“The Silence of the Cicadas” is episode three of season one of Zoo.
In the previous episode, “Fight or Flight”, Mitch and Jamie started checking the brain patterns of a lion cub, which revealed some weirdness – brain activity that doesn’t exist in lions. All the other great cats at the zoo started acting oddly, and Mitch started to believe they were actually managing to communicate long distance with each other.
Jackson and Abraham are heading to Japan to find the remainder of the former’s father’s recordings, in the hopes that they will shed more light. Chloe Tousignant, who Jackson rescued in “First Blood”, has been asked to help regarding the matter of the lions in Botswana and what happened in Slovenia. The latter was not what might have been expected. The tigers didn’t go mad and attack the audience; instead a man – and not the first person either to have this happen to – was lured out of his hotel by a small dog, to an alley where a lot of bigger, more dangerous dogs were. Dogs who had already attacked and killed several people. Which displayed a rather disturbing amount of coordination and planning on the part of the dogs, and was the first aberrant behaviour seen outside of felines. Chloe’s actual job – she works for the DGSE (French external intelligence; think MI6 or CIA) as something (which hasn’t been made clear yet; other than she’s skilled at it) – makes her suited to help in the matter, not being nearly killed by lions.
Chloe and the man who asked for her help in the matter are in Slovenia. They are looking at the body of the victims of the dog attacks. There are six in total. The man, Gaspard Alves, wanted to show her tangible proof of what is happening. Chloe isn’t a field agent, she is an analyst, one of the top ones in the DGSE and has many other qualities as well. Combined with her experience in Africa, that makes her invaluable. Even though she says her expertise is with humans, not animals. Gaspard suggests she treat the animals as if they were human. When she does so, these leads her to a disturbing conclusion.
Abe and Jackson are in Tokyo. Given how long they have been travelling, and the fact that Abe hasn’t been away from Africa in over a decade, he wants to go for pleasure before business. Jackson wants to find the address they are looking for first. When they get there, the woman who answers the door recognises Jackson. From photos belonging to her husband, Jackson’s father. She is not surprised by what is happening to the lions, but she, Minako, lacks the professor’s final research. He had hidden it on a radioactive island. On the trip out to the island during the daytime, their plane runs into a cloud of bats. Bats that were flying much, much higher than normal. And during the day. Hitting clouds of flying things is not good for planes. This would appear to be the third type of animal acting strangely.
In Los Angeles, Jamie wants Mitch to take the evidence they have to show that Reiden Global pesticides are causing problems to a senator. Mitch points out that they lack evidence; they only have a theory. Which is true. He says that there does seem to be a mutation that is creating a hive-like mind in lions, making them more like bees, but that this sounds more crazy than anything else. They have nothing really linking Reiden Global to this. Jamie persuades him to go see the senator anyway. She hasn’t been telling Mitch the entire truth either. Jamie does reveal the origin for her hatred of Reiden Global.
In Biloxi, a man about to be executed is refusing to do what the prison warden wants, until he spies what looks like a wolf acting strangely out the window. At which point his behaviour changes.
There are more and more animal attacks around the world.