iZombie Season 3, Episode 3 Review: Eat, Pray, Liv

This iZombie review contains spoilers.

iZombie Season 3, Episode 3

How do you solve a problem like fatal zombie sydrome? Ravi, Major, and the rest of Team Zombie is dealing with that question as Major spirals ever closer to his undead death on iZombie. Surprisingly, Major is the character who seems to be handling it best. Or at least better than Ravi who, to be fair, tends to be casually asked to save the human race on a season-to-season basis.

In Season 3, that pressure seems to be getting to Ravi. (As is the Blaine/Peyton relationship.) In “Eat, Pray, Liv,” we see a jealous Ravi bully Blaine into taking the serum that could cure his memory loss. (That is, if Blaine isn’t faking — which, personally, I am still not sure of.) Desperate jealousy is not a good look on Ravi. Though his description of all of the terrible things Blaine has done may be accurate and fair (especially if he is faking), the way he has treated Peyton since her near death experience is not cool. When she calls him out on making her kidnapping and PTSD about him, she isn’t wrong. 

For me, the dramatic ending of the episode — seeing Peyton and Ravi seemingly patch things up only for Peyton to discover that Ravi slept with his ex-boss (who he hates) Katty Kupps — wasn’t such a dealbreaker. Although I get that Peyton was upset about it, Ravi’s drunken one-night stand with his old boss seems far less hurtful than the way he has been treating Peyton. But I’m not here to tell Peyton how to rank Ravi’s bad choices in terms of hurtful. Sufficed to say, the Peyton/Blaine train seems to have veered off the tracks again and, from Peyton’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why this lounge singer version of Blaine might be seeming like a good dating option.

Does anyone else feel like Ravi is heading for a meltdown this season? I wish that iZombie did a bit more to tie his spiral to the pressure around zombie cure creation, as well as the failing health of his best friend. His mid-morgue rant about Blaine would have been a lot more nuanced if it didn’t seem so wholly based in Ravi’s jealousy. Then again, it also didn’t feel unrealistic.

Elsewhere in the episode, Liv and Clive work to solve the murder of a zen mindfulness instructor who used to be a corrupt, selfish banker. It’s not such an interesting murder-of-the-week, but the brain worked well for me. It’s always nice to see Liv happy (especially with this Major angst going down) and the dynamic with Clive here was particularly funny. It’s nice to see that Clive’s knowledge of zombie-ism hasn’t removed the humorous dynamic from the Clive/Liv relationship.

But we were talking about Major, weren’t we? And, though the zombie might not be handling things as poorly as Ravi right now, he isn’t exactly facing his impending mortality head on, either, instead throwing everything he has into his search for Natalie. He’s also found a new home of sorts in the Fillmore Graves mercenary group. While I may be side-eyeing Fillmore Graves’ intentions in general, it’s nice to see Major find a place to belong after all of the tragedy he’s suffered. 

In addition to finally earning approval from his instructor, Major has fallen in with DJ-turned-zombie-mercenary Justin, who also seems to have a connection with Liv. (Is there love on the horizon for these two?) Like Liv, Justin was in the wrong place at the wrong time and it led to his zombie-ism. Like Major, he seems to be doing the best he can with the hand he has been given. Like other handsome nice guy zombies who have chemistry with Liv, I’m worried about Justin in the long-term. Will he be this year’s Drake? I hope not, but it seems highly possible.

Finally, we got some movement on the Angus/Don E. villain subplot. They’re planning on opening a zombie club called The Scratching Post and Angus has already commanded Don E. to start scratching wealthy people to create their clientele. This feel’s like this season’s Meat Cute. There has to be a massacre here at some point, right? In the mean time, there will just be a slightly slower pace of murder.

Ultimately, “Eat, Pray, Liv” was another solid installment of iZombie that continues to fire at all cylinders when it comes to long-term the serialized arcs and the character drama that is intertwined with it. In the season premiere review, I called iZombie one of the most consistent dramas on TV. That title seems in no danger of being stolen. “Eat, Pray, Liv” might not have been the best TV episode I saw this week, but it was funny, emotion-driven, and gave me plenty to speculate about when it comes to these big zombie questions. What more could you want from a zombie drama?