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iZombie: “Method Head” has a little of everything I love about this show

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An uncharitable viewer may call “Method Head” overstuffed and disjointed, but I think I can say, without being entirely uncritical, that this episode managed to include basically all of my favorite things about iZombie. Sure, there’s a lot going on, and one of the major gut punches from the winter finale is resolved far too easily and quickly, but this episode seriously has everything. They even managed to squeeze scenes with Vaughn and scenes with Blaine into one episode, which almost never happens. Even better, in spite of all its moving parts, “Method Head” mostly works, although parts of the very meta case of the week fall a little flat.

The episode picks up the morning after Liv and Major’s breakup and Ravi’s discovery that their rat had reverted to being a zombie. All things considered, Liv and Major seem to be doing alright post-breakup, and they continue to be friendly throughout the episode, so it’s really Ravi who has the truly unfortunate news to share. Definitely the rat, New Hope, is back to being a zombie, almost certainly Major (and Blaine) will go back to being zombies, they’re right back at square one on the cure front, and they are out of tainted utopium. The only bright side here is that they know where they might be able to get more utopium—their search area is still a hundred acres, though. It’s a new raising of the stakes for the show and its characters and a renewal of the urgency that marked the series’ first season, which is nice, especially as the case of the week format has gotten a little stale.

I like the way this episode made use of title cards to move things forward in time, and it did a decent job of showing what everyone was up to over the remainder of the holiday season. It was a little sad watching Liv trying to get back into Clive’s good graces, but my complaint here is actually that the passage of time wasn’t enough. In the most generous reading of things, Clive was only mad at Liv for about two weeks, and by the end of this episode their status quo seems to have been restored.

This is especially disappointing after Liv’s very convincing devastation over it in the winter finale. This week she seems to have gotten over it relatively quickly, and we don’t see much of her sadness or stress or how she’s been emotionally affected by either her falling out with Clive or her breakup with Major. Certainly, I don’t expect Liv to sit home moping and eating pints of ice cream, but her arc this week was a very sharp turnaround after her apparent grief back in December.

The case of the week deals with the murder of an actor on the set of a show called Zombie High, which Liv apparently loves, and there are some fun moments, but I don’t think this idea was used to its maximum potential. There are some funny moments, but nothing that sticks in my mind even just a few hours after watching it. The one line I do remember—a teen actor suggests a show starring a zombie, and Clive replies, “That’s dumb”—is just too on the nose, but most of the rest of the Zombie High stuff is highly forgettable. The investigation does get Liv and Clive back together, but I would honestly have rather seen that drag out for a couple of episodes at least. It would have been interesting to explore who Liv is without that aspect of her life, and it would have given Clive some room to be developed as something more than just Liv’s way to play police officer.

The biggest surprise this week, for me anyway, was that it was Major’s story line that was the most interesting thing happening. Usually Major is the worst, but his scenes with Vaughn were excellent, even if I totally called it that the “whistleblower” thing was a loyalty test. It was predictable and obvious, but it worked, and I’m very interested to see how deep Major is willing to go down this rabbit hole.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Dale and Clive have a very cute relationship, but I wish we got to see a little more of it.
  • “Hair color: white as snow.” I kind of wish the writers hadn’t wasted that Santa murder. They could easily have gotten a full episode of puns out of that.
  • Gilda/Rita and Vaughn are an incredible amount of fun to watch together. They hate each other so very, very much.
  • I was genuinely concerned for Dale when she went to talk to Blaine.
  • Looks like things could get real interesting for Major in the next week or two if Dale tracks the dog down to his place.
  • Peyton is missing in action. Again. Still.
Television

iZombie: “Cape Town” is thick with narrative justice

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This season of iZombie has been an examination of how Liv’s zombie-ism affects her life and relationships, and this episode really digs deep into the ideas that it’s introduced over the last few weeks. “Cape Town” opens with the inevitable argument between Liv and Major after last week’s ending, moves on to the murder of a masked vigilante, has some fun with new villain Stacey Boss, and then hurtles towards a devastating nadir of a midseason finale.

The biggest surprise of the episode, for me, anyway, was the slight abatement of my hatred for Major. This was helped along by “Cape Town”’s B-plot, which explained Major’s situation a little better and worked to make a little more sense out of what’s going on with his zombie-freezing operation. It’s definitely a case of “telling” rather than “showing,” but it works here, with Major spending most of the episode having a heart to heart with a suicidal zombie prostitute. It’s surprising enough that the show handles this material sensitively and respectfully, but that Major comes out of it a somewhat more-polished turd than he was before is a real achievement.

