iZombie - Maternity Liv

With each episode Liv learns a little more about herself. And through her brains consumption, Liv picks up on feelings that provide insight into how to better relationships with friends, loved ones, and colleagues. In Maternity Liv, Liv eats the brains of a lovely young woman who was pregnant and had died of injuries and malnutrition. She seems to have walked a great distance and roughed up her body along the way (Liv also sees a vision where she climbs out a tree house), collapsing near where some teens were camping out around a fire. The baby is okay, kept in the NICU while Liv and Babineaux work to determine who was responsible for this girl’s demise. Visions of dogs barking and this guy smoking while the victim was in a truck begging to be let out are experienced by Liv. Liv also adopts the victim’s maternal instincts, deep love for the baby, and anxiety of the prick she was involved with (Dylan Munson (Chad Rook)) possibly being the guardian of the baby. Her motherly attempts to clean the tie of Babineaux, lick down a standing hair on Ravi’s head, take Duncan to task for how he’d let the baby sleep, hug her mother affectionately, and even side with her mother in an argument against her brother. The love of a child and wanting to protect her (and just hold and be with her) is what truly arises in Liv after these brains, along with the realization that she should perhaps spend more quality time with her mother. At the end of the victim’s life she had a big row with her parents regarding her pregnancy with Duncan. So they had parted on hostile terms. So when Liv (thanks to some good acting by McIver) sees the parents, the reaction on her face perfectly conveys what the victim feels…sorrow and love. This isn’t a primarily comedic episode, considering the tragedy of the overall story. But Duncan handing over the baby to the grandparents leaves a somewhat better taste in the mouth.

Major gets Babineaux and the Seattle Police Department bad press for having a reporter nearby when talking about why there hasn’t been any significant investigation into the missing persons near the skate park. Major follows Candyman but is arrested for breaking into his car. Embarrassed after telling the cops Candyman has a human brain in his car and provided company in bikers in the jail for his assistance in getting that story printed, painting them in a negative light. All Major has wanted to do is bring attention to the kids missing, but it has all went wrong for him. Babineaux even gets sent down to go through paperwork duty because of being in contact with the Major. Major had been searching for Candyman’s actual identity in order to get the reporter to research his back story.

A little detail I like that is briefly mentioned is that Liv has been trying to get security prevention for the morgue so they are protected against outsiders. Ravi and Liv want to keep Blaine from just waltzing in whenever he feels like it. It is something we don’t perhaps dwell on too much, but over the course of the last few episodes several folks just show up in the morgue when they feel like it, especially Blaine. What if Candyman was sent in if Blaine felt threatened by Ravi and Liv?

Babineaux’s boss, Suzuki, is a supporting character starting to gain attention in the series’ main story arc because he’s a zombie. Suzuki seems to duck and jive the questions about the missing persons, and as Major has already mentioned in the past, Missing Persons seems to be a division lax in their drive to find answers. When Liv and Babineaux tie a forest ranger and her husband to the victim, Suzuki takes the lead as the couple set up a sniper attack from their house. Suzuki tells his cops to wait for his cue to enter in the house after him, actually taking a bullet but goes zombie mode killing the husband and wife cult fanatics (who actually kidnapped other girls, holding them in the tree house). Suzuki wasn’t the only one shot, though, as Liv climbed the steps of the treehouse and was shot in the leg. This is important because Suzuki notices her wound, eyes her white skin and hair (Duncan called her Beetlejuice!), and smirks…clearly he knows! I’m anxious to see where this goes.