Series / Zoo

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

— Opening Narration

Zoo is an American drama series aired on CBS in America, based on the novel of the same name by James Patterson (also one of the executive producers) and Michael Ledwidge. It ran for three seasons of thirteen episodes.

The series centers on reports that animals all over the world have banded together to wage attacks against humanity for no reason. Ex-field-zoologist Jackson Oz (James Wolk), whose late father was ostracized in the scientific community for anticipating a global animal uprising, finds himself caught in one while doing his job as a safari guide for tourists in Africa. When he saves the life of Chloe Tousignant (Nora Arnezeder), a French DGSE intelligence analyst who was one of the tourists caught up in an unprecedented mass lion attack, the two began to work together with fellow survivor and safari guide Abe Kenyatta in finding out who or what is making the animals hostile towards humans.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, reporter-on-crusade Jamie Campbell (Kristen Connolly) joins forces with antisocial veterinary pathologist Mitch Morgan (Billy Burke) to investigate why previously-peaceful zoo lions broke free and went on a killing spree. Although Jamie's attempts to link the killings to agricorp giant Reiden Global hit a political brick wall, Chloe's superiors at DGSE learn of the pair's interest, and recruit them to team up with Chloe, Jackson and Abe, to look into the cause for attacks that are now occurring worldwide.

And yes, the man who wrote the opening title music is that John Carpenter.

The show ran for three seasons airing between 2015 and 2017, but was canceled after the conclusion of the third season, apparently leaving the series to end on a cliffhanger.

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This show provides examples of:

• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Mitch's stepmom is about his age. They don't much like one another. Turns out they used to date until Mitch's father stole her right out from under him.
• Adaptation Expansion: Jackson in the novel investigated the mystery solo, with Chloe a supporting character and Abe Killed Off for Real in the initial lion attack. The series expands both of the latter characters, making the trio part of an Ensemble Cast with Jamie and Mitch and expanding even further in Season 2 with the addition of Dariela and Logan. The phenomenon in the book was confined to non-human mammals, but the series includes a human villain with the defiant pupil. Birds are also susceptible, as well as reptiles, insects, arachnids and hydrozoans as of Season 2. Also in Season 2, we see the effects on humans explored a lot further.
• Agony of the Feet: Jamie gets a nail stuck in her toe while hiking through the Canadian wilderness and spends most of that episode("Caraquet") not realizing it. By the time she finally does, gangrene has set in. She ends up opting to have it crudely amputated by Logan at the end of the following episode ("Collision Course").
• Always a Bigger Fish: Brannigan takes Chloe into custody, only to get shot by mooks working for Gaspard, who's also sold out to Reiden Global.
• Ancient Tradition: The Shepherds are a relatively short lived version of this, only starting their mandate to prevent mankind from wiping out the environment about two centuries ago. Turn out to also be an Ancient Conspiracy, as they plan to achieve their goal by wiping humanity out.
• Animal Wrongs Group:
  • In "Emotional Contagion", the group gets help from one of these in order to get some equipment they need to research the mutation.
  • The Shepherds turn out to be so dedicated to protecting animals from humanity's actions that they create a Sterility Plague and infect all of humanity with it, ensuring our eventual extinction.
• Antlion Monster: A huge group of moles acts collectively like this trope, undermining a building so that it collapses and crushes anyone still inside.
• Anyone Can Die: Chloe buys it in Season 2, when Dariela locks her in with the poison gas. Both Dariela and the others agonize over whether or not Chloe could have made it before the gas cloud. Then Mitch performs a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the season, staying behind at the Shepards' base to turn on the electric fence, as hybrid wolves are closing in. Or does he?.
• Artistic Licence – Anatomy: Mitch states with amazement that the hibernating bear seems to be developing "some sort of endoskeleton". The only problem with that: vertebrates already have endoskeletons. It's sort of a defining characteristic. (The source novel uses the correct term "exoskeleton". Repeated uses of the word "endoskeleton" by Mitch and other characters seem to indicate that this was an error made by the show's writers.)
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Baby rats are sexed by the presence or absence of nipples, not penises, as females have a urogenital bump that looks just like one.
  • The "triple helix" DNA's extra strand wouldn't work, as there'd be no way for enzymes to "unzip" it from its neighboring strand so its base pairs could be read.
