iZombie: Eternal Sunshine of the Caffeinated Mind Review

This iZombie review contains spoilers.

iZombie Season 2, Episode 14

iZombiehad some major

Blaine is a zombie again.

The good news? Blaine didn’t stay dead when Mr. Boss had his throat cut for moving in on his Utopium business. The bad news? This brings Blaine (and soon Major) one step closer to the inevitable death that, so far, all “cured” zombie-rats have faced. In the short term, however, it brings the drug war between Blaine and Mr. Boss out in the open.

Now that Mr. Boss knows it is Blaine who has been causing so many problems for him, Blaine has to make some moves. Luckily, he has the zombie edge. Does Mr. Boss even know about zombies? It seems like someone who is so in touch with Seattle’s underworld would be in on this not-so-well-kept secret, but who knows. Something tells me Mr. Boss will not make it out of this season alive. The only question is: who will he take out before he dies?

Liv figures out that Gilda has been lying to her.

Whoa. Liv does not take kindly to finding out that Gilda/Rita was the woman Major was sleeping with when Liv was pining after him. She straight-up punches her in the face, asking her to move out by midnight. This feels like an overreaction on Liv’s part, but it isn’t an overreaction for the audience, given all that we know about Rita. While Liv thinks Rita stalked Major after seeing his photos around their apartment, we know that Rita even moving in was far more calculated than that. She is there as an insurance policy for Max Rager, a way to carry out the threat against Liv’s undead life if Major doesn’t keep killing people for them.

It’s really frustrating that Major didn’t get a chance to tell Liv the truth about his fake zombie killer ways. His logic that, if he dies, no one will be able to revive the zombies he has frozen in his storage locker, is sound. As soon as Major saw that Rita was living with Liv, he should have grabbed his ex-fiance, left the apartment, and explained the whole thing to her. After all, he knows how dangerous Rita truly is.

Drake is actually an undercover cop.

Drake is this strange, potentially unneccesary cross between Lowell and Major. He is a fake-killer bad guy who is really the perfect zombie boyfriend for Liv. This is why, as with Lowell, I am so worried that he is going to die. It’s nice to see Enrico Colantoni back in a Rob Thomas show, even if it is in a relatively minor role as Drake’s handler. Presumably, we will get more of him as the season progresses. Again, I’m not sure if this entire subplot is necessary — we already have enough invested in the Mr. Boss takedown — but I like Colantoni and Greg Finley (Drake) enough to accept it for now.

Abigail Hobbs killed her mom.

OK, so the teenager who kills her mother in this week’s episode is not actually Abigail Hobbs from Hannibal, but she is played by the same talented actress — Kacey Rohl — so I am going to pretend this is some kind of epic iZombie/Hannibalcrossover in which an undead Abigail Hobbs is following in her father figure’s footsteps.

In actuality, the murder-of-the-week plot was less complicated, but just as sinister. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is the first time we’ve seen a murder-of-the-week killer allude capture and justice.  Perhaps this means Rohl will be back in some form — though it doesn’t seem necessary or even likely. It’s an unexpected, welcome change-of-pace in an episode so infused with in-universe optimism from Liv’s brain-of-the-week.

Ravi’s rat is a rotting-flesh zombie.

In zombie cure news, things are not looking good for Major or Blaine — at least in the long term. The cured rat that Ravi tested the new batch of cure on turned into a rotting rat of a zombie. It was not pretty. It’s hard to see how Ravi is going to figure out a work-around for this one. And he’s working on a tight time schedule here (if I had to guess, probably until roughly season finale time…) iZombielikes to play Ravi off as the good-natured, hilarious, loyal BFF, but he really is the linchpin to this entire zombie conspiracy. If he can figure out a way to cure zombie-ism, it would affect literally every narrative corner of this show. And if he can’t? Well, then, his roommate is going to die.