iZombie is the best show currently airing on the television, it is better than everything on the prestige networks, Netflix and the Trivago app. Shit fucking rules and if you aren’t watching it you need to remedy that shit pronto.
By the way, I should let you know up front that I curse, a-fucking-lot. I do not do this because of the cliché bullshit about people who curse having limited vocabularies, I am an underground rapper, my vocab game's been tight. I curse because cursing is fun. It is 97% of what is enjoyable about Quentin Tarantino movies. If you are so prim that your psyche may be fractured if besmirched by the language of the longshoreman, may I suggest catching up on the Downton Abbey recaps over at genteelsummations.uk. For the rest of you, I will be here every Tuesday with the hot and fresh takes on iZombie. For now, let’s get you up-to-speed.
Main Characters:
Olivia “Liv” Moore played by Rose McIver: A medical resident who seems to have the perfect life (money, brains, beauty, good familial stock, hunky boyfriend with a heart of gold, etc.) that finally gave into peer pressure, decided to cut loose one fateful night and swing by some lake party to hang out with a bunch of assholes who seemed far too young and bro’d out for someone cut from Liv’s cloth. The party quickly goes tits up when the kids break out some designer drug called Utopium. We never learn the intended effects of Utopium but this shit has muthafuckers zombing out and wrecking shop and you know that homegirl Liv gets turned into a zombie pronto, cause she was book smart not street smart. The lesson as always, your friends are assholes who will destroy your life.
Little known zombie fact: It turns out that eating brains allows a zombie to maintain their previous personality, with the unfortunate side effect of making them look like Julian Assange. However, the consumption of brains bestows the traits of the person whose brains you housed, and in Liv’s case gives her crazy visions like Ghostface. Since most of the brains Liv is feasts upon come from murder victims, it only makes sense that she will hook up with the Seattle PD’s most in-the-dog-house homicide detective, Clive Babineaux.
Clive Babineaux played by Malcolm Goodwin: Is a recent transfer to the homicide unit, coming over from Vice, so you hombre is all up on utopium bruh, and is hella familiar with the main villain Blaine from his days as an undercover. Clive hooks up with Liv and they start solving all sorts of murders thanks to her visions. Clive gets the collars, so he isn’t looking too deep into shit, especially once Ravi tells him that Liv is a psychic. I’ve watched America’s Most Wanted, cops stay working with psychics and most cops aren’t that inquisitive, so this jibes with me.
Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti played by Rahul Kohli: Medical Examiner and Liv’s ace. Ravi often comes along on the case because we need someone with a personality and Clive does not have one. He is also working on a zombie cure and spends a brief period shacking up with Liv’s best friend Peyton Charles (who is hella fine and has the name of a prep school lacrosse player).
Major Lilywhite played by Robert Buckley: Liv’s too good to be true fiancé, who is all killer smile, broad shoulders and good looks, plus he works with runaways. Dude is the real deal, he is your friend that makes you feel like a piece of shit for staying home to deposit DNA in a tube sock on a Thursday night while he is out saving the world. Major is left with nothing after Liv drops him for his own good, she has a bad case of the Zombie bro, it like a the most antibiotic resistant strain of the clap out there. So in order to keep him around as anything more than an afterthought, Major gets a storyline, and it is a pretty fucking good storyline. Turns out homeless kids are disappearing and he is the only one that gives a shit, even the po-po could give a fuck because like the rest of us, they don’t care about homeless teens or their dogs that they dress up like anarchists. Major spends season one investigating the disappearances, finds out who is snatching them and why. He also dies, gets brought back to life when live scratches him and gives him a mean case of zombie scabbies, and gets pissed at Liv for turning him. Kind of an ungrateful prick IMO.
Blaine DeBeers played by David Anders: Blaine is the best part of the show. He is an asshole. He kicks this whole shit off by selling the tainted utopium that turns the beach party from a cornball kegger into a straight massacre. He is the fool that is kidnapping the runaways, so he can steal their brains and sell them shits out of a butcher shop to 1%er zombies that can afford his exorbitant price. Shit man, beauty ain’t cheap, especially when you turn into a rotting hunk of flesh that keeps alive by killing other people. Blaine is both a villain and an alley to the gang, he walks that fine line that all the best characters do. He is the charming sociopath that you kind of want the lead to get with. Plus he looks British but doesn’t act British, so that’s a major plus.
There are some other characters, like the aforementioned Peyton, the dude from Wings who owns the Max Rager energy drink company, Stacey Boss (which might become my new rap name) and some side goons, but none of these fools have done enough to deserve their own write up yet.
Plot Synopsis:
The show follows Liv (all hopped up with brain visions) and Clive as they try to solve homicides while extending the main story arc of “how the fuck we gonna get Liv cured of zombie”. They do a great job of mingling the case of the week with season long story arcs and the ultimate goal of the show. The characters are well written (they are even starting to make Clive interesting – he likes basketball and white girls) and they have done wonderful work flushing out Major (he has a dark side) and Blaine (he had a shit childhood, which as TV teaches us, all rich children do). Rose McGiver’s Liv is dynamic as fuck, she is like a less award hungry/less Canadian version of Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany.
For my money it is the best of the DC Universe shows. We are at about the halfway point of season two, so recapping both seasons would be a bit much, but the major themes are as follows:
Season 1: Liv turns into a zombie, tries to keep it hidden while hurting everyone around her and trying to bring down Blaine. Eventually he kills or hurts enough of her people that she either has to tell them about her deal or is forced to show them for one reason or another, and they all turn their backs on her.
Season 2: Liv’s people learn to accept it, and they all start working together to take down the big baddy (Stacey Boss).
Thanks for taking the time to get yourself up to speed, I will see you again with a recap of episode 14:
iZombie airs every Tuesday on the CW at 9 PM EST.
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