• Artistic License – Geography: All the time, from Biloxi having a federal prison in the midst of farmland to Clearwater having a zoo, to the leopard-capture party forgetting which freakin' country they're supposed to be in.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Bats unhesitatingly die by the hundreds to take down a small plane, and more of them make kamikaze attacks on electrical equipment to short out the power. Another plane starts crashing as a Cliffhanger at the end of "Wild Things", and the pilot's announcement just before suggests that a suicidal bird strike is to blame.
• Bat Out of Hell: Swarms of bats crash a small plane, plague Rio by the millions, and disable the power of an Antarctic outpost so the occupants will freeze to death.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Nobody at the prison questions Chloe's claim that she's with the French embassy and there to claim the body and effects of a deceased French national. Or even checks whether there was a French national among the inmates who died.
• Bears Are Bad News: Chloe's superiors cite a case of black bears attacking people in the Black Forest when they're recruiting the team. A brown bear menaces a Frenchwoman in her apartment in "This Is What It Sounds Like", and in "Sleuths" the team tracks down three more in some nearby drainage tunnels. Polar bears hold a town under siege and menace Jamie and a teenage girl in "The Moon and the Stars".
• Beware of Vicious Dog: A pack of them ambushes and kills several tourists in Slovenia. An afflicted dog is nearly shot by its owner before Abe convinces him to allow his berserk pet to be used to test a possible cure. Jackson is chased by Rottweilers, then bitten by a German shepherd that'd killed its owner in the Season One finale.
• Big Bad: Reiden Global is a borderline MegaCorp who were responsible for the decimation of Jamie's hometown but got away with it. The mother cell used in their products is responsible for the aberrant animal behaviour and mutations, something they're trying to cover up at all costs even if it means depriving the world of the chance to cure the mutated animals.
  • In Season 2, we get an individual antagonist in the form of General Davies, who leads the military's response to the animal attacks. He's put in charge of carrying out the Noah Objective, and is willing to do anything to do so. And then the finale reveals that he's been an Unwitting Pawn of the Shepherds all along.
• Bittersweet Ending: Season 2: The animals are finally cured and all seems well... then we learn that Robert Oz re-engineered the triple-helix/Ghost gene cure to sterilize humans as well. Not only that but the hybrid animals that the Shepherds created on Pangea are still loose, have somehow managed to spread and multiply, and are attacking human settlements at least as regularly as normal predators would.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Double Subverted; Season One and Season Three both end with our heroes being on the wrong end of a massive animal rampage charging at them. The show, as it seemed it was going to be canceled in its first season, would have ended like this, but it got a last-minute reprieve so Season Two starts with the cliffhanger being immediately resolved. Season Three however plays it straight as the show was cancelled for real this time.
• Book Ends: Season One starts with escaped zoo lions attacking a couple of guys in a city alley. The Season Finale ends as a huge mob of escaped zoo animals charges towards the heroes' vehicle on a city street, with a lion leading the way. The Series Finale similarly ends with a horde of hybrids storming into the compound that everyone is holed up in.
• Break the Cutie: Jamie is visibly traumatized by her experiences in Canada. What finally sends her all the way over the edge is when she learns that Chloe is gone and Dariela's responsible. Sometime after that, she makes it plainly clear that she thinks the world is hopelessly done for, no matter what they do. Alison voices her concerns to Mitch about this several times.
• Chekhov's Gun: The big cats' development of a Hive Mind, which Mitch exploits by sticking the leopard cub with a hypodermic, thus attracting a bunch of adult leopards to attack the Zambian bandits.
• Cliffhanger: The penultimate episode of season one ended with the team's plane crashing on its way back from Africa. Season One's final scene of a huge herd of escaped beasts from the D.C. National Zoo charging the team's vehicle also.
• Compensating for Something: In "The Silence of the Cicadas", when a senator refuses to help Jamie in stopping Reiden Global because they're too powerful, Mitch response by telling him that he's done a thesis comparing the size between animal trophies and their own penis.
  Mitch: My condolences to your wife.
• Cool Plane: Provided to the team in Season Two as a mobile laboratory and base of operations. Comes complete with sophisticated lab equipment, cages for captured animals, living quarters, showers and (per Mitch's request) a basketball hoop.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: If you see a scene on an episode with a person confronting animals, the latter surely will take the advantage.
• Darkest Hour: From "Murmuration" when Delavane is outed to be a Reiden mole.
