We
ended last week in a major cliffhanger – Major told Ravi the truth and
started to turn into a zombie… before Ravi drugged him
And this episode begins with… common sense and Ravi
allowing Major to explain himself (he drugged Major because the stress was
turning him full on zombie), including the whole death threat and kidnapping
instead.
Can we take a moment to say how much I love this? A
terrible situation happened that needed desperately explaining and… the
characters explained themselves! How unheard of is this? They needed to spend
at least 4 episodes with whacky misunderstandings, lots of angst before finally
seeing the truth. Seriously, characters actually explaining themselves and listening
to each other is so depressingly unheard of fiction that this is novel.
Common sense… so very rare.
Of course Major being a zombie is likely to cause a lot of
emotional angst, especially since he’s hungry for brains… so
Ravi feeds him left over super-positivity brain to making him all happy and
sunshiny.
Ok while this is kind of hilarious, this needs to be
something that iZombie needs to examine
more. It is something they began to touch on in season 1 and occasionally when
Major first learned about Liv – the whole way that eating brains really does
destroy someone’s personality. How their basic opinions, attitudes,
personality, likes, dislikes – every single aspect of their beings, of their
identities, is constantly in flux. They lose themselves – and it’s constantly
played for jokes without really looking at the utter horror of this. They did
touch on the horror of eating brains and then living the lives of the people
you’ve killed – but the fundamental horror of losing yourself is not really
touched on
Similarly, iZombie
is
still not doing well with borrowed identities from those brains either.
This week was a lot more subtle than previous weeks – but we still have the
murder victim, Bayley, being used to return to Old Liv: an overachiever, desperate
for praise, constantly pushing themselves to extreme levels. This would be a
nice moment of introspection (which it wasn’t, sadly) with Liv seeing the
person she used to be before she became a zombie – but there’s a shaky element
in this “this girl is just like me” narrative. Bayley is Black – and an overachieving
Black woman of colour (now dead) going to college and striving to do the best she
can is different narrative to a White character doing the same thing: there are
implications there and “she is just like me” is shallow. Which is kind of
indicative of every single time Liv has borrowed a marginalised brain.
Interestingly, while this story doesn’t focus too much on
Clive, it does do some interesting things to add to his history. Firstly, Clive
now has an excellent clearance rate for his cases. Now in other shows this
would be down to Liv’s shiny abilities (and Clive even says “it takes a village”
acknowledging he didn’t do it alone) but, as I’ve said repeatedly, a lot of
these cases continue to be solved as much or more by Clive’s detective skills
so it’s nice to see the affirmation of his skill. We also learn why he’s so
very unpopular with the police force – because he follows the rules. He follows
the law and doesn’t agree with police doing whatever they want to do
In this particular case we have Drake’s old partner in
narcotics forcing a large number of students to become confidential informants
to expose drug dealers. This naturally puts their lives at risk – and this is
what got Bayley killed. The detective, Bernadetto, gives a dubious “greater
good” argument that Clive doesn’t buy, deciding to feed Bernadetto to internal
affairs. This could be something interesting to follow up – especially since
police abuse is becoming more of a prominent topic. A huge problem with police
abuse is not just abusive police, but a culture that views rules governing
police as a burden that needs to be removed and a police culture of continually
supporting and covering for their fellows. I hope we keep following this
storyline of Clive refusing to chase results even as it puts people at risk and
flouts the law. I want to see more of this.
I want to see less of side comments like Ravi’s “smells
like Taiwan” when discussing Liv’s brain cooking
On the beta storylines – Blaine still can’t remember
anything and has to be filled in by Ravi who tells him everything he was
involved in. It’s something of a shock to Blaine who also has a whole lot of
legal problems and Peyton being super pissed at him. He is beginning to see
through the manipulations of Donnie and Chief (which could end messily as Chief
was involved in the latest murder/drug dealing case).
But Blaine’s amnesia gives happy-dappy Major an idea: he’s
happy to remain a zombie for the moment and doesn’t buy that he’s definitely
going to die just because a rat did. He proposes infecting Vaughn with
zombieness and if he starts to die, use the cure. Sure it may give him amnesia,
but Vaughn with amnesia is not a bad thing... given all the evil (and he has
now imprisoned a Not Impressed Zombie Gilda in a cell)
When They try to implement this though, they fall afoul
of Clive and Dale – Dale has put some clues together and now knows Major is the
Chaos killer. She arrests him… and he turns full on Zombie
