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iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Looking for Mr. Goodbrain, Part 2” just goes for it and ushers in the zombie apocalypse

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**This is a spoiler-y review.**

Things have gotten weird on iZombie over the course of this season, and this season finale ratchets the weirdness up to eleven by going full-on zombie apocalypse. It’s an ambitious decision; the show has had some success this season with changing up its style, moving away from the episodic case of the week format in favor of developing a season-long story, but this is a huge change, and the way they get there is, frankly, bizarre.

After spending the previous dozen episodes teasing a conspiracy, it’s revealed over the course of about ten minutes in this episode that every potential lead we had before now was a red herring and that all the unusually connected events of the season were a plot by background character Carey Gold (a criminally underutilized Anjali Jay). Pretty much everything about this revelation is terrible. It’s surprising, sure, but not in a good way. Carey Gold hasn’t gotten enough screen time or characterization to make her betrayal feel consequential or to make her motives feel real or compelling. She doesn’t have any strong personal connections to any of the main characters to make her actions feel personal, and she just literally never got enough screen time to feel like, well, anything more than exactly what she appeared to be: an important administrator at Fillmore Graves with ill-defined job responsibilities and no particular connection to the show’s main story.

There’s not even much that in hindsight justifies the decision to have Carey be behind the conspiracy. Yes, Weckler’s daughter was staying at the Gold house, and it was Carey’s daughter who was on the plane, but it’s only in this final episode that we really understand what the conspiracy even is, what is actually going on and what Carey’s goals are. When we do find out, it’s in a lengthy (for iZombie) monologue from Chase Graves, who has put the pieces together (at around the same time Liv has a vision of Carey murdering Katty Kupps) and explains Carey’s own plan to her before rather unceremoniously shooting her. To be fair, Carey was about to have Chase killed, so at least it was self-defense, but her very brief remarks about how cowardly Chase and the zombie island idea are don’t really work as an effective conclusion to her plot to, apparently, usher in the zombie apocalypse instead of trying to coexist peacefully with humans like some kind of sissy. Or something. It’s hard to say, since—though Carey Gold gets more to say in this episode than in the whole rest of the season—we don’t actually get any cogent explanations out of her.

After a whole season of buildup to this baffling denouement, it’s finished with quickly—by about the halfway point of the episode—and the back half of the hour deals with much of the fallout from Carey’s plan. As the episode opens, the Aleutian flu has started infecting more in the Seattle area, and a vaccine is being recommended for as much of the populace as possible. We later learn that this was all part of Carey Gold’s plot and that the vaccine is how she and her faction of zombies have decided to transmit the zombie virus, which sends Liv on a frantic quest to stop the infections and hopefully prevent the chaos that must surely come from the sudden infection of thousands of people with a zombie disease. It’s a situation where the best-case scenario is still only damage control, and Liv and her friends have mixed success.

Major has Chase Graves re-infect him with the zombie virus so he can rejoin the mercenary force; Johnny Snow is a zombie now; Peyton’s first tasks as Mayor Baracus’s chief of staff are crisis management; Dale Bozzio shows up again just in time to get turned into a zombie right after finding out zombies are even a thing; and Ravi ends the episode asking Liv to scratch him as a test of his newly developed zombie vaccine, because vaccines have worked out so well for people already in the iZombie universe. iZombie has always been a plot-heavy show, this has been a jam-packed busy season, and they’ve never shied away from making sweeping changes from season to season, but this is a lot of changes, many of which undermine the formula of the show the audience fell in love with. The worst part of it, however, is that what felt like a solid ten minutes of this stuff is delivered under yet another lengthy Chase Graves monologue, which lays out how things are going to work now that the zombie cat is out of the bag—and it looks and sounds like next season we’re in for a positively dystopian ride that no one has ever asked for, filled with zombie martial law, brain-hungry hordes dependent on Fillmore Graves for sustenance, murderous anti-zombie mobs, underground speak easy shenanigans, and I guess some kind of resistance(?).

The biggest thing left unclear by the end of this season is what the shape of Liv’s role is going to be from now on. In the final montage of the episode, one gets the sense that basic infrastructure has not held up well in the post-zombie world, no matter how much zombies insist that they’re still everyone’s friends and neighbors, and the Fillmore Graves mercenaries (Major and Justin included) are shooting humans in the streets, so it seems safe to say that normal police work is not going to be happening. By the end of the hour, Liv has reverted to her pale-faced and bleached-hair look, which reads as both a direct rejection of Chase’s compliment of her tanned and dyed disguise and an explicit embracing of her identity as a zombie, but this could mean anything in a show that has never quite totally decided if Liv is owning this zombie thing or if she desperately wants a cure. Without a case of the week and with it left so ambiguous about who the antagonists are now that Carey Gold is gone (not that she was much of an antagonist), it’s hard to say what further seasons of the show hold, and I’m not sold yet on this darker zombie apocalypse dystopia. Much of iZombie’s charm has always been in its fundamental lightheartedness and optimism; it’s been a fun show before this season, and it’s hard to see the potential for fun in the landscape we’re left with at the end of this episode.

Miscellany:

  • Liv blaming Katty’s brains for her infidelity with Chase is not her finest moment, but I guess props to her for confessing immediately?
  • I want a full-length music video of choreographer brain at The Scratching Post, with extra shots of Don E.’s delight.
  • Every face Clive and Ravi make while Liv is talking around having slept with Chase Graves. That is all.
  • Zach crawling around as a torso after the house party explosion was uncharacteristically gruesome for the show, though it was a nicely executed special effect.
  • Chase seems to genuinely like Liv, and they probably have more chemistry than any other Liv/X pairing on the show, but I’m ready for a season without a romantic subplot for Liv.
  • Zombie Johnny Snow is a spinoff-worthy idea.
  • Liv and Ravi saying “I love you” before she scratches him was perfect, and ending the season with that scene in the morgue—quiet as chaos reigns outside, and with just the two of them—was a smart and moving callback to the dynamic that has been at the absolute core of this series since the very beginning.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: The first half of Looking for Mr. Goodbrain is all about unfortunate implications

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It’s not a great time to be a tertiary/guest character on iZombie in the first half of the season three finale. The title reference for “Looking for Mr. Goodbrain, Part 1” is to a 1977 film about a young woman’s self-destruction via sex and drugs, and this episode sadly has some of that movie’s worst tendencies, specifically a penchant for inflicting unreasonable punishments upon its female characters. It’s not that this is a bad episode of iZombie: it’s a good set up for next week’s finale, they made a smart choice by skipping any Blaine/Don E. stuff this week, and it ends with a genuinely surprising and upsetting turn of events. It’s just that it’s also an episode with some unfortunate implications that suck a good deal of the fun out of the room if you think much about them.