My only serious complaint about Major’s scenes this week is that the woman he spends all this time talking to is never named. I appreciate that the show does such a good job of differentiating between the woman’s choice to engage in sex work and the sex slavery that’s made her suicidal, and her story is definitely a heart wrenching way to offer a sort of worst (or at least worse) case scenario of the zombie experience. It helps Major to understand Liv a little better, though it’s too little, too late for now, as we see at the end of the episode. Still, the Major stuff this week was effective. When Liv breaks things off, I actually felt bad for him on some level—even if it was on a level somewhere underneath my cheering for even the temporary ending of this relationship.

Ultimately, “Cape Town” becomes an attempt to answer some of the existential questions raised by the predicament of Liv and the other zombies. We see how integral to Liv’s identity her job is and how important her zombie powers have become to her, but we also see how her being a zombie interferes with her ability to function. For all that Liv disparages the masked vigilantes that (apparently) Seattle is just infested with, she sees herself in much the same way. The difference is that Liv actually does have super powers, even if they do come with some significant drawbacks.

In this way, “Cape Town” is also a great example of the show doing some of its best work as an interrogation of genre more generally. The masked hero conceit may be a little on the nose, but it’s well done, and this episode utilizes a lot of smart humor to balance out its darker elements and keep it from just being crushingly depressing.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Ravi’s face when Liv starts spouting super hero platitudes is amazing. No one could be more delighted by this turn of events than Ravi is.
  • Stacey Boss is quickly becoming my favorite villain in the history of this show. I have a deep appreciation for disgustingly banal evildoers, and this guy is a perfect example of the type.
  • “I’m a brain dealer, not a doctor!”
  • I’m a little surprised at how easily Liv decides to make another zombie. Worth it for Blaine’s “Welcome to Team Z” speech, though.
  • Peyton is missing again this week, as are Gilda/Rita and Dale. I thought Peyton would be back for sure, with both Boss and Blaine in the episode, but no such luck.
  • It’s also getting a little tiresome for women of color to only be included in this show as murderers, negative stereotypes, and otherwise disposable characters.
  • The breakup between Clive and Liv is about a million times more devastating than the one between Liv and Major.
  • Ravi’s face when he sees Hope, though, is the saddest thing in the whole episode. I feel like Ravi’s face is always the place to look when you want to know how to feel about this show.
Television

iZombie: “The Hurt Stalker” is a showcase for some of this show’s biggest problems

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I feel like I’m decidedly in the minority with my ambivalence about “The Hurt Stalker” when all the other reviews of it I’ve seen have been glowing. It’s not a bad episode, and it tells us a lot more about Clive, who has been desperately in need of characterization for some time now, but a lot of the episode deals with Liv and Major drama, which is my least favorite thing about this season so far. Probably because Liv and Major drama is objectively boring, and this episode really highlighted to me just how unfair and hypocritical Major is being through all of this.

First, though, we get a big dose of Clive stuff right at the beginning of the episode, as he’s the initial suspect in the murder investigation of the week. It turns out the woman who was murdered was someone Clive dated a few months ago and who subsequently stalked him and menaced his new girlfriend. The evidence against Clive, of course—his gun was the murder weapon, and he had threatened the murdered woman just an hour before her death—is obviously too damning for him to actually be the killer, so the challenge for Liv and Ravi this week is to clear Clive’s name by finding the real murderer.

My biggest problem with the Clive stuff this week is that, while we do learn a lot more about him—He plays piano! He cooks! He love Game of Thrones!—all of this information is literally told to us in one conversation with Dale very early in the episode. There are a couple of scenes later in the episode where this information is revisited, but there’s nothing new introduced after of this initial reveal. As adorable as it is seeing Ravi poking gentle fun at Clive about Game of Thrones and watching Liv and Ravi together trying to get Clive to admit to cooking for them, it can’t reasonably be counted as characterization when Dale told us all about it in thirty seconds twenty minutes ago.

