“Pack Mentality” is episode four of season one of Zoo.
In the previous episode, “The Silence of the Cicadas”, Mitch and Jamie had headed to the latter’s home state to talk to a senator who was pursuing the fight against Reiden Global, but the senator had given up and Jamie was going to as well. Mitch was approached in a bar by Gaspard Alves, who had recruited Chloe at the end of “Fight or Flight”, to also help, and Mitch insisted that Jamie come as well. Abe and Jackson had headed to where the latter’s father had kept his research, on a radioactive island. There, after their plane was knocked out of the sky by bats – with the second wife of Jackson’s father dying in the process – they discovered that Professor Oz was using the radiation to accelerate the mutation he was expecting. The professor had gouged out the eyes of some horses that were turning vicious. They were rescued from the island by Alves. All four have met up, as they were recruited by the same person, Delavenne, to look into the animal attacks happening globally and try to work out how to stop them, and the team is being headed by Chloe. Mitch had heard of Jackson’s father – and the latter did not exactly have a good reputation in the academic community.
Abe and Jackson are in the airport, and the latter is having problems with understanding his father’s work. Abe suggests that Jackson lets Mitch look at the research, as Mitch and Jamie are there as well. Mitch and Jackson did not get off on the best foot. Chloe is there as well and, whilst Mitch is also failing to understand Professor Oz’s research, she says that plans have changed and that they are going to Biloxi Penitentiary in Mississippi. Which caught fire at the end of the previous episode when it was invaded by what appeared to be wolves. Everyone is dead – and the prison was attacked by wolves.
Because they have no official government backing now, they are operating under false credentials – there was French national being held at the prison and Chloe is pretending to be with the French embassy in order to deal with his remains. Mitch and Abe are asked to catch a wolf for study. Jackson and Jamie are accompanying Chloe to the prison. Delavenne is providing a good level of funding, but it isn’t clear who he is as yet. Abe and Mitch do not make friends at the hunting store where the locals are planning to hunt down and kill the wolves. Mitch has previously stated he is not a people-person.
The CCTV footage of the prison attack shows the death row prisoner, Evan Lee Hartley, not being eaten by wolves. In fact, according to Jackson, he is acting as the pack’s alpha. Which is a little odd. As if everything else is perfectly normal. Hartley, in his conversation with the widow of a man he apparently killed, said things that suggested that he might have been more previously, but something happened to change him. Indeed, this seems to be the case – he was a biologist and outdoorsman who, for no reason at all, stabbed an entire hunting party to death. Something clearly happened to him.
In Antarctica, there is more weirdness as bats – not a common lifeform on the continent – perform a rather intelligently planned attack on an outpost.