**Spoilers ahead.**

Once again, the show eschews the case of the week format in favor of having Liv eat a brain that is more intimately involved with the overarching storyline of the season. This time, the brain du jour belongs to Ravi’s old boss from the CDC, Katty Kupps, and there’s much to be infuriated about regarding this development. It’s irritating that Katty is a character who seems to have been introduced for just this purpose; she doesn’t get much backstory of her own, she hasn’t been treated with much respect in her interactions with the show’s main cast, and she’s disposed of here so brutally and with so little ceremony it feels positively indecent. When we find out, two thirds of the way through the episode, that Katty had been picking up men nightly in the hotel bar and going to bed with them, it’s hard not to put that together with the title allusion and conclude that Katty’s murder was a culmination of her own self-destructive tendencies as much as anything else. In a show that is otherwise largely sex-positive and mostly non-judgmental, this might be easy to overlook if Katty was the only woman who seemed to be being narratively punished for her sex life this week, but she’s not.

Liv, under the influence of Katty’s brain (but also having her own ambivalent feelings about her fledgling relationship with Justin) spends much of the episode following Katty’s patterns, though she does stop short of having sex with any the human men she picks up. It’s only late in the episode that Liv is tempted enough to go through with the infidelity she’s been flirting with this whole time. After finally clarifying her relationship status with Justin (they’re officially exclusive), Liv still finds herself drawn to the hotel bar, and this time she runs into Chase Graves. This hook-up has been teased most of the season, and as handsome and sweet as Justin is, Liv has definitely had a bit more straight-up chemistry with Chase (who… oh, my god, is that body for real?). Considering Liv’s poor track record with men so far, it was even easy to root for Liv and Chase, if only to protect Justin from her, but not like this. While picking up men in a hotel bar isn’t exactly Liv at her best, she and Chase have a seemingly genuine connection before going up to his room to bang on his desk, and it’s kind of heartbreaking for Liv to end the episode with a strong and well-founded suspicion that Chase might be involved in Katty’s murder, especially when it’s framed in a way that almost suggests that Liv is stupid and should have known better.

The woman who comes out the worst this week, however, and by a long shot, is Major’s friend Natalie, who took the cure he gave her and has since moved to Italy. She’s back in Seattle for a few days, however, to wrap up her affairs there and move her stuff into storage before returning to her new home, and she takes the time to visit Major and thank him for everything he’s done for her. Major is recently unemployed, having been fired from Fillmore Graves when Chase found out he was human, and he offers to help Natalie move things. After a long day of lugging boxes around, they get back to Major’s place, things get romantic, and next thing you know Natalie’s asking him to come to Italy with her and Major is saying yes. He just has to go to his Fillmore Graves going away party first, and he takes Natalie with him—and she’s promptly killed in the blast when Harley Johns shows up and suicide bombs the place. Natalie has always been something of a plot device for Major’s storyline rather than a character in her own right, but this is a pretty obvious case of fridging that is both wholly unnecessary and wildly frustrating, as it’s not at all clear based on the show’s previous treatment of Natalie whether or not Major will be deeply affected by her death. Either way, it was always bad enough that the show played the Hooker with a Heart of Gold trope so blandly straight with Natalie, and is disappointing that they so casually have killed her off right as she was about to get a happy ending. That it directly followed her having sex, in an episode where she isn’t the only woman to have bad things happen to her after having some sex, only solidifies the connection: sex leads to bad things happening to you.

While Major is caught up with his romance with Natalie and Liv is in the midst of some kind of existential crisis, it’s Clive and Peyton who make the most of somewhat minimal screen time. New Mayor Baracus asks Peyton to be his chief of staff, which would be a significant promotion and great opportunity for an ambitious woman under thirty, but she’s still suspicious that he’s involved in the Weckler murder. Though Peyton can’t completely clear Baracus of the crime, she does test him by bringing up the case, only to find that he doesn’t show any obvious signs of guilt. Liv advises Peyton to take the job, and it seems likely that she will. Meanwhile, Clive is doing most of the heavy lifting in the actual investigation of Katty Kupps’ murder, and it leads him right back to the house where Weckler’s daughter is staying, which we find out is also the home of Carey Gold from Fillmore Graves. Between this connection and Liv finding the napkin in Chase’s room with Katty’s name and room number on it, it’s starting to look like Fillmore Graves may be up to their collective ears in whatever is going on this season.

Miscellany:

  • Ravi breaks the news to Liv about the front-page zombie story that he’s the source of, but Liv doesn’t seem to actually care that much about the source of the story and it’s somewhat glossed over in general.
  • I don’t really understand the bioterrorism red herring. I mean, it’s a red herring, obviously, and by the end of the episode it seems much more likely that Katty was investigating the zombie outbreak after all, but the bioterrorism angle never gets explored enough for it to properly do its job as a red herring.
  • I hated the trailer scenes of Liv having visions of Katty having sex with Ravi, but they weren’t terrible in context.
  • “Wake up sheeple!” surprised a cackle out of me.
  • Ravi and Liv interrogating the racist lady and then segueing to the adorable Sikh dad was perfectly done and extremely funny.
  • Harley Johns’ suicide bombing was genuinely unexpected, but it also makes so much sense for a character who has lost everyone he loved and has been turned against his will into something he hates.
  • I always miss Blaine when he’s gone, but it was a smart choice to skip him this week.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: In “Conspiracy Weary” about half the season’s chickens come home to roost

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After expanding the story and cast by quite a bit in the last few weeks, “Conspiracy Weary” sees that trend reversing in preparation for the season’s two-part finale. Not all of it works, at least not entirely and not all in this episode, but it seems almost certain that some of the show’s more questionable storytelling decisions—like everything to do with Shawna—are going to turn out to be important in the next couple of weeks. Personally, I’m still not entirely sold on the necessity of these story threads, but we’ll see, starting next week, if the payoff is going to be worth the sometimes tiresome buildup.