The other order of the day is more exploration of what Liv and Major’s relationship looks like now that she’s a zombie. There’s some great stuff going on here, and a couple of really powerful moments, but I can’t help feeling frustrated at how Major seems to have already checked out of the relationship. At the same time Major’s tendency to hold Liv to an entirely unfair standard continues to be infuriating. By the end of “The Hurt Stalker,” I was heartbroken for Liv, but for entirely different reasons than I think the show intends for us to be. Major is just the worst, and Liv does not deserve what he’s going to end up putting her through.

I missed Blaine and Peyton this week, but Vaughn du Clark was back, which was nice. I loved the scene between him and Gilda/Rita, although that was pretty much the only part of the episode where she showed to advantage. The rest of her time on screen was spent being subtly hostile towards Liv—who is totally oblivious, apparently, to the fact that her roommate hates her—and being creepily jealous over Major, who she also despises. I’d be the last person to argue that there’s no place for the occasional one-dimensional character in fiction, but Gilda/Rita is just terrible. She seems to be motivated pretty much only by hatred and spite, with no softer feelings at all, and she verges on being a misogynistic caricature at times.

As much as I love this show, it continues to be plagued by serious problems in the way it chooses to represent women. Liv is a great character, and I like Peyton, but Peyton is rarely around and even more rarely in scenes with Liv, in spite of their purported best friendship. Dale could be promising, but we only ever see her with (or about) Clive, and Gilda/Rita could be a wonderful antagonist if the show was willing to dedicate more time to developing her, but they don’t. For a show that is so well-known and well-loved for its excellent female protagonist, it’s a shame that it can’t figure out how to better utilize its supporting cast of women.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Liv in jail felt like a situation with legitimately high stakes, but I feel like the woman she shared a cell with who was screaming about Ferguson felt like a horrendously racist caricature of a black criminal “playing the race card.” There are seldom women of color on this show, and that this one was set up in such a way that the show seems to be implying that she almost deserves to have her brain eaten is pretty horrifying.
  • As much as I can’t stand Major and Liv together, the engagement ring in the safe was really well-done.
  • Best use of “Karma Chameleon” ever.
  • It’s never a good idea to go snooping in your significant other’s devices, and that clearly doesn’t work out for Liv here, but I hate that this whole episode worked to essentially minimize and delegitimize Liv’s feelings and deflect her valid concerns about her relationship with Major—who is in fact being dishonest with Liv about multiple, important, probably deal-breaking things that she deserves to know about.
Television

iZombie: “Abra Cadaver” breathes life into a pretty standard dead magician murder mystery

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It seems that it’s a requirement that every police procedural show must eventually do an episode involving stage magicians, and iZombie’s time to continue this tradition has come. In “Abra Cadaver,” Liv eats the brain of a death-obsessed magician with a penchant for explaining his colleagues’ best tricks on YouTube.

It’s nice to see an episode where the murder mystery of the week is more than just incidental to more important goings on, although this mystery turns out to be not as clever as the writers think it is. The best parts of this episode are all the parts that aren’t the investigation of Sid Wicked’s murder, and we finally get to see the show begin to address the enormous elephant that’s been in the room since the beginning—how Liv’s being under the influence of the brains she eats affects her relationships.

Post-, well, not –coital, but post-probably-hand-stuff, I guess, Major talks a good game about how he’s cool with all incarnations of Liv, but it turns out that he’s much more bothered than he wants Liv to believe. By the end of the episode, Liv has gotten very weird from morbid magician brains, and Major has gotten very weirded out by it. I might be annoyed that Major’s brief flirtation with the most boring drug problem ever is so quickly forgotten, but this shift in direction for Major and Liv spawns one of my favorite interactions on the show so far when Major asks Ravi and Peyton about Liv’s personality changes.

My love for this scene might have something to do with the fact that it immediately follows Peyton shutting down Ravi’s awkward and totally unwelcome and inappropriate attempt to ask her for relationship advice. Left to his own devices, Ravi ends up dumping his girlfriend, Steph, later in the episode, which is actually the lowlight of the episode. Steph, weirdly and annoyingly, has decided to throw a Guy Fawkes Day celebration for Ravi—a couple of weeks late—and it’s every bit as cringeworthy as you could expect. It’s a really lazy way of dealing with a character who’s outlived her usefulness to the narrative the show is building.