  • In the Season 2 finale, while the animals are cured, humanity as a whole is sterilized, dooming us to extinction.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Mitch hits this in the season 1 finale, as he's reduced to drinking and picking self-destructive bar fights because he thinks Jamie is dead and the cure for the animals, lost.
  • Jackson's is when Chloe dies. He's lost the woman he's come to love, his own mutation is progressing, he's keeping secrets from his best friend, Jamie is still missing, and they've lost two government sponsors in a row. He doesn't despair as visibly as Mitch did, but he's glum enough to accept Dariela on the team because she's already killed one Task Force member when it became necessary and can do the same for him if he becomes dangerous.
• Deadly Gas: "The Walls of Jericho" unveils this as the Noah Project's method for wiping out the animals. Later in the episode, Chloe and Dariela are forced to outrun a cloud of TX-39 when it is accidentally leaked into a hallway. Dariela makes it to safety and in a panic, closes the doors, just in time for Chloe to appear outside and seemingly suffocate to death while Dariela watches in hysterics.
• Developing Doomed Characters: The new adoptive father in "Fight or Flight" is led into a trap by his own pet dog; the lesbian couple from "Pack Mentality" are frozen to death by bats.
  • Also seems to apply to the villains, who mostly seem to get killed off within two or three episodes of their introduction.
• Dig Attack: Used by the giant bird-hybrids in season 3.
• Disney Villain Death: After finding out that Logan is The Mole for General Davies, Jamie tranqs him and shoves him out of the plane.
  • (Un-)fortunately, he survives.
• Driving Question: Whatever is making the animals join forces to attack humans. In the second season, it's which animals carry the "triple-helix" gene needed to synthesize a cure.
• Eccentric Exterminator: A Red Shirt Victim of the Week was an exterminator that hunted pets with a flamethrower and kept boasting about his life being badass enough to merit a reality show. He's unceremoniously eaten by a swarm of rats, but the flamethrower becomes a Chekhov's Gun.
• Eternal Recurrence: Chloe finds articles from a 19th century tabloid that chronicle animals exhibiting behavior and abilities that mirror what's happening now, suggesting that this has happened before, on a more limited scale.
• Explosive Breeder: Taken to extremes by the killer rats, as even the males give birth.
• Fed to the Beast: Jamie and a teenage girl are put outside the fence for polar bears by Gwen and her followers, who've been doing this on a monthly basis to try to placate the animals.
• Five-Man Band:
  • The Leader: Jackson- One of the first to experience the animals' attacks firsthand and live to tell about it. He tends to be the guiding force of the team, especially during field operations.
  • The Lancer: Chloe- She's in charge whenever Jackson isn't around (and often as not, she's The Leader when he is, especially if the situation at hand calls for dealing/negotiating with people more than the wilderness); due to being a French Intelligence operative, she has tons of diplomatic, espionage, and even combat tactics and experience under her belt.
  • The Big Guy: Abe- Literally, the biggest member of the team; Additionally, he's often the voice of reason but can be quite intimidating when the situation calls for it.
  • The Smart Guy: Mitch- He's the resident genius when it comes to analyzing why the animals are acting the way they are and how the mutation might be further altering their behavior or itself. Very snarky but always willing to come through for the team.
  • The Heart: Jamie- an Intrepid Reporter who doesn't shy away from danger to complete an objective, and can use her experience as a reporter to relate to people.
  • The Sixth Ranger: Dariela- a U.S. Army Ranger who joins the team in the beginning of Season 2 after her original unit is killed off. She's tough but loyal and would gladly lay down her life for her team.
  • After Chloe's death- Dariela takes over as The Lancer and Logan becomes The Sixth Ranger.
    • Logan is actually the Sixth Ranger Traitor, having been Gen. Davies's contact the whole time.
• Flash Forward: The final sequence of season 2, in which ten years in the future, schools are closing because no more children are being born. Abe and Dariela watch their son Isaac be among the last graduates of his elementary school ever. Hybrid animals like the ones on Pangaea have spread and are attacking humans and livestock. Jamie has become a successful author, and Jackson has kept in touch as Isaac's "uncle". In the last scene, Abe meets Mitch's now-grown daughter Clem, who claims he's still alive and can fix the problem.
