iZombie - The Whopper

Watching the second season I often wonder how this or that works out because I have seen the final two seasons of iZombie. Like in “The Whopper”, where Liv eats the brain of a former underling for Mr. Boss (of course, since he’s one of three villains during the busy and loaded second season), found buried while Major and Ravi were looking for one of two missing drug dealers (we learn in this episode that Blaine’s “flunky”, Don E, was responsible for killing the con artist named Big Fish after a guy with the last name of Carp, who shot Drake, the current lover of Liv and muscle for both Boss and secretly for Blaine…sounds quite convoluted, aye?) with a prosthetic leg (he returned from the Middle East missing a leg) because he was the key to finding tainted Utopium. This tainted Utopium is key to a major development that spells doom for Blaine and Major, because they took Ravi’s temporary cure and the white rat, Hope, given the cure first, eventually dies. So Ravi somehow finding a solution for this development is crucial and pertinent, quite the matter of importance. But what I was actually talking about with my initial start to the writeup is Major finding himself in a coffin, with duct tape across his mouth, his hands and legs tied, staring up at Blaine, the muscled, mute thug, Chief, and flunky, Don E. Who would have thought Don E would become a much more important character of significance later on. At this point he was but a lackey who did Blaine’s every order, without fail and even excitedly so. Chief is pretty much an eye-patch, towering brute Blaine sometimes funnies for his own amusement while Don E gets his boss brains and follows operations that are masked by the Shady Plots funeral home business.

This show has a way of throwing a lot at us. While there are multiple villains in the future, this season really brought out the bad guys. While Vaughn Du Clark is the one sending Major out to kill zombies, Blaine is fortunate enough to seize upon an opportunity to exploit his current difficult situation. The episode, as if it doesn’t have enough going on, introduces the Angus video will reading where Blaine soon learns that if his father was killed the evil, torturing German nanny gets everything. Blaine sure needs to rectify this and when Major informs him that Angus is alive, just frozen, things are looking up. Major, however, will not give up Max Rager as the mastermind threatening Liv. So Blaine takes a page out of that playbook and threatens Major as well. Major’s navigational skills remain epic. He can seem to dig himself (no pun intended) out of holes when it is almost assured he’ll be buried in them.

“The Whopper” has the victim of Mr. Boss so instead of this outlying case that is separate from story arcs involving seasonal villains, once again (much like the three beheaded thugs working for Mr. Boss in a previous episode) an associate to the kingpin of Seattle provides the brain occupying Liv. He was a pathological liar so almost everything in the episode has Liv coming up with some doozies, really ridiculous and elaborate, sometimes effective, other times just making those around her, like Clive and Ravi, roll their eyes. The episode’s funniest involves Major trying to convince her to leave the city while she tries to keep him from investigating the noise in the other room (Drake getting dressed as Mr. Boss called him in to take care of a former associate tied to a murder he doesn’t want to be connected to).

I admit it, writing reviews for this second season can be quite an undertaking. They really piled on a ton of interconnecting stories with characters given their own. Mr. Boss is investigated by Peyton and Clive, while Clive and Bozzio investigate Blaine. Blaine helping Peyton investigate Mr. Boss so he can become the top drug supplier. Drake working for both Boss and Blaine while trying to keep Liv in the dark. Major working for Du Clark while also involved with Blaine. Liv, Ravi, and Major looking for a serum to keep “repair” the flaws in the “cure”. Liv not knowing that Major has been freezing the zombies while telling Du Clark he has been killing them with Gilda/Rita currently Liv’s roommate. And I haven’t even covered the on-again/off-again romances of Major/Liv and Ravi/Peyton.

And in this season, at some point, there will have to be some wrap-ups due to all these ongoing threads within the Seattle main zombie arc involving Liv. Sure Liv is indeed at the center, but because it is a big city and there are other zombies within it she can’t be the end-all/be-all of everything that happens on the show.

This personality Liv has isn’t has over-the-top or archetypal, so McIver has to be a bit more subtle in her movements and reactions, her stances, way of walking, standing, talking. The confidence man with a penchant for telling flamboyant lies, embellishing his stature in order to impress the ladies that pass by a bar where he stops off to replace coins in arcade machines. And her visions are crucial to revealing how the victim found buried alive is tied to Boss and why Boss needs [further] loose ends tied up. Anytime Clive gets closer to Boss, Boss removes whoever it might be that could implicate him. And that Drake is the weapon of use makes Liv’s relationship to Drake all the more complicated. The plot doesn’t just thicken, it has many layers. 4/5