Steph was introduced as Ravi’s new, relatively cool-seeming girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, and now she’s suddenly, well, this? I don’t buy it. And I didn’t like it. I ship Ravi and Peyton as much as the next person (which is to say a lot), but I hate to see this kind of character assassination in service to that. It could just as well have been handled by Ravi saying at some point that it just didn’t work out with Steph. There was no need to humiliate her on screen like this, and it didn’t make Ravi look good either.

By far my favorite parts of the episode, though, are the scenes of Liv and Blaine hanging out together trying to figure out who is killing zombies. By the end of their time together, I want nothing more than for them to get married already and make some beautiful zombie babies. In all honestly, though? Liv and Blaine have about ten times the chemistry that Liv and Major do, and we know that Blaine isn’t totally thrilled about being de-zombified. Liv and Blaine giving into their obviously sexual tension would be a great way for him to get re-zombified.

“Abra Cadaver” is a solid episode overall, and it hit most of the right notes, but it could have made better use of its premise. Personally, I could have used more magic puns, but it’s still a solid example of iZombie at its near-best and a nice entry into the annals of the dead magician murder mystery genre.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • How did Liv not even seem to notice that the dog in Dale’s file looked an awful lot like Major’s new canine friend?
  • Please stop trying to make Blaine and Peyton happen.
  • Who is the mysterious woman who drops off something at Babineaux’s place?
  • Speaking of Babineaux, I really like him and Dale together.
Television

iZombie: “Max Wager” pays off, bigtime

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“Max Wager” was a solid episode that advanced all my favorite plots while also not making things too easy for Liv and Major, whose relationship troubles ate up perhaps a tad too much of the hour. Still, even Liv and Major doing sad vanilla Skype sex couldn’t ruin an episode that had so much good stuff going on.

It looks like Liv and Major are really happening, which I’m not super thrilled about, but it does give Ravi a reason to spend the whole episode testing over a hundred different types of condoms to find out which one might let Liv and Major have sex. The answer is none of them, because zombie virus is very tiny, and Ravi proves that he is the world’s best friend before the end of the episode when he bursts in on Liv and Major to, I guess, physically stop them from having sex if he had to. Also, Ravi’s condom-balloon unicorn is great. Also, also, I would like it if Ravi and Peyton would start making out again now, but I’ll settle for companionable roommate breakfast together.

I was happy to see Clive get a little more to do this week, and while the chance meeting between Clive and Dale and Liv and Major was a little cringeworthy at times (entirely because of Major, who apparently knows well enough to say “Native American” but not enough to avoid making vaguely racist and unfunny “jokes”), I was mostly just glad to see that the show is moving things along between Clive and Dale. It really helps to establish that Clive has a life and personality and goals when he’s not just hanging around with Liv—which was also called out in the scene. I think this was supposed to be amusingly self-aware, but it fell flat with me. I don’t want a self-aware quip about how underdeveloped Clive is or how underused he is in the show. Just fix it, please.

Once again, Peyton is back, and while I always wish we got to see more of her, she got some good material this week. While we’re first introduced to Big Bad Stacey Boss with Liv at the barbershop (which was an incredible scene, by the way), we only find out who this extremely creepy little guy is when he shows up at Peyton’s office to threaten her into stopping her investigation of his illegal activities. She isn’t going to stop, obviously, but in Stacey Boss the show has managed to create its most legitimately scary villain yet.

The best scenes of the episode were all Blaine’s, though. David Anders does an amazing job of balancing evil, humor, and pathos. Literally every time this guy is on screen, things get interesting, whether he’s talking with his dad, drunkenly philosophizing at Liv, or maudlinly murdering his own grandfather.

It’s all a perfect set up for the absolute gut punch at the end of the episode when, at first, we think Major has murdered Blaine’s dad (making Blaine’s killing of his beloved grandfather tragically unnecessary) only to find out that Major hasn’t been murdering any of the zombies that have disappeared. He’s only freezing them, presumably to be thawed and cured at a later date. Though this makes Major’s brief flirtation with self-destruction earlier in the season somewhat more inexplicable than it already was, it’s good to know that Major isn’t a total monster.

Aside from my general boredom with the Liv and Major drama, my only real criticism of this episode is that with a title like “Max Wager,” I expected to see some Vaughn. In the end, though, any disappointment I felt at the lack of Vaughn du Clark was more than mitigated by the abundance of Blaine and the introduction of a new villain to love-hate.