• Forbidden Chekhov's Gun: Jamie warns Logan not to fire his pistol in the New Brunswick woods, as the sound will attract hostile animals to them. Sure enough, when one of the men who are chasing them fires off a shot, he's promptly pounced on by a wolf.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Made explicit in the opening narration for each Season One episode.
• Genius Bruiser: General Davies turns out to have a Ph.D. in bio sciences.
• Green Rocks: The "mother cell", a compound which reputedly makes it much cheaper for Reiden Global to manufacture everything. So they do, regardless of the side effects. Said side effects accelerate mutations in animals and cause them to become highly aggressive towards humans.
• Goal-Oriented Evolution: Animal species mutate in manners that will specifically help them to kill as many humans as possible, even at the cost of their own lives. It's suggested that even without the mother cell, they would have developed the same traits in only a few hundred years. It's later discovered that this isn't the first time in history this has happened.
• Godzilla Threshold: The government's plan in Season 2 is to kill off all mutated animals (with 2 million people as collateral damage) and have Reiden Global re-populate the species from preserved (unmutated) DNA samples. The protagonists think it's a really bad idea.
  • In "Zero Sum", Davies' men overrun the Task Force's plane, threatening to haul Jackson away as a human lab rat and hold the others hostage to his cooperation. Mitch responds by opening the captive earthquake-sloth's soundproofed box, allowing it to unleash a sonic howl that nearly tears the plane to pieces in midair.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The show seems a little torn on the message it wants to send. Actor Billy Burke said in an interview, “We expect and hope that you will take the animals’ side,” presumably because the animals on the show are meant to be seen as sympathetic avengers taking control of their own fates after years of abuse. Problem is, the brutal mass killings are outright stated by several characters to be premeditated murder, seeing as the animals have gained a ‘cognitive acuity’ similar to humans. Why murder on one side of the fence is acceptable versus the other side is not entirely explained; possibly what the show really wants is for viewers to take the animals' side initially, then grow progressively more horrified by just how nasty the defiant beasts they'd sympathized with are becoming.
• Hellish Pupils: The hostile animals and Hartley all seem to have a distorted pupil in their left eye. Jackson's father called this the "defiant pupil".
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the Season 2 finale, Mitch stays behind to ensure that the other can safely escape Pangea, and is seemingly killed by the hybrid predators. Subverted, as the epilogue reveals that he somehow survived.
• Hive Mind: Mitch's tests of a captive lion cub cause every lion in the zoo to react at once, suggesting that their minds or senses are linked.
• Home Base: Averted; the team travel all over the planet chasing down evidence and pursuing leads, seldom even remaining on the same continent for more than two or three episodes in a row. Doubly true of Jamie, who loses her job and apartment to her obsession with bringing Reiden Global down.
  • In Season 2, they get a Cool Plane that serves as a mobile lab/base of operations.
• Hope Spot: For about three seconds in "Pack Mentality", it looks like the bats are leaving because the couple released the captive birds, thus proving themselves being good humans and earning the animals' mercy. Nope, they're only leaving just because the pair have already frozen to death.
  • "Wild Things" wraps up with the leopard-capture expedition having found the means to successfully cure a dog of its abnormal aggression, suggesting they'll be able to reverse the defiant animals' condition worldwide. At least, until their plane starts to crash...
  • The season 1 finale also has one with a professional special forces team capturing a leopard in order to develop a cure, only to find out that the leopard has strayed into the lands that use Reiden Global products, meaning the leopard is now useless for that purpose.
  • Season 2 is essentially Book Ended by them: in the season premiere, they recover an uninfected leopard, only for the mutation to evolve, and in the season finale, the animals are cured, but the Shepherds sterilize humanity.
• I Choose to Stay: Done twice with Dariela. The first time when she decides to join Chloe's team instead of returning to the military and some episodes later when she remains in England to help the refugees.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Even if animals were behaving normally, the little boy who toddles innocently up to the tiger cage in "Fight or Flight" would be any parent's nightmare.
• Instant Sedation: Whatever Dariela and Abe are loading into their tranq guns, it can evidently drop a brown bear in seconds.
• It Can Think: The animals' tactics reveal their increased cognitive abilities: obscuring their own tracks, luring people into ambushes, sabotaging equipment.
  • Exaggerated in Season 2, with animals such as vultures and snakes poisoning human food/water supplies, sloths communicating with moles to cause earthquakes, jellyfish summoning hurricanes, blizzard lizards, cicada swarms releasing insufferably high tones...
