iZombie - Dead Air

I wasn’t quite invested in Dead Air, although it is clever in whose brains Liv eats…a sex / relationship show host is electrocuted while on the air (backup generator was rigged) and the access to do so was available to any number of people. While Ravi and Peyton meet for the first time, he thinks when they lock eyes they “have a moment” picking up Major from jail (he’s really badly beaten), Liv finds herself sizing up people, analyzing their behavior, and offering relationship/sex advice!

This is really the first episode of the first season where I’m struggling for the inspiration to even form a write-up of any value to me. That conclusion is enough to not feel it wasn’t a total loss. The romance between Liv and Lowell is touched in with brief, clip-like bits conveying how sex between zombies appears okay, until she eats some brains at his place and sees through the eyes of Jerome right before he is killed, the last face seemingly Blaine’s! And Lowell gets his brains from Blaine, so the connections are starting to refine. Major seeing the brain in Candyman’s car, telling Liv about it with her, in panic mode, attempting to coax him into accepting that the bodies of those kids he knew, found conveniently in the yard of the cult kooks from the previous episode, were buried there by them. Major believes (and he’s right) that there’s more to it and that the cops (Suzuki is, as we see him talking to Blaine about burying those bodies in the yard of those kooks as a means to shake off suspicion) are tied to it somehow.

The case at hand doesn’t even really give Babineaux much to do. He and Liv believe the killer is closely tied to the radio host, whether it be her competition (one of those sexist, women-objectifying types who has blow-up dolls in his station and pet nicknames for girls), producer (who was once her co-host), or underling (her boyfriend was cheating on her with the host!). The influence of the brains Liv eat has her giving dating advice, speculating why Ravi would never be a candidate to date Peyton (Peyton, to Liv, is a Victoria Secret model with guys coming and going…), and trying to unearth Babineaux’s own concealed love life. The opinions and intrusive dissection gets to be a pain in the ass and a bit rude. Again, the show does that each week in that Liv learns about herself and those around her when the influences of the brains she gobbles up alter her personality, as words and behavioral changes startle not just her but those she encounters. Peyton looks at her at one point with surprise as Liv makes a comment that is so unlike her. That happens a lot now in Liv’s life. And what Liv doesn’t realize is that the radio host so sure of herself gets it wrong with Ravi: he asks Peyton out and she accepts!

“Shocking.” – Ravi

Babineaux and Liv are dead silent.

“Too soon?” – Ravi

Babineaux and Liv shake their heads yes.

Peyton is growing on me, but the show hasn’t altogether committed to her yet. I think she has had some really good individual scenes like the earlier episode where she confronts Liv over her antisocial, shut-in behavior. She just walks right into the police station like a power in her power suit telling the desk clerk to get Major out or else…a form that wasn’t signed properly and her being a DA attorney, empowered by the office and her take-no-prisoners attitude is immediately noticed by Ravi. She’s hot and got a good head on her shoulders. Major, on the other hand, has been dealt a rather bad hand. Losing his job because of his jail time and being arrested for breaking into Candyman’s car he loses his social worker job. Beaten up by the jailbirds didn’t help. And the loss of those young men certainly weighs heavy on him. And Liv breaking it off with him, not to mention the new girlfriend also dumping him…Major has hit a rather harsh snag in his life.

Ravi's experiments with the rats in his attempts to develop a serum that will reverse and possibly cure the zombie effects of the designer Utopian drug could result in his own undoing. Despite "chainmail protection gloves" the rabid white zombie rat still bites through breaking the skin! Is Ravi the next zombie to be victimized by Blaine?