iZombie Season 3 Episode 11 Review: Conspiracy Weary

This iZombie review contains spoilers.

iZombie Season 3, Episode 11

Has anyone found this season of iZombie a bit scattered? I still enjoy the show on an episode-to-episode basis, but I often find myself a bit too bogged down in plot overall, like the show has been a bit too ambitious in scope. “Conspiracy Weary” is a classic example of this. While there were some laugh out loud moments in tonight’s episode (I don’t usually enjoy Liv’s brains-of-the-week as much as the average viewer, but was delighted by her conspiracy brain), the focus was all over the place, which meant none of the plot points really hit as hard as they should have.

Take the show’s opening, for example. Last week’s episode ended on a massive cliffhanger: with Ravi stepping in front of the truthers’ guns to protect a captured Don E. It was heroic, an example of Ravi putting himself in danger to help someone in a way he wasn’t able to do last season with Peyton, but it was also scary. We love Ravi. More than that, he’s vital to the zombie cause. He is the only one who knows anything about developing a cure (an oversight I still believe Filmore Graves wouldn’t make).

Rather than give us an episode that revels too much in that suspense or doubles down on the consequences of Ravi’s choice, the show quickly resolves the set-up by having Liv and Blaine burst in to save the day. It’s a great, action-packed scene, but it feels like a bit of a waste of a high-stakes situation. Sure, Liv gets shot. Two of the three zombie truthers get taken down by Filmore Graves. But, by the second act of the episode, the incident has been over-shadowed by a million different storylines.

All of these storylines have potential; they’re just to cluttered here. I love iZombie’s entire cast and it breaks my heart to say this: but maybe the show should consider thinning the character herd a bit in season four.

Let’s break all of those plot developments down…

Major’s new girlfriend sucks.

I don’t think any of us thought Shawna wouldbe Major’s one true love (that’s Ravi, obviously), but it would have been nice for Major to have a nice, uncomplicated fling. This guy has had the worst life these past few years. Sadly, it was not meant to be. While Major was able to enjoy a brief period of sex fort-ing, he eventually found out (via Liv’s helpful paranoia) that Shawna had been chronicling their personal lives via her Tumble account. (Extra relevancy points to iZombie for knowing that Tumblr is probably where this would happen.)

While Shawna doesn’t seem to have malevolent motivations — she seems to truly believe that Major’s life will be better if more people can see this side of him — it is a gross invasion of his privacy, and actually serves to make his life worse. Someone takes a shirtless bed photo from Shawna’s Tumblr profile and prints it on a t-shirt along with the words “Killer Abs.” Get it? It’s a Chaos Killer reference?

While Major is able to find some solace in the Philmore Graves mercenary community, even in the locker room, he can’t get away from the Chaos Killer persona. His buddies might just be taking the piss, but Major obviously doesn’t find it funny, and it’s hard not to imagine that this Chaos Killer stigma won’t seriously endanger Major’s life one day… especially now that he is human again. 

(I am going to print my own Major-themed shirt. His mug, along with the print: The Major Lilywhite Protection Society — Worrying About Major Lilywhite Since 2015.)

Peyton uncovers some truths about Seattle’s new zombie mayor.

We’ve known since last season that Peyton’s boss Floyd Baracus is a zombie, but it’s only more recently that we discovered he may be involved in multiple murders. When Peyton realizes that Weckler’s daughter is a zombie, she puts together a theory (again, with the valuable help of a paranoid Liv) that Weckler was blackmailed into killing the Dominatrix.

Even if it wasn’t Baracus who killed Weckler and his jailor to hide his tracks, Baracus is still a dirt person (or zombie, whatever). Peyton’s theory is that he turned Weckler’s teenage daughter into a zombie to keep Weckler under his thumb. Baracus would give Weckler brains for his daughter in exchange for Weckler’s help. And now he is the leader of Seattle.

So many unanswered questions…

Does anyone else think that Filmore Graves may be involved in all of this? Not only did they actively support Baracus for mayor, but there’s something that just doesn’t add up about the larger concpiracy at work here. (Yeah, I am aware I sound like Conspiracy Theory Liv, but she was the most sane character in tonight’s episode, so…)

In addition to the question marks around the Baracus/Weckler situation, there are also a whole lot of unanswered questions about Wally’s death. Clive shot Harley in self-defense (and partially because he thought the truther committed Wally’s murder), but Liv’s flash confirmed that it wasn’t Harley or co. who offed Wally and his family. Did Anna perhaps find out something about Filmore Graves that they didn’t want out in the open? Perhaps the same something that could have gotten Vivian killed? (I still don’t believe it was the truthers who did that — they’re no high-tech enough.)

Now that Harley is a zombie, perhaps we will get some real answers about which crimes the truthers have and have not committed. I kind of love this development, making the bigot into the very thing he hates, which will hopefully lead to the realization that zombies are no different than humans — as Ravi tells Rachel: they can be monsters, but they’re usually not.

And speaking of Rachel, it turns out she is a reporter who went undercover within the zombie truther gang to write an expose. When Ravi tells her the whole truth, she prints it in her newspaper. Will Seattle believe her? Does she have any guilt over betraying Ravi like that? It’s that first question that really matters. The closer we race towards the end of season three, the more it seems like the zombie secret won’t be a secret for much longer.

Additional thoughts.

iZombie has spent so much time making Blaine into a villain that it’s hard for me to accept when he and Liv are on good terms. That being said, it was pretty adorable/hilarous when he, Don E., and Liv were on the same brain together.

Stop going on mercenary missions, Major. You’re not as undead as you used to be.