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet: Jackson's trip to the forest has him noticing that the forest is too quiet, which is unusual.
• Kill All Humans: This seems to be the agenda of the affected animals.
• Living Lie Detector: The Russian Prime Minister acts as one when questioning Jamie as to Mitch's whereabouts and whether they really are close to finding a cure.
• MacGyvering: Mitch jury-rigs a test for whether bacteria are agitating the animals' nervous systems with a hotel coffee pot, a car battery and the milk from a couple of coconuts. Later, he throws together a sonic oscillator to drive off bats with a bunch of parts he'd only asked for from his captors so he could buy enough time to get rescued.
• Made of Iron: Ray and Jackson both recover from gunshot injuries quickly enough to be back on their feet and exerting themselves within a matter of hours. Jackson, at least, does groan a lot while doing so, although his wound had been the more serious of the two.
• Mad Scientist: Jackson's father Robert is remembered as one, due to being the only one to foresee the animal uprising. It turns out later that the Shepherds, the cabal Robert was part of, are all this, creating hybrid animals and ultimately sterilizing humanity, in order to return the world to the animals.
• Magic Genetics: Multiple members of a given species all, at about the same time, begin displaying exactly the same traits. These traits require many complex mutations to be workable: for example, gigantism in female rats and parthenogenesis in males. Animals exposed in the womb are born with the mutations, but fully-developed adults will mutate just as completely: only in the case of the bears are they actually shown taking any extra time to undergo these extreme metamorphoses.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Wolves in Mississippi, bats swarming in Antarctica, European brown bears in Paris, a freakin' kinkajou in New Brunswick. Lampshaded in season 2 when Abe asks how an African elephant can be in Argentina.
  • While wolves did historically occur in Mississippi, not only are they extirpated, but it was the now-critically endangered red wolf that was found there instead of the gray wolves featured on the show.
  • Bison, grizzly bears, and polar bears are also shown inhabiting New Brunswick.
• Motive Misidentification: The mistake everyone makes with the Shepherds, assuming their line of "we want to set the world back to the way it was" means restoring the balance before the outbreak. Instead they intend to return the world to the animals by sterilizing the human race.
• Multinational Team: The DGSE forms one at the end of "The Silence of the Cicadas" to further check on animal attacks.
• Mythology Gag: Season 2 addresses the mutation making the jump to infect humans. This is the premise for James Patterson's recently released sequel/novella, Zoo 2.
• No Ending: In “The Barrier”, Abigail kidnaps Clementine’s baby, the key to curing sterility on humanity, and makes a deal with Jackson. If he lets the hybrids run lose, she’ll give him and the team the baby. The problem is that the hybrids have the ability to make animals aggressive towards humans through biting them. But given that humanity’s survival is on the line, Jackson reluctantly agrees to the deal and uses his team’s plane to destroy the barrier, thus releasing the hybrids. Unfortunately, this is how the show ends due to its cancellation.
• Oh, Crap!: More than one's fair share of these, considering it's a thriller series about animals turning on humans but the one the sticks out is the Season 2 finale's revelation that Robert Oz's cure was engineered to target and sterilize humans.
• One Dose Fits All: Dosage from Abe's and Dariela's tranq guns doesn't seem to matter, as they use the same darts on rampaging dogs as they do on bears or big cats.
• Only Sane Man: Despite everything that has happened, Jackson is still routinely called out on his father's "crazy" theories, even though they have proven to be correct.
• Orifice Evacuation: A living mutated snake is pulled out of a man's throat.
• Outrun the Fireball: "The Walls of Jericho" has Chloe and Dariela having to outrun a cloud of noxious gas that has been accidentally released into a hallway. Dariela makes to a safe zone first and in a panic, closes the doors before Chloe can catch up. She then breaks down in hysterics when Chloe appears outside the doors a second later and appears to choke to death on the gas right in front of her.
• Panthera Awesome: Lions are the first of the killer animals featured, attacking people both at the LA zoo and in Botswana. Performing tigers in episode 2 don't kill anyone ... yet. Leopards kill a lot of people in "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and "Wild Things". Some huge black cats menace townsfolk at the church in "Jamie's Got A Gun".
  • Near the season's end, we learn that the final animal needed to synthesize the cure is a saber-toothed cat. Yes, they still exist here.