**Spoilers ahead.**

We start at the shooting range, where shit gets very real very fast once Liv and Blaine show up. Ravi is hurt (only a little, fortunately) and Rachel flees into the night about the time that a group of Fillmore Graves soldiers shows up. Liv and Blaine take down one Bo Johns while two of the other zombie truthers are shot by the Fillmore Graves crew when they try to engage in a shootout instead of surrendering. Meanwhile, Harley Johns manages to give everyone the slip. It’s a taut, exciting action sequence, overall, and a great way to open the episode, fully delivering on the promise of last week’s cliffhanger. The zombie truther body count is even slightly surprising, since the show tends to avoid having its protagonists straight up murder people, even when they are kind of asking for it. The highlight of these early scenes, however, isn’t the action. Instead, it’s Blaine, Liv and Don. E. companionably sharing the brain of Bo Johns.

Once again, the show eschews the case of the week format in favor of advancing its bigger storylines, and Liv on conspiracy theorist brain is smartly done, with some of the funniest brain-eating-antics-related moments of the season. Liv and Peyton working to unravel the actual conspiracy surrounding Weckler’s murder and the connection to zombies is a great opportunity for their friendship to get some much-appreciated screen time, and some real strides are made in that investigation as Peyton gets the memory card Weckler was killed over and deduces that Weckler’s daughter, Tatum, is a zombie. Unfortunately, none of this is discovered before Baracus wins the mayoral election.

Liv also works with Blaine and Don E. to try and figure out where the Johns brothers’ secret property is. The guns recovered from Harley’s truck at the start of the episode turn out to be the same weapons that were used to kill Wally and Anna, which has Clive very invested in finding Harley Johns. When they finally track Harley down, however, Liv has a last-minute vision (right as Clive shoots Harey) that proves that Harley didn’t kill Wally and Anna. Fortunately/unfortunately, Harley isn’t dead; he’s a zombie, a revelation that will likely be dealt with early in next week’s episode. It seems obvious, especially in hindsight, that the Johns brothers weren’t going to turn out to be Wally’s killers, and by the end of “Conspiracy Weary” it seems likely that their deaths are tied in some unknown (and not obvious) fashion to the broader zombies vs. humans plot, the Weckler case, Baracus, and Fillmore Graves.

Bafflingly, we get some more of the Major and Shawna thing that started last week. She seems nice, and she encourages Major to start going out again, even convincing him to go dancing with her, but a short bit of sleuthing on Liv’s part (possibly influenced by the paranoia caused by Liv eating conspiracy theorist brains, but possibly just jealousy, though Liv denies this) turns up that Shawna has been sharing photos and videos of herself with Major since the beginning of their relationship. Here’s the thing, though. Why is Major so shocked and upset by this? He knew that she was taking pictures. He posed for them. He knew that she was active on social media, and he was aware of her Tumblr. It’s normal for people to post photos of themselves on social media, and none of what Shawna shared was particularly embarrassing. Sure, she should have been clearer in explicitly asking Major’s permission to share his image, especially considering his history as the Chaos Killer, and it makes sense that he would be upset about that, but at the same time, what did he think she was doing with all these pictures?

The show frames Shawna’s social media use as weird and suggests that she’s somehow trying to exploit Major, even though it’s not clear what she could gain here other than some notoriety (and then only if she was publicizing Major’s history). Really, though, the stuff Shawna posted is pretty run-of-the-mill honeymoon phase relationship pictures, and while she wasn’t explicit with Major about what she was doing, she also wasn’t hiding it; Liv was able to literally just google Shawna to find her totally public Tumblr. The episode takes pains to portray Shawna as “crazy,” but nothing she does actually is crazy. Even when Major unceremoniously dumps her—she very reasonably apologized and offered to take down the photos immediately when he confronted her about it—Shawna is upset but not unhinged in anyway. We’re meant to think that the shirts being sold at the end of the episode with Major’s photos on them are Shawna’s doing, but it, frankly, seems out of character for her, and it seems at least somewhat likely that this is a coincidence and that Shawna is going to turn out to have some other importance to the story. We must hope so, anyway. Otherwise, this whole Shawna subplot—introducing her just for the sex fort gag and to give Major a “crazy ex-girlfriend”—feels like a huge waste of time.

Finally, it’s not just Major who’s having girl trouble this week. Ravi’s friend and seemingly potential new love interest, Rachel, turns out to be a journalist, and she manages to get Ravi to tell her everything about zombies, which she promptly turns into a fear-mongering frontpage piece in a local newspaper. The episode ends with this, which, after the revelations of Baracus’s election win and Harley Johns being a zombie, leaves things very well set up for an exciting two-parter starting next week.

Miscellany:

  • It’s not just me, right? Chase Graves is obviously super into Liv.
  • Peyton and Clive both have the best reaction to Liv’s brain-influenced behaviors, but nothing beats the faces Clive makes when he’s just silently judging.
  • I could listen to Liv, Don E. and Blaine talk about conspiracy theories forever.
  • It seems very unethical for Peyton to pressure a child to comply with her off-the-books investigation like that. Isn’t this girl just fifteen or so?
  • How did Liv know to text Major about Harley? I mean, thank goodness she did, because I was about 95% certain poor Justin was about to die tragically like all the rest of Liv’s boyfriends, but this scenario was extremely contrived.
  • How is it possible that there aren’t officially licensed “Killer Abs” shirts already available to buy?
iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Return of the Dead Guy” wastes time dredging up the past

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There’s a lot going on every week on iZombie, but “Return of the Dead Guy” is extraordinarily busy, even by iZombie standards. The show is juggling multiple different plots, even adding new ones, and while this is something iZombie has always done with mixed success, this week’s mix is more bad than good. Still, the good parts are very good. It’s just a shame that they’re tied to garbage material like “Fort Lust” that does nothing but drag down the episode.