Television

iZombie: “Love & Basketball” is the best episode of the season so far

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No Peyton this week, and no Vaughn, but there’s so much else going on in “Love & Basketball” that I can [mostly] forgive these sins. “Love & Basketball” is one of those rare episodes of television that manages to be just jam-packed with really interesting stuff, full of important emotional moments, and very funny. It would be very easy for this episode to become incoherent with so much going on, but it’s masterfully balanced here.

The episode picks up right where last week’s left off, with Liv and Major making out big time. Which Liv puts a big time stop to almost immediately, and there is so much that I love about this interaction and the following morning when Liv wakes Major up by taking his blood pressure. This is probably the funniest Major has ever been, which is a nice change after several weeks of him sort of alternating between boringly tortured and boringly insufferable to everyone around him. I still don’t love Liv and Major as a pairing, but I can kind of see the appeal now at least.

I even found myself rather liking Major when, after Liv delivers a long, basketball coach brain-inspired pep talk in Major’s (disgusting, by the way) bedroom, he just responds with a lovingly indulgent, “God, you are so weird.” If you are a Liv/Major shipper, this is basically a perfect episode for you, as it’s peppered throughout with these kind of cute moments. I do think the emotional arc of them going from wanting to tear each other’s clothes off to being best friends again to ending the episode with having a real serious relationship talk was a lot to squeeze into a single episode, but it mostly worked here. It didn’t even completely monopolize the episode; there was plenty of time for advancing other plots and revealing new information about other characters.

The larger of the two B-plots in “Love & Basketball” is definitely the actual case of the week, which Clive ends up mostly working alone. Even then, this storyline this week is much less about the actual murder mystery (which is, frankly, almost too convoluted) and more about giving Clive a good deal more screen time than he’s had so far this season. In the end, this turns out to be almost entirely in service of advancing the Meat Cute plot, which has apparently not been abandoned.

This is another story thread that this episode manages to pull of nicely, even though it seems like it would be a lot to squeeze in. Honestly, though? I think the most important part of these scenes is the new insight that we gain into Clive’s character. He’s apparently the kind of guy who will beat the shit out of a child abuser, which makes me like him even more than I previously did.

While following Clive around, we also get to see more of the new character that was introduced last week: Dale Bozzio the FBI agent. We learn a couple of big things about her. First, she’s totally hilarious. Second, she’s also interested in what happened at Meat Cute.

Finally, in the third major story thread this week, Ravi finally gets his hands on more of the tainted Utopium that he needs in order to re-develop the cure for Liv and the rest of the zombies. This is a pretty significant development, but the best thing about it in this episode is that we get a scene with just Ravi and Blaine. Fighting over the tainted Utopium. While “Friday I’m in Love” (Get it? The Cure!) plays in the background, which is my favorite thing that has ever happened on this show.

Leftover thoughts:

  • “Clear eyes, full stomachs, can’t lose” is a great line.
  • I hate the conflict between Gilda/Rita and Liv over Major. Gilda/Rita doesn’t even seem to like him very much, and I can always do without this type of sexual competitiveness and jealousy between women. It’s not entertaining to me. At all.
  • Blaine comes up with the very best business names. I’m sure I’d heard it before, but Shady Plots as the name of his funeral business? GENIUS.
  • The other medical examiner in Tacoma was super racist, right? If they were just trying to portray a kind of humorous city vs. country rivalry between Ravi and this guy, I feel like they went a little overboard with that dude’s really hostile bigotry. It wasn’t the whole scene, but it was early enough in the scene that it made it hard for me to laugh when the tone was more playful later in the conversation. I just felt bad for Ravi and Clive being stuck dealing with this jerk.
  • I don’t really get what’s going on with the zombies at Max Rager. How is it possible that this scientist lady doesn’t know that the zombies they are paying Major to kill are sentient people? That stuff was all just weird.
Television

iZombie: Peyton is great, but Peyton plus Blaine is better

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iZombie surprised me this week, by following up last week’s very good episode with another that I like even better. “Even Cowgirls Get the Black and Blues” is an episode about heartbreak, which it deals out in spades, and, relatedly, the ultimate randomness and meaninglessness of the universe. Nevertheless, this is also an episode full of hope, although I wouldn’t exactly call it optimistic, either.

The biggest surprise this week by far was how much Peyton was in the episode. Last week, we seemed to have gotten her back in exchange for no Blaine at all, but this week we get some of both—and both together, which is something I never knew I always wanted. Peyton and Blaine together is only my second favorite development of the episode, though.

