Zoo - The Mini-Series

Because this was always meant to be a limited mini-series, there was no chance that I would have to endure a second season if I got into the characters and their issues as the they fight to figure out how to stop the change that has come to the planet's animals.

13 episodes seems like twice the episodes needed to tell the story that can often be light on answers when answers would have propelled the story which sometimes just plodded along. There is a lot of travelling around the world in a story that seems to take place over a 72 hour period of time. Again, it's all deliberate and therefor feels manufactured. Sure, every story is manufactured but this one seemed to hit all the story points where it needed to. Nothing that happens is really a surprise. No one stays wounded for very long.

I wanted to see more scenes of huge packs of animals fighting humans but the budget didn't call for that. Sometimes the creators could be very effective with what they had to work with. Two or three leopards loose in an abandoned hospital is enough to put everyone on full pucker alert.

This reads like a summer beach paperback and author James Patterson has written many books using this same formula. A group of specialists overcome tons of obstacles to solve a crisis. Everything however seems to rely on huge coincidences and last minute saves just like you would find in a book that worked each chapter so that you couldn't just put it down when one chapter ended and another began. In between those two points was way too much filler but just enough story to keep me interested.

 

Sometimes characters who act one way suddenly change sides and often those decisions felt forced by a story that had to have a beginning middle and end. I reminded me of the story 'hill' that we taught in junior high English. Introduction  - Rising Action - Climax - Falling Action with the heart of the drama coming from conflict.

I had no fear that the end of the story wouldn't get fully resolved by the end. All the people who lived were suppose to live. Everyone who was meant to fall in love and get together did - for the most part.

Only one character we really cared about died.

I downloaded the whole season as it went along but saved up the last three episodes for today in order to finish it off, finally. It wasn't really 'appointment' television and if I didn't have the ability to save and watch at my convenience, I would have dropped out of this story before the end.

It's just 'meh' enough to enjoy. It just needed something more to be really effective and memorable.