Spoiler alerts are ahead. Maybe don’t read this until you’ve watched all of the series as I will include some major plot points. You have been warned!

As ya’ll probably know, I am an animal rights activist. I have been since I was about 5 and would get into the box with my puppy when she started whining in the night. True story!

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Yours truly snuggled up in a box with our Sheltie. She was less amused than I was, apparently.

I almost didn’t even watch this damned show because of my stance on animal rights. Then, I was assured it was really more about the humans than the animals, (which was mainly true) and I tried to join the Carole Baskin bandwagon and convince myself that she was really trying to do the right thing for these animals. I went in with the hope that after the average, decent people saw this show, they would also be fed up with the exotic animal trade and try to make some changes. I thought maybe there was hope for these animals. I thought maybe Joe Exotic would be innocent.

I was sadly mistaken on all accounts. The only thing this show was good for was the “oh shit” distraction factor that I needed for this heinous first half of 2020.

The Main Players

I can honestly say that whenever one character on this show would say something about another character, I believed them. Any and all of it, no matter how ridiculous, good or bad, I thought to myself, “I know he/she is right.” I mean, come on, all the main players are batshit crazy, right?

You’ve got a gun-toting, bleach-blond mullet sporting, gay polygamist cowboy (at least in his mind) who runs a not-quite-legal roadside zoo while simultaneously running for governor of Oklahoma and President of the United States. In case you have been living under a rock, I am describing Joe Exotic.

In the other corner, you have a man that is something like Joe’s mentor and role model, a man who dubbed himself Bhagavan, meaning “Lord” when his real identity lists him as Kevin Antle from Salinas, CA. People call him “Doc” for short, because believe it or not, he has a phD in “Mystical Sciences”, which may or may not be an actual thing. On paper, Doc Antle seems to be legit: he has a phD, even if it is in a field no one really comprehends, he runs a non-profit “conservation” organization and does seem to be a competent businessman; however, as per usual, there is something rotten in the state of South Carolina, where he runs his “conservation”, which is really just the government name for an amusement park where he grooms young women into being his “wives”, which is a generous term for indentured servitude with sexual escapades on the side.

In the other corner, you have the mongoose to Doc Antle and Joe Exotic’s snake, Carole Baskin. A cult of personality in her own right, she is a pretty blonde who exclusively wears animal prints and headbands made out of flowers. She looks like what would happen if Janis Joplin raided a Victorian zoo… or Teddy Roosevelt’s closet. She also, is a cunning businesswoman and no doubt a marketing maven. Her conservation attempt, known as Big Cat Rescue, is a Mecca for animal rights activists. Yet, as you look closer, you realize it is just a backyard zoo where the animals have limited human or other animal contact and while not exploited by posing for pictures and being snuggled by zoo-goers, the animals are still on live streamed videos where Carole’s signature sign-on “hey all you cool cats and kittens” echo in the hypocrisy. Did I mention that everyone and their grandmother thinks she killed her husband and fed him to a tiger?

The Plot Thickens

Joe Exotic had a Carole Baskin sized chip on his shoulder and became his arch nemesis quite quickly. He took her conservation efforts against other roadside zoos and theme parks personally, and truth be told, it could’ve been. It is quite possible she targeted him because of his redneck persona and because he had been, at one time, an animal rights activist while Carole Baskin was still breeding tigers in her garage because she was involved in the exotic animal trade herself. Gasp!

But she had an alleged change of heart when her millionaire husband wanted to move their little enterprise to Costa Rica and subsequently “disappeared.” This is all we know of this change of heart because nothing was elaborated any further. All we know is, she was trying to close down Joe Exotic and Doc Antle’s operations and when one of Joe’s employees lost an arm to a tiger attack, Carole was coming straight for him.

Meanwhile, Joe Exotic steals Carole’s trademarked logo, and mysteriously comes into possession of her diaries which carry some pretty damning circumstantial evidence in regards to her missing ex-husband, if they are even really hers. And, Joe, who was filming a reality show starring himself, allegedly burned down his own building that contained not only footage of the reality show, which he was hotly disputing with the producer, but some alligators as well. I firmly believe Joe did that shit. I also believe Carole had something to do with her husband’s disappearance, although I don’t think she killed him and fed him to the tigers.