The very best thing that happened this week? Peyton and Liv’s actual reunion at the start of the episode. After the last few episodes, which really focused on the breakdown of basically all of Liv’s relationships and Liv’s growing feelings of isolation and disconnectedness, it’s so nice to see something in her life going well. I was a little concerned last week when Peyton just left the birthday cake for Liv, but it turns out she really was just busy. When Liv tracks Peyton down at the gym, Peyton is pleased to see her friend, apologetic about the months of radio silence, and ready to talk about things.

Unfortunately, Liv is called away to help Ravi, but this isn’t the last we see of Peyton. Honestly, though, after all the time this show has spent sidelining and just plain disappearing Peyton altogether, I find it a little hard to credit this turnaround in their treatment of this character. This week sort of doubled down on Peyton’s storyline from last week and tied it together with Blaine’s in a way that makes me think that Peyton is going to continue to play a significant role in this season’s overarching plot. That said, the show has teased Peyton’s importance before with no payoff, so I’m trying to manage my expectations about this until I see at least a few more episodes in this same vein.

Blaine, of course, is shaping up to be a great villain, and this week he’s delightfully evil as he continues looking for the recipe for the tainted Utopium from the boat party. I pretty much loved everything about every scene Blaine was in this week. His texting henchman is excellent, and all of the Blaine scenes this week had the great balance of darkness and humor that characterizes this show at its best.

Aside from Peyton’s return, the other big emotional component of this episode concerns Liv’s relationship with Major. I’m very surprised to see this plot moving along as quickly as it seems to be, although I’m also not convinced that this really is Major’s rock bottom. If it is, it’s going to be profoundly unsatisfying and will really cement Major’s position as one of the most boring ex-boyfriends on television.

In basically every way possible, Major behaves abominably to everyone he comes in contact with this week, which is par for the course with this fetid pile of unexamined privilege. The difference between this week and every other week, however, is that we’re actually starting to see him being called out on it. Peyton has been back all of two days and has noticed what a weirdo Major is being. Ravi actually confronts Major about his bizarre behavior. Even Liv finally goes to Major and tells him that they are for real over. And then Major shows up on Liv’s doorstep and it looks like maybe this thing is back on—although I’d call it even odds that making out with his zombie ex-girlfriend might just be another rung on Major’s descent into crisis.

The problem with Major, of course, is that he’s just plain unlikable. I think I could deal with that if Major’s character arc was taking him towards being a villain, but he’s just awful as a romantic hero. Peyton’s return and her reunion with Liv, with its hugs and apologies and empathy, really helps to highlight just how terribly unreasonable Major has been in the way he’s treated Liv. It was gratifying this week to see Liv herself get to call Major out for this, but the ending of the episode reveals just how much Liv is still dealing with her own feelings of self-loathing, guilt, and shame—and how vulnerable and starved for affection she really is.

Overall, “Even Cowgirls Get the Black and Blues” is a solid episode. The murder mystery sort of fades into the background, and the effects of the murdered woman’s brain on Liv was subtly and sensitively handled, which was a nice change from some recent episodes where Liv picked up a few too many of her brains’ worst qualities. I liked the way that the randomness of the murder ended up echoing the randomness of Liv’s being turned into a zombie in the first place, and it was good to see Liv starting to deal with her feelings in a better way than she has been. Key to that development is Peyton’s return, and it’s very clear that Peyton’s forgiveness and acceptance of Liv is vitally important. I just hope that Peyton sticks around this season.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • Ravi’s new girlfriend, Stephanie, seems nice, but I got a sort of weird vibe when she congratulated him on banging Peyton.
  • Minor is a great name for that dog, which is totally adorable.
  • Is Babineaux getting a love interest? That would be swell, because that poor man hasn’t had much to do this season so far.
  • Ravi was awesome this week, in general. He dressed like a cowboy, was a supportive friend to Liv, and called Major out in a pretty significant way.
Television

iZombie: Peyton is back, but Blaine is conspicuously absent

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Peyton is back! Finally! And it looks like she might be getting a good amount of screen time, as she’s already getting embroiled in some of the show’s bigger plots (though she doesn’t know it yet).

