“Eats, Shoots and Leaves” is episode eleven of season one of Zoo.
In the previous episode, “Emotional Contagion”, all the team, bar Chloe, managed to get onto the plane to Africa, but there were problems. Chloe was captured by Agent Brannigan after she stopped one of Ray’s team from shooting him, which resulted in both of them falling out of the open back end of the plane (and Chloe and Jackson had only just started getting together, which seemed like it had been coming for a while). Ray himself, despite being in really poor shape after being shot, was running around not long afterwards as if nothing had happened. Which seems a tad unlikely.
In Virginia, Chloe is being transported by Agent Brannigan. Brannigan does not want to listen when Chloe tells him that his friend, Shaffer, who was killed in “This is What it Sounds Like”, was dirty. Brannigan threatens to kill Chloe, then another car pulls alongside them and a man in the passenger seat shoes Brannigan in the head. Brannigan’s car goes off the road, Chloe tries to escape, but she is abducted by the two men in the other car. Gaspard Alves , the man who originally recruited Chloe in “Fight or Flight”, is the one asking her to reveal where the others are. And he’s going to have someone, someone that Alves says is very unpleasant, hurt her sister if she doesn’t.
The rest of the team, and Ray (he really doesn’t seem like someone who has been shot recently), are now in Zambia. The people, Ray’s contacts, that they were planning to meet, haven’t been answering their calls. When they turn up, the reason is obvious. The people they were planning to meet are all dead. Killed by the leopards that they have coming for. Ray had been planning to get some decent weapons from the dead men – they only have a tranq gun – but all the ammo was used trying to kill the attacking leopards. Which clearly didn’t work.
The leopards are attacking in a way that seems random, but Abe says that this is done by armies that are looking to take territory, to inspire fear. Which means the leopards are acting with a plan. And running in packs. Which is also not normal, as leopards are solitary animals. Jackson and the others are now in the Zambian bush, which has got at least a few hostile animals, and neither Mitch nor Jamie is really at home there.