I believe she was planning a hit on him, and he found out and made himself disappear. I believe this because the husband’s friend and handyman, who had nothing to gain or lose from telling his story, said that the husband had said to him that if he could pull it off, ‘it would be the slickest thing he’d ever done.’ But the friend and handyman never had any elaboration on the comment because he never saw his friend or employer ever again. Then some shadiness went down with his will, estate and his ex-wife and daughters.

Then, it seems as though Joe put a hit out on Carole.

Yet, maybe not because he may have been set up by Jeff and his friends Allen and James, Jeff being the shady criminal element that took over the zoo after Carole ruined Joe’s finances. Jeff appears to be a con-man of epic proportions. A swinger himself, he and his wife, Lauren, go around involving themselves in failing businesses to fix them, meanwhile, their own business ventures have mainly been a string of busts. They were living in a rented mansion and driving rented, fancy cars to increase their allure. But Joe and his team did a bit of digging to find that Jeff, and his associate and employee, Allen, had criminal records as long as their respective arms, Jeff’s including assault and battery of his ex-wife. Nothing was as it seemed.

A lot of people believe that Jeff and his criminal friends decided to set Joe up on charges of putting a hit out on Carole. I am not even going to go into all the motives behind it because it is some complex, redneck chicanery, but suffice it to say, the logic behind it is strong. I believe it is likely that Jeff did set up Joe. I also don’t think it is beyond the pale to think that Joe could’ve put a hit out on Carole and been too distracted by the shit show that was his life that he never followed through. After Joe was arrested, he sang like a canary. He called up PETA and started giving them dirt on Jeff and his old friend, Doc Antle. He and Carole both alleged that Doc Antle was euthanizing healthy, young tigers because they cost him too much money once they weren’t as much of a draw to the Myrtle Beach excitement-seeking, cub-cuddling crowds. This I also believe, especially when they interviewed his “ex” and former employee and she admitted sometimes tigers would disappear with no explanation.

Feminist Soapbox

I know I am in the minority of viewers that didn’t think Carole killed her husband and fed him to the tigers, nor do I think she was innocent in his disappearance. I also don’t think Carole was just an innocent bystander in the downfall of Joe Exotic. What I do think is that many viewers fell into the sexist trap that Carole fit your standard gold-digging profile and everything else had to follow suite. She couldn’t be just a shrewd business woman, she had to gain her success off the failures of the likes of Joe Exotic, whom was digging his own grave well enough without any interference from Carole. She couldn’t just be a victim of unfortunate circumstances and bad decision making, she had to have masterminded a plot to kill her husband and profit off his “disappearance”. It is the same argument that I made to those who were shocked and appalled by Gone Girl.  Had it been the other way around, it would’ve been all in a day, but it was a woman sticking it to her cheating husband, so how dare she! There is a line of conduct that women are not supposed to cross. That is a hell of a standard to live up to, especially in today’s society where we are supposed to bring home the bacon and cook it.

I do think that Carole was judged much more harshly than any of the male characters in the show. I don’t have a doubt in my mind, and I think it is largely based on the fact that she is a woman whom is successful in her business and seemingly meddled outside her affairs.

I think all the characters in this show are guilty of all that the others accused them of, at least to a certain degree, even if it was largely their personal biases coming into play. In fact, the FBI have opened and reopened cases against Jeff and Carole respectively and I heard mumblings that Joe Exotic’s case may be going up for appeal a little earlier than anticipated, but don’t quote me on that.

One sin that they are all guilty of is robbing animals of a better life.

Maybe Carole is trying. Maybe they all are, but as you will see if you finish watching the series, it is as Saff says, the animals are the ones that really lost in this situation. They are still being bought and sold, they are still living in captivity and no laws have been passed to improve their fate.