This week’s murder mystery was only moderately interesting, functioning largely as a vehicle for advancing other plots. It just never quite got off the ground under its own steam, and even watching Liv strut around in rich bitch mode wasn’t that entertaining. The writing seemed torn between trying to take the stance of “trophy wives are people too” and joking too gently at these women’s expense, which is just unfortunate as it means the episode flounders a bit and doesn’t manage to be either funny or insightful. The one redeeming feature of this week’s whodunnit might have been the revelation of the murderer, except by the time that happened I didn’t even care anymore and it was quickly overshadowed by Peyton stuff.

It seems that Major is going to figure larger in this season than in the first one, but he continues to be a bore. It looks like he won’t be hitting rock bottom with his burgeoning addiction anytime soon, and in fact he seems almost too functional, all things considered. He’s certainly functional enough to bang Gilda (who it turns out is Vaughn’s illegitimate daughter?!). I’m not sure who of that pair I feel more sorry for, to be honest. That sounds like it would be the saddest, most vanilla sex ever. Also, is Major Lilywhite really the guy you run to in a fit of post-adolescent youthful rebellion? Poor Gilda.

Ravi was excellent this week. I like Rahul Kohli best when he’s less funny, to be honest, and Ravi is an excellent voice of reason, with good insights. That said, it was a little disappointing to see him so completely oblivious to Liv’s pain this week. So was Clive, but Clive has the excuse of having limited exposure to Liv–basically he sees her just often enough to think she’s probably insane. Speaking of Clive, though, he’s been kind of tragically underused this season so far. It seemed like he and Liv were becoming something like friends last year, but now he seems to exist only to react to her bizarre behavior.

With Blaine missing in action after the reveal of his zombie dad last week, this episode’s big villain was Vaughn du Clark, who was really wonderfully wicked. His interactions with Liv were particularly fun to watch for his part, although Liv’s strange behavior was a bit much. It mostly worked, but this week it was all due to Steven Weber’s excellence as Vaughn.

The most important part of “Real Dead Housewife of Seattle,” however, really is Peyton’s return. With Liv having so few female characters to interact with, Peyton is a pretty vital part of the show that has been missing far too often and, this time, for far too long. Her return was handled nicely, and I thought I might cry when Liv opened her fridge and found that cake. Now I just need for Peyton and Liv to find themselves in the same room. You know, talking and stuff, because I can’t imagine that Peyton has really, fully wrapped her head around the zombie thing yet.

Television

iZombie: “Zombie Bro” is a return to most excellent form for the show

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I think I almost one hundred percent loved this episode, which I was looking forward to with some trepidation after the racist mess that was the season premier. Everything about “Zombie Bro” worked, though. There were lots of “bro” puns, some interesting revelations, and a gut punch at the end that promises some serious drama in the future.

The murder victim of the week is stabbed to death at a frat party, which kicks off an investigation that has a couple of parallels with and tonal similarities to last week’s mystery. It’s interesting to me that they would do two such thematically similar episodes back to back, but I like the confidence that shows. It seems obvious that the writers aren’t worried about the audience getting bored and are certain that the other elements of the show will keep people coming back. In light of how heavily I criticized last week’s episode, I also kind of like that this episode felt sort of like a do-over of that shitshow, and I know that if I ever rewatch this series in the future I’ll be pretending that this was the season premiere.

Highlights of “Zombie Bro” include:

  • “E tu, bro-te?” (Have I mentioned how much I love puns?)
  • The guy with the same name as the murder victim.
  • Liv’s inappropriate laughter.
  • Furries.
  • Liv’s police tape dress, which is a miracle of handicraft that I wish I thought I could pull off for Halloween. (Sadly, I think I’m just too busty for that look.)
  • Princess Sparkles.
  • Major not knowing how to buy drugs. Because of course he doesn’t.
  • Ravi not knowing how to take drugs.
  • Seriously, all of the banter between Major and Ravi in this episode was great. I’m really starting to love these guys together, and I want more of this dynamic.
  • Liv’s is still Major’s in case of emergency number.
  • Ravi dancing shirtless. Thank you, iZombie writers.
  • Major falling asleep in Liv’s lap. I don’t care for Major that much, but I’d have to be a monster to not be affected by this scene.
  • Ravi trying to make sense of his messages to himself the next day. You can really see the moment when he gives up.
  • We get to meet Blaine’s dad, and it’s probably the best Blaine scene to date. This makes so much sense.
  • That whole ending, which was just heartbreaking.