• Prison Episode: "The Silence of the Cicadas" has wolves overwhelming the prison guards in order to free Evan Lee Hartley, an inmate who's in jail for killing a hunter in defense of animals.
• Psychic Powers: First seen in the lions, and even crossing species lines at one point.
• Red Shirt: The prison guards in "The Silence of the Cicadas". To be fair, they didn't expect wolves to take them out so easily.
• The Reveal: Dr. Robert Oz is alive...and in the custody of Gen. Davies, forced to help him with the Noah Objective.
  • The Shepherds' real goal is wiping out humanity and returning the world to the animals.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Jamie makes sure Logan doesn't get away with betraying her and the team and delivers him a Disney Villain Death.
• Rhino Rampage: The opening scene for Season 2 shows a rhino colliding with the team's SUV.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The female rats.
• Savage Wolves: A pack of them attack a prison in episode 3, and are made scarier in that they aren't purely savage: they coordinate their movements, target a cook who's using hot oil so he'll spill it and set the place on fire, and hide their tracks when they leave.
• Sewer Gator: Giant mole-tunnel gator actually, but close enough.
• Ship Tease: From the moment they meet, romance is teased between Jackson and Chloe. In Emotional Contagion they finally kiss, but are separated when she falls out of the airplane they team is escaping in. His mutation and her death put a damper on this.
• Shock and Awe: Ants develop the ability to generate electricity. They kill Chloe's boss by crawling inside her hotel meal and electrocuting her from within when she eats some. Their advancing swarm nearly blows up the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
• "Shut Up" Kiss: In Season 1's "Wild Things," Mitch is musing about the work the team's done in the past few weeks when Jamie cuts him off with a kiss ...right before their plane crashes.
• So Last Season: Near the end of Season 1, Mitch is able to synthesize a cure from a "mother cell" and a leopard that hasn't been exposed to it. The cure is thought lost until early in Season 2, when it turns out that the animals have already mutated beyond the point where the cure works, sending Mitch back to the drawing board.
• Spare a Messenger: Jackson was able to save Abraham from being killed by the lions after they massacred tourists on a safari trip. However, he thinks that the lions spared him so that he can let the rest of humanity know that the animals are willing to conduct further attacks against them.
• Spiders Are Scary: Deadly-venomous Brazilian wandering spiders that attack in groups certainly are, in "Sex, Lies, and Jellyfish".
• Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: Eleanor's laptop displays a global map showing predicted animal - and human - fatalities from the Noah Objective.
• Sterility Plague: The gas that's supposed to wipe out all animals affected by the Ghost gene/triple helix is actually this, targeted at humans.
• Story Arc: Jamie's crusade against the multinational conglomerate Reiden Global, which leads her to think their products are responsible for the sudden animal attacks. Jackson must track down his late father's research notes and former colleagues, suspecting that Oz Sr. may have identified the cause of the attacks he'd foreseen. Mitch's daughter is ill, and needs medication that Reiden Global can provide if he betrays the team and returns the "mother cell" to them.
• Summon Bigger Fish: When the team is apprehended by bandits in Zambia, Mitch attracts a pack of leopards to attack the thugs by jabbing the leopard cub with a hypodermic needle.
• Superpower Lottery: Strength and efficacy of unusual abilities in "Phase Two" animals is all over the map, from vultures that upchuck partially-digested remains (which is a Real Life vulture defensive behavior, hence not really a "power" at all) to jellyfish that cause hurricanes.
• Surprise Car Crash: Near the end of the episode "Blame it on Leo", the car Jamie rides with Leo Butler gets smashed up when Evan crashes the pickup on the side to secure a sample of the mother cell the latter kept hidden from Reiden Global.
• Swarm of Rats / You Dirty Rat!: In "The Cheese Stands Alone", the Monster of the Week is a rat hive-mind.
• Take That!: In "That Great Big Hill Of Hope," Abraham tells Jackson about secret restaurants that still serve meat, and Jackson responds by mentioning underground groups of cat lovers. Abraham replies that cat lovers should have been in private before this all started. Granted, this is from a guy who was almost eaten by big cats recently.
• Terrifying Pet Store Rat: The trained animals who "menace" their human victims sometimes look more playful than infuriated, despite the dubbed-in snarls.
  • A "leopard cub" is played by a young serval cat, possibly the same one that'd appeared as an actual serval in the previous episode.
• Time Skip:
  • The Season 1 finale skips several months ahead of the previous episode's cliffhanger ending.