**Spoilers below.**

The highest stakes plot this week is, fortunately, one of the ones that works best in this episode. After Harley and his zombie truthers showed up at the morgue last week, they’ve commandeered Ravi and repaired to the gun shop, where they have Don E. imprisoned and a live video feed set up to document his declining health as they starve him of brains. With his phone confiscated and surrounded by dudes with guns, Ravi is still determined to prevent the torture planned for Don E. Eventually, Ravi manages to get Don E.’s phone and call Blaine, but by the end of the episode Ravi and Don E. are still waiting on their rescue and shit just got real. With the view counter for the livestream over 100k, Harley and his friends are ready to go to town on Don E., and the episode ends with Ravi physically blocking their way and Harley putting a literal gun to Ravi’s head. Of course, the viewer knows that Blaine is outside, with Liv, and gearing up to save the day (finally), and this does diminish the overall effect of the attempted cliffhanger, but it still works well. It’s especially nice to see Ravi getting a storyline that takes his character growth in a positive direction and gives him a chance to do something heroic.

The other storyline that works in this episode is Blaine’s, if only because villainous Blaine is vastly more fun—even absent David Anders’ singing—than nice Blaine ever was. This week, we get a showdown of sorts between Blaine and Mr. Boss, rather sooner than expected, when Boss shows up at the funeral home and shoots Blaine as soon as he opens the door. Obviously, this doesn’t go well for Boss. Blaine trusses him up, lays him out in a casket and then gives him a crash course on the existence of zombies. There’s a lot to love about Boss’s reaction to this news, which is neither the easy(-ish) acceptance of Ravi and Clive nor the fear and hatred of the truthers. Instead, Boss is skeptical, or perhaps “violently disbelieving,” and he continues trying to kill Blaine until it becomes extremely obvious that it’s not going to work. What’s less obvious is why Blaine wants Boss as a business partner after all this. It seems like the sort of thing that is obviously going to backfire at some point, probably sooner rather than later.

Interestingly, there is no regular case of the week this week. Instead, Liv finally eats the brain of the dominatrix murderer, Weckler, who Peyton thinks may have been innocent. It turns out that he wasn’t, but it also turns out that he was, himself, murdered. This is found out in scenes that involve some interesting (in a “gift to the femslash community” way) roleplay between Liv and Peyton. Liv and Clive investigate, trying to figure out who might have had Weckler murdered, but they hit a wall when Weckler’s daughter refuses to cooperate with their investigation. Also, Weckler’s daughter is a zombie, staying with a zombie family, and they’re involved somehow with Fillmore Graves since they eat tube brains. Unfortunately, this plot twist is more confusing than anything else. This episode did an okay job of establishing some of what happened with Weckler, it feels as if we’re as far away as ever from learning why, and a whole new plot just got thrown into the mix as well.

The other side effect of Weckler’s brain is that Liv experiences aspects of Weckler’s mental illness, particularly his visions of his dead wife, except Liv sees her dead boyfriend, Drake, because she apparently still has some issues to work through regarding his death by her hand. Here’s the thing, though. Liv straight up says to ghost delusion Drake that the reason she’s been throwing herself into all these different brains has been to avoid having to live in her own head and thus having to deal with actually processing the grief and trauma and guilt she feels about Drake’s death. However, she’s just spent several days on tube brains, specifically so she could be herself, unaffected by other personalities, in order to pursue her relationship with Justin, who she spends most of this week—even after being visited by ghost delusion Drake—trying to bone. And when it really comes down to it, she’s able to talk herself out of her Drake-induced doldrums relatively quickly (and successfully bone Justin). The time to address this stuff was about eight episodes ago; at this point in the season it just feels superfluous and, frankly, baffling.

Finally, for some unfathomable reason, this episode contains not just one but several check-ins with Major and his new friend Shauna, who have built themselves a blanket fort for sex. I mean. Okay. Fine. Liv is slightly jealous and weirded out by it, but not enough to stop her from going right out and sleeping with Justin. Shauna seems nice, but not in any truly sinister way, which is almost sinister just in and of itself. But the truth is there’s no particular reason for any of this stuff to have made the cut in an already busy episode. It’s late in the season to be introducing a new character that we’re supposed to care about, and Shauna isn’t particularly likeable or at all interesting. Sure, Major doesn’t have much to do now that he’s not a zombie any longer, but that’s okay. It would be better to have no Major at all than to have Major engaging in overly saccharine sexy times with a virtual stranger when there’s far more interesting stuff going on elsewhere.

Miscellany:

  • Mr. Boss sneaking in and out of his own house while his wife is on the phone with her lawyer or the life insurance company or whatever was a smart, funny intro to the episode.
  • Even as Blaine is expanding his business, there’s some grumbling in his crew about how things are going.
  • Curious to find out who Rachel is. My money is on FBI, but we’ll see.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Twenty-Sided, Die” is the best episode

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“Twenty-Sided, Die” is by far the strongest episode of the season so far, and it’s probably my personal favorite episode of iZombie of all time. It’s got a good case of the week along with some excellent big picture plot development, and Liv gets to DM a D&D game for her friends. Spoiler: It’s glorious.

