Kyle’s Thoughts

“Zombie Knows Best” returned iZombie’s to its police procedural roots. The episode yielded mixed results.

Major as a second zombie member of Liv’s detective team didn’t work as well as I would’ve liked this week. iZombie can have its funny, or even hokey, moments but Major with teenage girl tendencies and Liv channeling a middle-aged father was so over-the-top, the show left the Earth’s atmosphere. iZombie is at its best when the brains Liv and the rest of the zombies eat influences how they react; the zombies in question retain their baseline personalities. New viewers tuning in this week wouldn’t know who Major or Liv are as people based on their bizarre actions. Unfortunately, the zombie underground/utopia is the reason Liv and Major acted out of character.

The zombietopia has concocted a brain mixture—hitting frappe on fifty or so brains and packaging them in easy to transport tubes—to counteract any mood swings or strange thoughts or behaviors. I like this concept. On the surface, it shows the zombie community adapting to their powers and condition, and it makes sense within the confines of iZombie’s world. The problem is that Major and Liv must behave more out of character than normal to sell this wonder brain tube story thread and the tube’s packaging leaves much to be desired. Each one is marked as brains.

The “Brains!” tubes are an issue because one of the major plot points this year is the underground giving zombie families living in human communities these tubes. They’re labeled as brains. The zombie families have been throwing out tubes marked brains for almost two years and the underground is surprised humans have discovered they exist. Don’t label the tubes “Brains!,” or don’t send zombie families into human communities with these cartoonish tubes.

The Wally story this week had to do a lot of heavily lifting. I’m sure Wally didn’t exist before this season, or he was minor character with little connection to Detective Babineaux. “Zombie Knows Best” squeezed a lot of background for two characters who were retrofitted into Babineaux’s past. The lost fifteen minutes didn’t do anything for the main storyline and anything work it did for the zombie underground was lost with Brains! tubes.

I did like iZombie’s return to a police procedural. The show hasn’t lost one of the elements that make it fun; it’s not your typical cop show. The mystery was a little too easy but that was due to all the other plotlines swirling around, not to mention Liv and Major’s Dawson’s Creek impersonation.

I’m hoping the Wally story has played out and there’ll be time and space for other storylines to thrive. This hasn’t been a great start for iZombie but it hasn’t been a terrible one either. I’m still digging the overall idea of a zombietopia.

Thanks for reading.