“Sleuths” is episode seven of season one of Zoo.
In the previous episode, “This is What it Sounds Like”, the Mother Cell was recovered from Evan Lee Hartley, after the latter had gone into an opticians and had the optometrist perform surgery on his eye that had the blown pupil. The surgery did not go well, and Hartley died as a result. Agent Shaffer, who was acting a bit strangely for an FBI agent, also turned out to be looking for the Mother Cell, and killed the optometrist, blaming the death on Hartley. He tried to get the Mother Cell back and, as a result, Jamie wound up shooting and killing him in self defence. She, and Jackson, seem to have managed to get away, even though they killed an FBI agent. Surely that will have consequences?
The team are all together again and are now in Paris, where, in the previous episode, a bear went into a woman’s house and behaved aggressively before it went into hibernation – in summer. They are looking through tunnels where they can hear noises, which Abe says are bears, before the episode goes back 42 hours and to Washington, D.C. Jamie is having her photo taken, so she can have a new passport that doesn’t link her to a murder. She thinks that she should turn herself in, and that she killed an FBI agent, but Abe points out that what she did was shoot a man claiming to be an FBI agent who was trying to kill her and Jackson. They just can’t prove that. Jamie wants to, and prove that Shaffer was working for Reiden, and Abe agrees, but he doesn’t know how. Yet.
They may now have the Mother Cell, but Mitch says they can’t go to the government. They need proof that what Leo Butler said in “Blame it on Leo” is true; that the Mother Cell is in all of Reiden’s products, and that it is what is causing the aberrant behaviour in animals. A bloody knife is what Mitch calls it. Then Chloe says that they are going to Paris – four Eurasian brown bears were being studied and their trackers had gone offline before one of the bears turned up in the woman’s apartment. The other three bears are still missing. Apparently a pack of bears is called a ‘sleuth.’ Jackson says that this could be Mitch’s bloody knife, if the Mother Cell is found in the bears. Mitch then contacts an executive at Reiden Global and says that he has the Mother Cell, and is willing to give it back – but wants something in return. So, what game is Mitch playing?
In Paris, it turns out that the eye of the hibernating brown bear is normal – no ‘defiant pupil.’ Which would suggest that the bears have not been exposed to the Mother Cell. Or the assumption is wrong. In Paris, Chloe actually has more authority than normal, and she and Jackson speak to the people looking for the bears. The idea that the bears are still in the city, and perhaps underground, is proposed, and it can be quickly determined that one of the people is Chloe’s not-quite-husband, the one she found was cheating on her with her sister (played by Simon Kassianides, Sunil Bakshi from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)
Why is the bear hibernating in summer? Mitch thinks that possibly it isn’t normal hibernation, but because the bear is changing. Into something. But what? Probably something you wouldn’t want to encounter in a tunnel. First, Abraham has an idea about how to help Jamie.
Abraham reveals something about his past to Jamie, at least part of which could have been guessed, from hints given so far. Mitch comes up with a theory as to what the Mother Cell is doing to the animals.