**Real spoilers below.**

Last week’s episode ended on a tense note, with Ravi going alone and unarmed into a meeting for the local zombie conspiracy theorists, and this episode starts with showing us how that goes. Fortunately, it’s not as awful as it could have been, and Ravi gets out intact, but it’s definitely a meeting full of bad news for Seattle’s zombies. Harley Johns has identified Floyd Baracus as a zombie, and he’s got files on numerous other people he suspects. He’s also got a plan to kidnap a zombie and starve it, then publicize it in order to convince the public of the existence of zombies and to highlight the threat they pose. Thinking quickly, Ravi reveals his identity and claims to be working on a zombie vaccine, urging Harley and the others to delay their plans. At the end of the episode, however, we find out that even Ravi’s sensible urging of caution isn’t enough to stop Harley and his brother from capturing a zombie at the first opportunity. They’ve collared a berserk Don E. and brought him straight to Ravi thinking that Ravi might have a tranquilizer that would calm Don E. down.

Don E. is going berserk, of course, because he’s gotten into Blaine’s new product: the brain of a WWII veteran and ladies’ man that has been soaking in Ravi’s blue memory serum liquid for twenty days. After Tanner enjoys the experience after eating a tiny sliver of the blue brain as a test, Don E. takes a much larger piece for a spin, and it looks like they’ve discovered the potential downside of the product. Too bad Blaine isn’t around to know about it. Riding the high of the initial successful test of blue brains, Blaine heads out to the well where he dumped his dad last week to have a nice, long gloat. Too top off the list of things Blaine doesn’t know about that might derail Blaine’s optimism, the episode ends with Mr. Boss coming back to town, an unexpected development that doesn’t bode well for pretty much any of the main cast and adds yet another subplot to an already packed story.

This week’s murder mystery is a weird one. A dungeon master running a weekly D&D game night is poisoned, and his circle of gamer friends—including police sketch artist Jimmy and IT guy Vampire Steve—come under suspicion for the crime. However, as Liv and Clive slowly clear each member of the group, they stumble upon a hidden room at the DM’s apartment that houses some advanced looking computers tied to Russian power plants. It’s weird, and it’s even weirder when the case goes unsolved by the end of the episode. Apparently, it’s a situation that’s enough about Liv and Clive’s pay grade that the FBI takes over, which offers a chance for Dale Bozzio to come back and break Clive’s (and our) heart all over again. It’s unclear so far whether this is the end of this case and the final nail in the coffin of the Clive-Dale romance or if this is yet another new story thread being woven into the mix, but it seems awful late in the season to be bringing back not one, but two characters that it seemed we’d seen the last of so long ago.

The highlight of the episode is Liv on dungeon master brains. Sure, her dice-rolling outside the game setting is odd and leans a little too hard on supernerd stereotypes, but Liv pressing her friends into service so she can run a D&D session in an effort to trigger a vision is everything perfect about this show. Of course Peyton is the kind of player who asks why they can’t just kill the quest giver for the reward instead of going on the quest. Ravi resuscitating Peyton’s character to keep her in the game was hilarious—and of course Ravi is an engaged and knowledgeable player despite mocking this particular kind of nerdery. Obviously Major plays a paladin. And even more obviously, Clive is the guy who isn’t into it until he is and then he’s really into it. It’s a scene that is clearly written and filmed with love for the game and deep knowledge and care of the show’s characters, and everyone in it seems to be having so much fun it’s infectious. I would definitely watch this group play D&D Critical Role-style, is what I’m saying.

Miscellany:

  • After the meeting at the beginning of the episode, Ravi meets a photographer named Rachel, who I’m curious to see more of. She wants to photograph a zombie, but it also seems like she could be a possible new love interest for Ravi.
  • Ravi hiding all Major’s hatemail is very sweet.
  • Major inviting this Shawna woman over sight unseen is just weird. (Also just plain ill-advised.)
  • Not as weird as how totally fine Major is with Liv dating Justin. He’s even giving Liv his stash of brain tubes so she can be herself with Justin.
  • It’s also not as weird as Liv being much more girlfriend-y with Justin than has really been established so far. This show has never been a romance-heavy program, but we’ve only seen them go on a couple of dates, and things onscreen have been decidedly PG so far. I dunno. It’s fine. Honestly, I’m just worried for Justin. He seems nice, and Liv’s boyfriends do not have a great life expectancy.
  • Liv finally meets Chase Graves, and he’s intense. Also, flirting with Liv? I kind of ship it because I’m trash, but also because I’m firmly on Team Protect Justin.
  • Peyton is getting increasingly suspicious about the dominatrix murder case, especially when her boss Baracus tells her to drop it and then Liv tells her that Baracus was one of the dominatrix’s clients.
  • Best line delivery of the episode: Clive shouting, “Where is the lich?!”
iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Eat a Knievel” takes some risks, but not necessarily the right ones

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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.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Some Like It Hot Mess” fails at humor but succeeds at storytelling

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“Some Like It Hot Mess” is season three’s first brain flop, in which Liv eats a brain from someone so unlikable that it also makes Liv herself largely unlikable and definitely unfunny. It still manages to be a decent episode, with some great emotional moments, a significant setback and a major reveal, but Liv’s “hot mess” brain is absolutely an albatross around its neck.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The episode opens with an introduction to party girl Yvonne, who will be this week’s murder victim, and she doesn’t seem like a bad sort. Self-absorbed and flighty, sure, but not the worst. However, as we get to see more of Yvonne’s personality through Liv after she eats Yvonne’s brain, it starts to grate. I’m not really sure what the joke is here, to be honest. I suppose it’s that Yvonne is vapid, talentless and irredeemably self-centered, but none of that is particularly funny, and the portrayal works mostly in cheap stereotypes without much depth of thought. While iZombie often plays with stereotypes and worn tropes for comedic value, the show’s treatment of Yvonne is genuinely unkind and oftentimes unpleasant to watch—particularly when you can tell that the show was going for a laugh and it doesn’t land.

That said, it’s possible that the writers wanted to use this experience, for Liv, as a way of reiterating for the audience why it’s so crucial to Liv that she get the cure for her zombie-ism. More than once in this episode, Liv’s brain-influenced behavior is hurtful to her friends, damaging to her relationship and/or professionally embarrassing. The thing is, this is all stuff we’ve seen many times before in one way or another, and while all of that is heightened by consuming the brain of someone as unpleasant as we’re supposed to think Yvonne was, this heightening feels superfluous. It’s especially so in light of the fact that Liv starts the episode off expressing her fatigue over the whole zombie/vision thing; this makes the cringeworthy saga of Liv on “hot mess” brains feel particularly torturous in a way that’s, frankly, at least as fatiguing for the audience as it must be for poor Liv.

