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Kids playing in an abandoned property – someone has to
get eaten for this. Especially when they decide to investigate when they hear
spooky noises. The gene pool demands they be eaten
They take a picture of a figure they call a zombie and
post it online to be spotted by Ravi and Liv who are gloriously snarking back
and forth. This raises Liv’s fear of a horde. Liv is also angsting over Major
having recognised that she hasn’t been the best person to him and she’s sent
him an apology. RFavi does question how appropriate a texted apology is and she
quips about eating his head.
She muses on how much hunger utterly consumes a zombie and Blaine drops in kind of pissy that Liv didn’t meet with him as she planned. He rather creepily points out just how hard it is to get your hands on brains when you don’t work in a morgue. Liv makes it clear she’s not a fan of his and still thinks he’s a drug dealing groping arsehole
Time for some of Liv and Peyton together – about time.
Peyton is a lawyer handling her first big murder case and wants to celebrate
and practice with Liv. Unfortunately seeing picture of the dead man triggers
Liv’s memory flashback after eating a brain that morning – suggesting the brain
she just ate belonged to the murderer. Not the guy Peyton is prosecuting.
Awkward.
She takes this to Clive who would rather not deal with it, he’s certainly not going to interrupt a high profile trial of as tech guru for the sake of the accused – a homeless drifter (who stole the dead man’s wallet and shoes) and accusing some random guy, Marvin Webster, instead. As part of her brain eating, Liv also gains some gun insight. She, rather unfairly, accuses him of wanting an innocent man to go to jail rather than throw away his career on the words of a psychic. But as she walks away she realises her harsh arrogance was another symptom of brain eating
Yes, she ate the brains of sociopath – or, rather,
someone with anti-social personality disorder as her newly fact addicted mind
throws up.
That emotionless state helps her deal with Peyton’s revelation – Mason kissing another woman on facebook. She feels nothing – so she takes the chance to examine Peyton’s casefiles instead.
Time for Ravi and Liv to go zombiehunting while Liv
describes how disturbing the emotionless-brain is. They find the trapped zombie
– and she is a zombie, Liv’s friend/co-worker Marcy who was supposed to have
died at the boat party. Ravi expects Liv to be devastated to see her friend and
fellow zombie reduced to a rotting, shambling monster but the hit-man brains
are still working. Ravi decides to experiment – feeing Marcy brains and seeing
if she can come back from this level of rot.
Liv is still on the murder case and drags Clive to a cop
bar to speak to ex-cop and book-maker Frank Smith who Wally, the dead man
Marvin murdered, owed a lot of money. Liv is sure they’ll blend into the cop
bar, Clive is less sure and describes the places as “white Whitesville.” It’s
also quiz night with stylised Genie from
I Dream of Genie – and Clive has some sharp insight about a room full of men
whose ideal woman was one you could force back into a bottle when she gets “uppity.”
While Liv aces the trivia, they interview Frank who tells them that yes, Wally owed him money but the man was selling his company and going to pay him back. Something he can’t do now he’s dead. He also knows Clive’s boss and drives him off – but as they leave Liv sees pictures on the wall of Marvin the hit man, in the bar the same night Wally asked for an extension on his loan.
They go to Marvin’s house where they find a silenced
pistol – the evidence Clive needs – but Liv also has a vision of the hit and
run that killed; it was deliberate murder.
Of course, Peyton isn’t happy with her case completely
destroyed. Peyton is outraged that have months of complete apathy, this is what
finally encourages Liv to wake up – of course Liv doesn’t handle this well with
her emotionless brain.
Liv thoroughly hates herself for it because she can’t even
make herself care. Avi points out she could eat another brain but, if she did
so she would lose the visions and not be able to find the murderer. Liv, again,
sees the logical ethics while feeling nothing.
Her being so compassionless is probably not a good time
for Major to visit with one of his clients (he’s a counsellor and also runs a
shelter); Jerome, one of his clients, wants to report his room-mate missing.