  • The epilogue of the Season 2 finale jumps ahead ten years after the animals are cured and humanity is sterilized.
• Tranquillizer Dart: Preferred by the Task Force when animals need to be captured alive for research, and to avoid needless killing while they search for a cure.
• Trapped in Containment: Chloe dies this way, from poison gas that got released from its canister during a gunfight at Reiden Global. To make it worse, Dariela has to hit the button that traps Chloe in order to prevent the gas from escaping.
• Truly Single Parent: The male rats develop this mutation in order to multiply.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Leonard Pierce, 19th century pseudoscientist, made a traveling sideshow out of X-raying animals and people. Too bad his bodged-together equipment turned everything he scanned into a carrier of the Phase Two mutant gene.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: The real objective all along of Robert and the Shepherds: to "return the world to the way it was" by sterilizing the entire human race.
• Veganopia: Inverted; humans give up eating meat by the end of Season One, but not for ethical reasons. Most livestock have escaped or been destroyed and people fear exposure to whatever's affecting the animals if they eat animal products. Thus, it's a vega-dystopia, not a vega-utopia.
• Viewer-Friendly Interface: When Jamie steps away from her laptop for a moment, windows visibly open up and scroll down rapidly on the screen. Presumably this is because, if it's to foreshadow later events, the audience needs to see she's being hacked.
• We Need a Distraction: The team employs this to hack into Reiden Global's French office database by letting Jackson serve as the distraction, claiming the security guard just won a free vacation while Jamie hacks into the database's facial recognition security system.
  • In "The Moon and the Star", Maddie distracts Gwen and her supporters by crying and pleading for her life, allowing Jamie to slip Logan an item to help them all escape.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: General Davies in Season 2. He's perfectly willing to not only kill off all mutated animals but also over 2 million people, who would die as collateral damage. Furthermore, he won't hesitate to kill anyone who stands in his way.
  • The Shepherds are so determined to undo humanity's damage to the planet that they're willing to wipe us out with a Sterility Plague.
• What the Hell, Hero?: The team gives Mitch this when they learn that he nearly gave Reiden Global the mother cell.
• Wham Episode: "Pack Mentality" has a photo of Evan together with Jackson's father, Robert.
  • "This is What it Looks Like". Evan dies after being injected and tells Jackson "Your father... did this to me!"
    • Also the reveal that Special Agent Shaffer is a mole for Reiden.
  • "Wild Things". Chloe and a repentant Delavane contact a new bunch of allies from the U.S. government, while the rest of the team successfully cure a defiant dog of its aggression in Zimbabwe, only to suffer a Cliffhanger plane crash on their way back from Africa.
  • "Sex, Lies, and Jellyfish" Animal mutations have happened before, and Jackson's father is alive and a prisoner of General Davies.
    • Double-whammy- Oz Sr. injected Jackson with the ghost gene as a child and the Noah Objective, was in fact, his idea.
  • The conclusion of the Season 2 finale, where we learn that Robert Oz altered the Noah Objective's animal-extermination gas to sterilize humans.
  • ”The Barrier”. Let’s see here. Jackson and the gang managed to stop all the beacons from activating. However, it is revealed that the hybrids can make the animals aggressive by biting them. Abigail Westbrook and her Vulture Hybids kill Logan and kidnaps Clementine’s and Sam Parker/Connor Oz’s baby, the key to curing sterility. Abigail promises Jackson to return the baby to him but only if he lets the hybrids run loose. Jackson proceeds with this deal by ramming his team’s plane into the barrier. The only thing that keeps the hybrids away from the humans and animals. Unfortunately, due to series cancellation, we’re not gonna find out what happens next…
• Wham Line: From "Zero Sum": "Your mother. She did. She killed all of them."
  • From the Season 2 finale: "My father just destroyed the world."
• What Happened to the Mouse?: An almost literal example: the mission to collect one male and one female rat in "The Cheese Stands Alone" is forgotten in favor of wiping out the colony, and the fate of the captive male and offspring is unresolved.
• Would Hurt a Child: Although not shown on screen, one of the cases cited by the DGSE was of bears attacking children in the Black Forest. It's implied that if Jamie hadn't reported the cats Mitch found lurking in the trees, the animals would have attacked the kids at day camp the next morning. Crows assail families in a park and one menaces a baby in "Murmuration".