The star player of the week is Robert Buckley as Major, who we first see gleefully scarfing down ice cream with his reinvigorated taste buds at the beginning of the hour. As expected, he starts to lose his memories soon enough, though not before pranking Liv by answering the door and pretending to have forgotten her. It’s a fine line to walk, and the scene could have come off as cruel, but it works largely because once Liv is inside the house we learn that Major has been writing letters to everyone he cares about—including a very fat and tear-stained one for Ravi. Major is coping, and it’s sweet. Of course, then he gets on a bus to Walla Walla, where his mom and her girlfriend (wife?) live, which is terrifying for Ravi and Liv, who have no idea where he is, but offers us an interesting and unknown before now part of Major’s backstory. He’s always been a very reactionary character, responding to things that happen to him, and the extra depth provided by even the barebones story of his parents’ divorce and his choosing his dad over his mom is a nice development, even if his mom doesn’t enter into the story again. iZombie doesn’t often include these kinds of grace notes in character development, probably because it’s such a wildly plot-heavy show.

Speaking of plot! The big revelation of the episode, of course and finally, is that Blaine has been faking his amnesia—for months. It’s Don E. who convinces Ravi of Blaine’s duplicity, and Ravi who gives Peyton this information in another scene that walks a fine line; Ravi is still hung up on Peyton, and she knows this, but Ravi does (barely) manage to deliver the news in a way that doesn’t come off as self-serving or jealous. While Peyton doesn’t take it well, she does seem to take it to heart, and it’s Peyton who smartly maneuvers Blaine into confessing it all to her: he did lose his memories, but only for a couple days, and he’s been faking ever since because it gave him the chance at a fresh start. It’s a surprisingly sympathetic performance, but we oughtn’t forget that Blaine is an actual murderer and that his sexual relationship with Peyton has been under false enough pretenses to arguably amount to rape by deception. In any case, that the memory loss is temporary is good news for Major and should be good news for Liv (who is already planning her own ice cream feast), but by the time the gang gets back to the morgue, the place has been tossed and the cure is missing. Worse, Major gave his other dose to Natalie.

Miscellany:

  • Clive’s exasperated “Oh, boy” when he hears a brief description of Yvonne’s personality was the single perfect comedic moment of the episode.
  • What kind of monster drinks pepper vodka straight?
  • Peyton is working that dominatrix murder case, and she points out that the confession seemed fishy with there being so little hard evidence connecting the suspect to the murder.
  • I feel like there was some point trying to be made about Nice Guys™ in the interrogation of Yvonne’s friend from the grocery store, but I don’t really know what point that was.
  • I wonder why Blaine is making Ravi’s blue stuff.
  • I have a strong suspicion that the obvious suspect isn’t who took the cure from the morgue. My money is on Fillmore Graves taking it.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Spanking the Zombie” is half hilarity and half heartbreak

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“Spanking the Zombie” is basically half fun murder mystery and half heartrending tragedy, but somehow it works. I do have a couple quibbles about it, but it’s overall a very good episode that avoids the biggest potential pitfalls in its concept, advances the overarching plot of the show in a big way and has a strong chance of making the viewer cry like a baby at the end.

**Spoilers below.**

This week, Liv and Clive are investigating the murder of Roxanne Greer, a dominatrix known to her clients as Sweet Lady Pain. Unfortunately, Roxanne’s brain isn’t fresh. Ravi has been keeping it soaking in memory serum for a couple of weeks, which leads to one of the grosser brain-cooking scenes in the show’s history. The blue color of the liquid the brain’s been in is a very unsettling non-food color, and pan-frying it doesn’t improve the look of it. Liv is also apprehensive about eating dominatrix brain at all, and her reluctance only just manages to avoid being kinkshaming. It’s a fine line, but they manage to convey pretty effectively that it’s more about that sort of thing being outside Liv’s personal comfort zone rather than having it come off as truly judgmental.

Liv almost immediately has a vision, which turns out to be the first of many intense visions she experiences this week, an unintended effect of the memory serum—which is interesting, since it supposedly had no effect on Blaine at all. I have the feeling that chances of Blaine faking his amnesia have risen considerably with this development, though we don’t see Blaine (or Peyton) at all this week. The other interesting thing that’s done with Liv’s visions this week is that, instead of filming all the visions so the audience gets to see what Liv sees, we see much more of Liv’s visions from the point of view of other characters. It’s a neat way of showing a little more of the mechanics of this mythology, and it feels significant, though it’s not clear what the significance of this new perspective might be just yet.

The murder mystery itself is nicely twisty and provides an excuse to bring back two of my favorite minor characters: erstwhile weatherman Johnny Frost (Daran Norris) and sleazy defense attorney Brandt Stone (Ken Marino), who are even more fun together than they have been apart. Obviously neither man is the murderer, but they are instrumental in figuring out who is. While they’re at it, they bring a level of humor and snark that, along with Liv’s vamping around dominatrix-style, makes this one of the funniest cases of the week in the show’s history. The only problem with this case is the wrap-up. Once the actual murderer is captured, he basically confesses immediately—with an odd line to the effect that it doesn’t even matter how or why he murdered Roxanne—and that’s the last we see of the guy.

It’s a strange anticlimax to an otherwise entertaining story, and the crack about the murderer’s motives and the details of the crime not mattering might be meant in a meta, self-deprecating way by the show’s writers, but it mostly just feels weirdly abrupt and dismissive of the whole previous half hour of storytelling. In a way, it’s true that the show’s murder mysteries are often episode filler and comic relief between more dramatic moments and more overarching plots, but it’s not true that these stories don’t matter or that no one cares about the resolution of them, even in an episode that’s about to end with a gut punch like this one does.