They’ve come to Liv and, through her, Clive because the police are indifferent
to a run-way/delinquent who has been missing for four days. Of course Clive
asked if he just left, but Eddie ran off leaving his Ipod behind. He also talks
about a creepy guy handing out utopian (which Blaine dealt in) to lure Eddie
and other guys like him
Back to the hit and run and things get confusing – the guy
who bought the car to run Marvin over was also a major investor in Wally’s (the
man Marvin shot) company who is paying a huge reward to anyone who brought
forward evidence of who killed Wally.
They bring the guy in for questioning and he tries to
throw out his fame and fortune (and the fact the man he killed was a murderer) to
dodge responsibility because he’s just so important
This guy needs his brain eating though his smugness may
be worse than the sociopathy.
Time to follow Clive’s investigative skills to different
scenes to prompt a memory flash which digs up a witness
Liv also goes with Ravi for their Marcy research – her chilling
voice over fully prepared to destroy Marcy if necessary. Marcy is still a
zombie and Liv says, simply “we have to kill it” even while Ravi corrects her “it”
to “her.” Liv looks for a big rock while Ravi, horrified, recites the Hippocratic
oath to her. Ravi falls in the hole trying to sedate Marcy and Liv watches,
curious as he screams and fights to escape the zombie. It’s pretty chilling.
She eventually comes to her senses, looks completely horrified before leaping
in to wrestle with Marcy – and when Marcy grabs her neck, Liv goes
Full-On-Zombie and beats Marcy to death. Ravi is now in a hole with another
lethal zombie but she returns to her senses with Ravi’s calm reassurance.
Liv is considerably more traumatised by the fact she almost let Ravi die than Ravi is – he focuses more on the fact that even high on sociopath brains she still saved him; the brains don’t entirely define her.
Back to the case and more interviews with the arsehole
whose name I can’t remember and don’t care to. I shall call him Smug. They don’t
have a witness but are very cunning at pretending they do with Liv’s visions
and, with Peyton’s help, get him to sign a plea deal. He confesses
There’s still a twist left – Marvin has nearly left Liv’s
system but after what she did to Marcy she’s afraid of what it will be like to
feel again. She resists and throws the brain away – because it’s cowardly and
cruel to not give Marcy the respect of her emotions.
She also has a friend moment with Peyton over the
facebook video
Sadly among all this no-one has noticed Jerome’s case as
he continues to hand out fliers. And he falls into Blaine’s clutches. Well we
know where Blaine is getting his brains
It was a small moment, but Clive mentioning how white the
bar was is very rare in the genre- not just having POC characters, but openly
addressing race (as well as openly addressing gender discrimination). Not even
having a great big “rawr this is a villain who is racist and misogynist so you
know they’re a villain” simplistic moment. Not, it’s addressing more subtle
elements like being the only Black man in a room (contrast with Resurrection and “do you see anything
different about me”) or what the chosen sexy costume implies. This kind of
commentary is really rare in the genre
Then we have Jerome’s case and, I think, an opening to some
class and race analysis there – no-one, certainly not the police, care about “delinquents”
and “runaways”. It’s easy to cast them as easy victims – and certainly what
Blaine is targeting – but the episode made a point of showing people cared, or
showing Jerome as a person and. I think this goes well with the depiction of
sex workers as victims in a past episode – again, a group that is very
vulnerable and often used as stock victims, but also a point was made
Seeing Marcy, as much as I would have liked to have seen
her developed more, was a poignant depiction of the consequences of not
feeding. I was pretty surprised that feeding her brains doesn’t bring her back
to humanity- it shows there is a terrifying, permanent consequence to eating
brains. I also liked that Liv refused to keep not feeling pain in part in
acknowledgement of what Marcy went through
While, at the same time, eating Marvin’s brains showed us
the terrifying consequence of continuing to eat brains. Last episode showed us
the power and joy of it, this episode went far the other way with some really
terrifying (and excellently portrayed) possibilities. It’s a difficult choice
to make.
On top of that, Ravi, Liv and Clive really work well
together (we still have an element of Liv replacing Clive’s detective skills
but his detective skills aren’t completely non-existant). In all, I’m pretty
happy.
