and Rachel finds herself having to work with Lily to find a way to stop it.
The Bite includes examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg:
- After Galen turns and Lily handcuffs him to the fridge, he chews his hand off to get free. Not only that, the disembodied hand comes to life itself and tries to attack Lily. She traps it and sends it to Rachel for a tissue sample.
- After it's discovered that Lily's father is infected, Rachel walks her mother through amputating his arm before the infection can take effect.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: The final episode takes place on Rachel's birthday, after she gets infected with Sun-9. She spends much of the episode trying to find a cure.
- Apocalypse Wow: Mostly subverted. Most of the societal effects of the outbreak is either seen from the news reports or takes the form of offscreen noise whenever the delivery man comes to Rachel’s apartment.
- Bittersweet Ending: In the final episode, Brian succumbs to Sun-9, but retains enough sapience to kill himself. Zack and Cyndi discover a possible cure for Sun-9 and send it to infected Rachel, but Rachel can't tell if the last part is supposed to be Sodium Chloride or Sodium Chlorite. Before Zack can clarify it, Cyndi turns into a zombie and kills him. Lily comes by Rachel's apartment and finds her trying to decide which formula to test on herself. Lily deliberately infects herself so they can test both. They test both formulae, knowing that one will die while the other will be cured, but the show ends before we find out which one survives.
- Bottle Episode: The entire series takes place in either Rachel's or Lily's apartment, the CDC headquarters, or various other simple rooms. Justified as it takes place during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the characters are supposed to be in quarantine.
- Hidden Depths: Lily is a dominatrix who wrote a memoir. But when she has to find the source of Sun-9 and the possible cure, she proves to be a halfway decent detective.
- Hypocrite: Rachel displays annoyance that Zack is working closely with Cyndi since they had an affair not long ago. However, Rachel herself is currently having an affair with Brian.
- Improvised Armor: When Zack and Cyndi discover they need to get to another room to relay a possible cure to Rachel (and possibly the rest of the uninfected world), they also discover a horde of zombies in their path. After Cyndi reveals a cache of weapons, Zack takes a stack of reports and wraps them around their arms to protect themselves from zombie bites. They successfully make it to the other room where Cyndi discovers a zombie bit completely through the report on her arm, infecting her.
- Not a Zombie: When Josh and Joel from Rate Your Room check back in on Kyle White, they note that he's added some color to his room. They don't seem to notice that he's become a zombie and the color he's added is blood spatter. Later, Joel becomes a zombie and Josh doesn't notice until it's too late.
- Not Using the "Z" Word: Averted. Once it becomes clear what's going on, the word "zombie" is used quite frequently.
- Raising the Steaks: Lily is taking care of a couple's cat in her apartment. After Galen turns, he attacks the cat. It later turns up as one of the zombies.
- Skewed Priorities: After Olivia is infected after having sex with an infected man, she refuses to identify him because she doesn't want his wife to find out. Apparently, she's fine with the wife potentially becoming a zombie and spreading the virus.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- Lily contacts Josh and Joel from Rate Your Room after discovering Joel was in a relationship with the bagboy who bit Miles Bresser. After getting the information she needs from Josh, we see that Joel was infected and has turned. After he gets out of his room, Josh goes to talk to him despite Lily's pleas not to. Josh doesn't notice Joel is a zombie right up until he gets munched. (Of course, they also didn't notice that Kyle White had become a zombie either.)
- Lily contacts her publisher and tries to warn her about Sun-9, only to be dismissed. Right about then, a zombie arrives in her office and the publisher goes to meet him, thinking it's a client of hers with a big dog. Not surprisingly, she gets killed by the zombie.
- Transformation at the Speed of Plot: Sun-9 seems to have no set time period for its victims:
- Miles Bresser is bitten the day before he shows his wound to Rachel. He turns into a zombie a few hours after that.
- After Miles turns, he attacks and kills his wife Petra who rises as a zombie herself after approximately a minute.
- Brian is nearby when the Bressers become zombies and is infected as a result. However, he makes it through the rest of the series (several days) before he turns.
- Rachel is infected in the next to last episode, but shows no signs of infection to the end which seems to take place no sooner than the following day.
- In the finale, Cyndi discovers she was bitten and infected while she and Zack were fighting through a mass of zombies. In what seems to be minutes, she turns and kills Zack before he can clarify the final part of the possible cure.
- The Unreveal: The series ends just before we find out if Rachel or Lily is the one who took the cure and who is the one who dies.
- Unstoppable Mailman: Clem, a messenger from a delivery service, actually. He's called upon to deliver samples and equipment to and from Rachel's apartment. As the series progresses, he finds his work conditions steadily worsening as more and more zombies appear, but he always manages to make the delivery without complaint. In the finale, he even slaughters a half dozen zombies to deliver a package to Rachel.
- Viewer-Friendly Interface: Impressively averted! All the computer screens show a mostly realistic version of macOS, even including the correct logos for the Finder, Safari, Siri, and iTunes. The only difference is the fictional video calling software "TeleHealth Drive" (which is still fairly realistic for a program like that)
- Virus-Victim Symptoms: Sun-9 infectees display the following symptoms:
- Blue veins spreading from the point of infection. (Miles Bresser has them spreading from the bite on his arm while Olivia, who was infected sexually, has them spreading from her vagina.)
- Decreasing blood pressure. (Miles at one point has a BP of forty over twenty and the woman who attacked a partygoer at the Lake of the Ozarks was later shown to have a blood pressure of zero over zero.)
- An absentminded tendency to snap their jaws shut. (Olivia does this several times while video conferencing with Rachel. Also seen in a politician, a talk show host, an NSA agent, and a high-ranking member of the CDC.)
- Increased appetite. (Miles Bresser and Olivia both mention this and Olivia later gives in and eats a pigeon.)
- Death and resurrection as a zombie. (Too many examples to list.)
- Zombie Apocalypse: The show displays the start of one caused by an experimental Botox derivative reacting to COVID-19 and spreading from there.