This episode starts and ends with Major. First, we see him participating in his first actual mercenary mission with the Fillmore Graves crew, during which he ends up being stabbed a whole bunch of times. When he returns to Seattle, he collapses and his friend Justin brings him to the morgue, where Ravi and Liv realize that it’s time for Major to take the cure, memory loss or not. First, though, they have to keep him alive until his stab wounds heal up enough that they won’t immediately kill him when he turns human, so they stabilize him and take him home. After Ravi goes to his own bed, Liv and Major kind of rekindle their relationship and say some tragically bittersweet goodbyes. It’s beautiful and sad, and I have so much love for how messy Liv and Major’s relationship is. They never manage to be quite at the same place at the same time, but there’s something wonderful about their quiet, consistent love for each other. Next week, I guess we’ll find out if Major really is going to lose his memories and what that’s going to mean for their friend group.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • “Frankly, I resent being questioned every time a hooker or stripper or dominatrix gets killed in this town.”
  • All of Liv’s scenes with Jimmy the sketch artist were excellent.
  • Lack of Ravi/Peyton/Blaine drama was a definite plus this week. Ravi actually got to be likable again.
  • Don E. makes a new zombie/friend, and the Scratching Post is open for business, but this storyline felt decidedly tertiary and was completely disconnected from the main story this week. It’s fine, and cool scene with them playing air guitar together on the bar, but I still don’t see where this stuff is going.
  • No follow-up on Justin’s shock when he learns about the zombie cure, and he isn’t fully briefed on it before he disappears from the episode, but I can only imagine that this is going to be a big deal in the next week or two. Surely he will go back to Fillmore Graves and tell people there, and I have a feeling it’s not going to go over well.
  • “Give me a new name. One that’s less silly.” Oh, Major.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Wag the Tongue Slowly” hangs some decent plot progress on a slight case of the week

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After last week’s fast-paced hour of watching Ravi metaphorically punch himself in the crotch over and over again, “Wag the Tongue Slowly” is a bit lighter and, for the most part, a lot more fun. There’s no particular aspect of the episode that stands out as excellent, but there are modest advances made on all the season’s important storylines so far and the murder mystery of the week is entertaining, even if it is predictable. Even still, the episode ends on something of a low note, which makes me concerned about how far and deep the overall sense of foreboding they’re building is going to go and what that means for the characters we’ve come to love over the last couple of years. iZombie has always had a feeling of tragedy about it, but that’s being explored this season to a far greater degree than ever before.

**Spoilers below.**

The episode begins and ends with Blaine still not having recovered his memories of his previous life, which doesn’t bode well for Major or, eventually, Liv, who would also like to someday not be a zombie. However, this is potentially good news for Blaine and Peyton, who are very cozy now. There’s an interesting dynamic between Peyton and her friends because of this, but there’s a problem: no one in the situation comes off looking particularly good. Peyton’s an Assistant DA, which makes her involvement with Blaine—amnesia or not—a pretty significant ethical issue. Ravi’s been a disaster over Peyton all season. Major is relatively chill, though more due to fatalism than anything else, and Liv was actually kind of monstrous towards Peyton this week, piling on a guilt trip as if it’s Peyton’s fault that the memory serum isn’t working.

It’s an ugly moment for Liv, and an interesting choice to include in an episode where Liv eats the brain of someone so unlikable, especially when it seems clear that this ugliness is all Liv. Similarly, at the start of the episode, before Liv even partakes of gossip brain, she gives a recap of Ravi’s exploits last week that borders on mean-spirited. It’s not as if Liv has always been a perfectly likable protagonist, but her friendships with other characters are central to the show and a key to its popularity. This unkindness is a sharp corner in Liv that hasn’t been explored before. There’s always been some question of how much of Liv’s personality is her and how much is from the brains she eats, and this episode presents another possibility—that the brains might (at least sometimes) act as an intensifier for Liv’s personality rather than taking over her personality.

Meanwhile, Major finally makes some progress in his search for Natalie, with Ravi’s help of course. I could have done with more of Major and Ravi hanging out together, but it’s good to see some actual movement on this storyline, even if it turns out to be frustrating. Major actually finds Natalie, who’s awake and apparently trapped by some zombie businessman who’s keeping her locked up in a hotel, although it doesn’t seem as if she’s there entirely against her will. Needless to say, she’s not happy to see Major, and she insists that he leave her where she is so he doesn’t get himself killed. Before leaving, Major gives Natalie a dose of the zombie cure and a heads up about the amnesia thing, which is, frankly, a strange place to leave things. It doesn’t explain who took Natalie or why, it doesn’t resolve Major’s hunt for her except in the most basic fashion, and leaving a syringe of the zombie cure out in the wild feels like set-up for it to be used for purposes other than its intended one. Ravi’s Don Quixote allusion is nice, as is the use of “I Don Quixote” in the background, though.

The murder mystery, as I already mentioned, is a predictable one, but it’s still fun to watch. Office gossip Cheryl is underdeveloped as a victim, and what we do learn about her isn’t flattering. It’s no surprise that she’s pissed off everyone she works with to the point that they’re willing to play a dangerous “prank” on her. It was mildly surprising that Cheryl’s death wasn’t actually intentional, but the basic method of her death was obvious as soon as they started introducing all the people she worked with and every one of them had strong motives. These fast-paced interrogation montages are something the show has done before, and I like it every time, but this time was made even better by the hilarious faces Clive makes throughout. His and Liv’s “Ahhhh!” when they learn that Cheryl was a gossip was perfectly timed and a laugh out loud moment.

The final piece of story that is touched on this week is the ongoing investigation of the murder of Wally and his family. Liv and Clive split a stack of messages from an online forum between them to look for evidence, and they find information that points them towards a local shooting range that turns out to be run by a man whose brother died at the recent Max Rager party. He claims to have solid proof of the existence of zombies—at least of the shambling type—and he’s also got a conviction that “you can’t murder what ain’t alive.” While the shooting range owner has an alibi and Liv and Clive don’t have any solid evidence against him, this surely isn’t the last we’ve seen of this fellow.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • “That can’t be the best use of taxpayer dollars.”
  • “Dude, don’t pitch problems.”
  • Ravi’s obsession with the porn actress was kind of extra gross after his behavior last week. Guess he’s just gonna wallow for a while in that hole he dug.
  • Wham Bam Gun Range. That is all.
iZombie, Television

iZombie: In “Eat, Pray, Liv,” Ravi digs the deepest hole. He lives there now.

