After a couple of lackluster episodes, I had high hopes for “Eat a Knievel” after seeing the preview for it last week. Eh. It’s alright. The case of the week is decent, if predictable, and there’s some major progress made in some of the show’s other plotlines as well. Not all the plot progress is great, and there’s at least one highly questionable turn of events, but “Eat a Knievel” is at least a solid enough episode to deserve its extremely rad title.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The best development of the week is Blaine’s return to villainy. Last week ended with Blaine shot and left for dead by one of his dad’s flunkies; this week starts with Blaine hunting down one of his own ex-clients to ask for a scratch and directions to where Don E. and Angus are working. It ends with Blaine encasing his father’s feet in cement and dropping him into a well on their family property before heading off to have an almost-touching reunion with Don E. Blaine has always been best as a villain, and his amnesiac turn sucked a good deal of the life out of him; returned to zombie form and freed from the constraints of trying to be a better man, he showed more vim and vigor this week than he has in the whole rest of the season so far. The only thing missing was a Blaine musical number.

The other event of significance is the apparent murder of Vivian Stoll, right after she figured out that Major is human. This is the questionable part of things. The arrival of Vivian and Fillmore Graves on the scene at the end of season two was promising, and they figured largely in the first couple episodes of season three before being moved to a decidedly back burner in recent weeks so the show could focus more on the personal drama of Major’s illness and de-zombie-fying and Blaine’s faked amnesia. While we’ve seen some of the Fillmore Graves crew (mostly in Major’s storyline), there hasn’t been any new development on the bigger Fillmore Graves storyline (whatever that’s supposed to be) in weeks.

When one of the first scenes in this episode was a sort of update meeting with Clive, Liv and Major reporting to Vivian, it seemed that we might be coming back around to some of the bigger picture zombie stuff that Fillmore Graves represents. Instead, what we get is the Fillmore Graves leadership team killed and the company taken over by Vivian’s brother-in-law, who’s some kind of aggressively militaristic loose cannon. It’s unlikely that any good will come of this change in management, and it seems at least somewhat likely that the new guy is behind Vivian’s death to begin with, but with Vivian dead Major’s secret (that he’s human again) is still safe—even if Major himself is decidedly less so.

The case of the week involved the murder of one “Finn Vincible,” who is less Evel Knievel (excellent episode title pun, though) and more Jackass. The identity of the murderer—Finn Vincible’s producer, Rudy—is heavily telegraphed from the very start of the investigation, though it takes most of the episode to ferret out his motive. Because this season seems to be all about investigating the murders of the worst people, we learn that Finn “pranked” Rudy by supposedly fake-banging Rudy’s then-girlfriend-now-wife. Rudy only finds out that the affair was real when his wife gives birth to a baby that is obviously Finn’s, so Rudy sabotages one of Finn’s stunts. There aren’t too many surprises here, and it would have been nice to get a little more interaction with Finn’s acquaintances, but it’s a totally serviceable murder mystery that doesn’t interfere too much with all the much more interesting and significant stuff that’s happening around it in this episode.

Liv on jackass brain isn’t as hilarious as she could have been, but she’s also not nearly as insufferable and unfunny as she was on the last couple brains she’s had. It’s almost all worth it for the shot of Liv sitting in on an interrogation with staples in her face; Clive’s facial expression in that scene alone is almost enough to carry the whole episode. His reaction faces to Liv’s antics have always been great, but they’re reaching a whole new level of amazing now that Clive knows that Liv is a zombie and understands how the brains affect her. The other thing that happens with Liv on jackass brains is her second date with Justin. She cooks up some brains for him so they can be on the same brain together, and then they go out and play with lawn darts before sharing a nice kiss. It’s really too bad that Justin seems doomed; I like him a lot (even if it does still seem weird how fast Liv has moved past Major), but he’s already had multiple foreshadowing events that suggest that the iZombie universe is out to kill him.

The episode finishes with Liv and Ravi trying to sneak into an anti-zombie conspiracy theorist event, but Liv is forced to turn back at the door when they realize that the zombie-haters are checking blood pressure at the door to prevent exactly this sort of thing. In the end, we’re left with an almost-cliffhanger—I mean, it’s tense, but it’s not really high stakes enough for proper cliffhanger status—as Ravi enters into the anti-zombie event alone to find out what these folks know and how organized they really are.

Miscellany:

• “Stop talking. You had me at ‘money.’”
• I suppose this episode finally lays to rest the theory that it was the Fillmore Graves folk who stole the cure from the morgue. The more I think about it, the more my money is on Blaine as the culprit. We saw him messing around with making his own batch of Ravi’s blue memory serum, so could Blaine be looking to sell the cure for top dollar and then charge people for the memory serum as well to “cure” the temporary amnesia? With no other likely suspects, this seems as plausible as any other theories I’ve seen.