As much as I loved “Zombie Bro” it’s not without its flaws.

  • Peyton is still missing in action, and this week she didn’t even get a mention. By the time she comes back, we’re going to have straight up forgotten what she even looks like.
  • Liv dragging Gilda to the frat party could have been really fun, but instead Gilda just came off as a wet blanket and Liv came off like some kind of weirdo with a case of arrested development who dragged her new roommate to a frat party. It was a completely wasted opportunity, and Liv and Gilda barely even interacted with each other. Considering how much both Liv and I are longing for Liv to have a friendship with another woman, I was pretty disappointed by this.
  • Everything Major-related that doesn’t directly involve Liv or Ravi. When he’s with other characters, Major is great, but by himself he’s just a big beige bore, especially since Liv and Ravi are both people who Major could talk to about the stuff he’s going through and he just sort of stubbornly refuses to.

Overall, though, this was great episode, and I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the season and trying to pretend that “Grumpy Old Liv” never happened.

Television

iZombie is back, and things have gotten weird

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So, I loved the first season of iZombie, but I’m already struggling a little to get into the new season. It wasn’t bad, but I think I was just so excited about it, especially in a year of otherwise pretty lackluster programming, that there was no way I wasn’t going to be disappointed. And “Grumpy Old Liv” was such a disappointment, on multiple levels.

  1. I’m not a huge fan of time skips, and I especially hate them when they’re used poorly.
    And the time skip between the end of last season and the opening of this episode sucks. It’s not that it’s disorienting. Indeed, it’s not that very much has happened at all. There seems to have been almost no movement forward for any character except Blaine, who has started a new business (albeit as a front for taking back up his old business). It’s supposed to be three months since the events of last season’s finale, but it could just as well be three days for all the change in the characters’ statuses.
  2. Peyton is still missing in action.
    If there was one story thread from last season that I was hoping for an update on, and if there was one character who I was hoping to see done more justice this season, it was Peyton. She did at least get mentioned this week, but only to say that she’s still gone. Still, it’s more presence than she got in most of last season’s episodes. I’m just so concerned for her. And, as a feminist and a woman who loves (read: craves) stories about female friendship, it’s more than a little frustrating that this show just seems determined not to provide that story.
  3. I feel like Ravi’s entire life revolves around Liv and to a lesser degree Major.
    This is sort of an addendum to the Peyton thing, but only because Ravi’s apparent total lack of concern about Peyton’s disappearance is kind of appalling, and it was the thing about this episode that really hammered home the idea that, aside from his relationships with (and usefulness to) Liv and Major, Ravi has nothing else going on as a character. He has no family that we know of, no other friends that we’ve seen, no interests that he doesn’t share with either Liv or Major, no career ambitions that he’s stated aside from finding the zombie cure. It’s too bad.
  4. The whole “zombies are super secret thing” is wearing a bit thin.
    Frankly, I just don’t see how there isn’t some kind of public awareness about this problem. There don’t even seem to be any urban legends about it yet. I also don’t understand how Liv in particular, but also zombies in general, are so easily able to hide this from their friends and families. Liv’s behavior is so erratic that I feel like, at the very least, people around her would think she’s gone bonkers.
  5. Major is still so very boring. 
  6. The casual racism in this episode was the worst.
    Like it makes me almost not want to watch anymore. I know that it was supposed to be a part of the “grumpy old man” persona that Liv got from the brains she ate, but it sucked. It wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t insightful, and it feels really, really unnecessary. I know that the brains change Liv’s personality, but she seemed much more out of control than usual this week. In the past, she seemed to have some self-awareness about the bad qualities she got from brains, enough that she didn’t have to give in to the worst aspects of the identities she gets saddled with. I have a hard time, now, buying that she just completely lost her filter the way she is supposed to have here.

Still, there are a few interesting things going on in “Grumpy Old Liv. The scenes with Blaine were good, and Liv’s new roommate was an interesting surprise. The actual murder mystery this week was nicely done, and Steven Weber as the evil Max Rager CEO (or whatever) was delightfully wicked.

Overall, however, this episode just felt a little uninspired, and it felt more like a recap than a continuance of previous story. The time jump felt awkward and Liv’s brains-induced racism was so unpleasant and unlikable that it’s actually tainted the show for me a little.