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After the big shake-up in the season two finale and dealing with the fallout from those events in the first couple episodes of season three, iZombie is already getting back to a more routine formula, and that’s not a bad thing. The case of the week concerns a murdered yoga instructor, and it’s a below average mystery at best. There are a couple of good Liv and Clive moments during their murder investigation, and it’s interesting to see Clive getting more comfortable with Liv’s zombie abilities, but the main events of the episode all concern secondary characters.

**Spoilers ahead.**

Major is working his way through mercenary training at Fillmore Graves, where it turns out that having been a personal trainer and generally fit still puts him way behind a group of guys who were apparently already mercenaries before they even became zombies. Major also doesn’t like the brain tubes that they eat at Fillmore Graves: “It’s like someone ate old brains, then yogurt, and then mommy birded them into a tube.” Which sounds about right, but Major has bigger problems. As we’ve already been reminded last week, the non-working version of the zombie cure that Major took will likely kill him if nothing else is done, and this week Major starts exhibiting some symptoms, mostly in the form of a persistent cough that Ravi diagnoses as a mild case of pneumonia. It’s a more tangible reminder, this time, that Major’s time is potentially very limited, and this episode sees him taking more steps to try and find Natalie, a quest that has a new urgency with Major being unable to deny anymore that he may be dying. Also of interest this week are Major’s several long, sad looks at Liv. He’s obviously still in love with her, but it remains to be see whether he is going to say anything to her about it or if he’s just going to keep suffering in silence.

Blaine’s dad, Angus DeBeers, is back and in a big way. First, Angus gets his lawyer to come with him to take back Blaine’s inheritance, which gives us yet another scene that proves Blaine isn’t faking his amnesia. Angus then spends the rest of the episode working with Don E. to open a new zombie club. It’s not entirely clear what exactly they’re planning to do here and how they’re somehow going to turn it into a revenge against Blaine, but they’ve got the place, it’s zombies only, and Don E. is about to go on a scratching spree. It’ll be interesting to see how these plans work out, especially for Angus, who doesn’t seem able to inspire much loyalty in his new lackey, judging by the wistful look we see Don E. giving Blaine at the end of the episode. And let me just say, Don E. staring wistfully at Blaine through a rain-covered window might be my favorite single image of the season so far.

The big thing I want to talk about this week, however, is Ravi and Peyton. I haven’t been thrilled with how Ravi has been behaving the last couple of weeks, and I’ve been concerned that his sad man story might be dragged out for a long time. I shouldn’t have worried. This is the episode where Ravi torpedoes his relationship with Peyton and possibly their whole friend group.

After Liv stops putting up with his constant moaning about Peyton and tells him to go talk to Peyton about it, that’s exactly what Ravi does. Peyton is at first receptive to his apology, as she’s been confused and hurt about Ravi’s coldness towards her, but things go off the rails quickly, with Ravi seeming to low key blame Peyton for his intrusive thoughts and then framing his apology to her in such a way that it’s clear he’s expecting his apology to be reciprocated. It’s the worst sort of sexist bullshit, and Peyton is not having it. She doesn’t have anything to apologize for, she’s not responsible for Ravi’s intrusive thoughts, and she’s got her own shit to deal with. It’s not often that we get to see a woman on television deliver such a great shutdown of men’s garbage like this, and it’s even rarer to see it portrayed as entirely justified and correct. It’s not that Ravi is completely unsympathetic; it’s just that he is completely in the wrong here and being monstrously unfair to and manipulative of Peyton.

Things get worse later on when Ravi and Liv get Blaine to come to the morgue so they can try to convince him to test the memory restoration serum that Ravi has come up with. Blaine, very understandably, doesn’t really want to have his memories back. He doesn’t remember the evil things he did, and his amnesia offers him the chance for a fresh start. Ravi argues that Blaine owes them this, and Ravi goes on a bit of a rant that culminates with him confessing his love to Peyton. Blaine finally agrees to test the memory serum, but Peyton isn’t immediately responsive to Ravi’s declaration of love, so Ravi goes out and sleeps with his old boss, Katty. This is found out when Peyton shows up at Ravi’s place. They’re talking in the foyer, Ravi kisses Peyton, and then Katty drops a wine glass in the other room, at which point Peyton walks into the kitchen and sees the other woman wearing no pants. The whole situation is on the one hand almost laughably contrived but on the other hand not exactly out of character for Ravi at this point. Once again, Peyton is not putting up with Ravi’s shit, though, and she leaves, immediately, and goes to join Liv and Major to listen to Blaine singing.

I almost feel bad for Ravi, but only in the way that I would feel bad for anyone who repeatedly punched themselves in the crotch for no reason. He just makes all the worst possible decision with how he deals with his feelings for Peyton, and it’s hard to watch. It’s, honestly, something of a bold move for the show. Ravi is a fan favorite character, partly because he’s generally delightful, and this storyline forces the viewer to see him in a very different and extremely unflattering light. That said, I am so glad that it’s made so clear that he’s the bad guy here. Peyton hasn’t done anything wrong, and Ravi hasn’t done anything right with her for a while now. We’re seeing something of a darker side to Ravi this season, and while I’m glad this storyline is moving along quickly I also hope the show doesn’t let Ravi out the hole he’s dug for himself anytime soon. He’s not the worst, and he’s not irredeemable, but they definitely should take their time.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • Blaine’s new job is as a lounge singer, which is obviously/hopefully just a perfect excuse to have David Anders sing every week.
  • Justin seems nice, and I’m glad Major is making a friend. They’re adorable together, and I feel like there’s already a subtext of “It would be a shame if something happened to one of them,” and I hate that subtext.