Robert Oz is a recurring character in Zoo, he is deceased but is shown through recordings. He is the father of Jackson Oz. He was a famous professor and a scientist who had many theories about animal behavior.
Biography[]
Robert recorded all his ideas into tapes, which Jackson calls "his [Robert's] manifesto". Most of his ideas consisted in the existence of a 'defiant pupil' that is the indisputable proof that his theory was correct. Jackson thought that his father was talking about a student but after seeing the left eye of a lion who tried to attack him (First Blood) he figured out that maybe his father was right after all.
However, there was always something missing in Robert's theories which ended up driving him to insanity.
After he was fired from Harvard for his animal evolution theories, he sunk into a deep depression. Minako, a Japanese woman he met while teaching, convinced him to continue his work and offered her family's money to sustain them since he was broke at time.
His last experiments were conducted on a radioactive island near Fukushima. He called it "his ghost of Christmas' future".
There, Robert studied the change in behavior in horses. When they developed the 'defiant pupil', he tried to isolate and reverse the mutations but failed at doing so. In a desperate attempt to stop the changes, he removed the eyeballs of every single horse he had been studying.
The last time Minako and Robert spoke, he was thrilled because he had finally understood. She didn't know for sure what he meant by that since he didn't want to say it on the phone.