iZombie Season 4 Episode 3 Review: Brainless in Seattle Part 1

This iZombie review contains spoilers.

iZombie Season 4 Episode 3

Things got a lot darker in this week’s iZombie, which made Liv’s romantic-comedy brain that much more discordant or comforting, depending on where you sit as a viewer. iZombie isn’t pulling any of its punches this season when it comes to exploring the desperate world of New Seattle. Things are bad, with Major’s Filmore-Graves soldiers trying desperately to keep the city peaceful, but scratching people in rage mode in the process (and getting understandably sued for it).

Meanwhile, there are corrupt coyotes who lure people into New Seattle only to sell them or ransom them or worse. When one girl, a hopeless romantic, falls prey to one such coyote, it’s up to Liv and Clive to get to the bottom of it. This leads Liv to meeting back up with Renegade, the coyote leader we met last week who seems to be one of the good guys. She explains to Liv how people looking to make a buck work the black market system.

While people are dying all over the place in New Seattle, from executions seemingly carried out by Filmore Graves employees to coyotes making to look a buck, it seems that our hopeless romantic wasn’t the victim of greed, but rather sociopathy. The episode ends with Liv and Clive finding the skeletons of many a victim in an abandoned warehouse’s incinerator. And how does the brain salesperson selling his wares to Blaine and Don E. elsewhere in the episode fit into all of this? He seemed super skeezy, but I suppose he could just have stumbled upon the brain of our hopeless romantic after someone else took her out. This is one half of a two-parter, so we’re going to have to wait until next week for Clive and Liv to solve this mystery.

Hopefully, this means we’ll get a bit more of Liv on romantic comedy brain, which was simultaneously kind of insulting to women who like romantic comedies and also hilarious. Liv falls in love with multiple randoms in this episode, confident they are both her soulmate—and “Truly, Madly, Deeply” is used to great effect. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see how Liv’s new brain affects her relationship with Major. As he’s having a rough week at work and they are still in a fight (as he evenly informs her), he wisely opts out of interacting too much with Liv on romantic comedy brain. Hopefully, we’ll get more of these two together and their unresolved romantic issues in part two.

If they do get more time to spend together, it won’t be because work has lightened up for Major. As previously mentioned, Filmore Graves is trying to scoop water out of a sinking boat at this point. While Major doesn’t seem to be privvy to this information yet, we learn from Chase Graves and co. that New Seattle will run out of brains in four to six months (presumably, right around season finale time in our reality). Yikes. What will that look like? What kinds of hard decisions will Liv, Major, and the rest of the gang have to make? What kind of people will they become? And will iZombie be able to keep up the hilarity in the wake of such horrors?

The show managed to pull it off this week, an episode that included Blaine murdering a zombie and eating his brain less than a foot from his bashed in skull. Blaine is desperate to discover the identity and whereabouts of Renegade. Chase Graves has offered to let him off the hook if he can bring her to him. Wonderfully, the ill-fated zombie Blaine tries to torture information out of refuses to talk. Renegade inspires absolute loyalty. However, Blaine is a smart dude. Eating his brain will most likely lead him to the information he wants eventually, just as it so often does for Liv when she is looking for a killer. Hopefully, we’ll get to see Blaine talking about his time in ‘Nam in the mean time.

One of the lighter elements of the episode came in Ravi, Peyton, and Liv’s friend outing to the club. Not only did we get a hilarious clothes montage featuring Ravi trying on multiple outfits, but we got Ravi and Peyton as friends again. It seems like these two may be moving back towards romance—or maybe that’s just Liv’s influence talking.

In other romantic news, Liv is on a mission to protect Clive’s heart after she sees Bozzio kissing someone else at the club. There isn’t a lot of room for the concept of open relationships in romcoms (though there should be!), so  the possibility that Clive might know that Bozzio is sleeping with others doesn’t even cross her mind. Still, it’s nice to see this moment of friendship between the two, even if Liv’s efforts to set Clive up on a date with the new police officer in town is crossing a line.

The final big revelation in tonight’s episode was a blink-and-you-miss-it detail: Blaine has the 16 zombie cures that went missing from Ravi’s office. Um, what is he going to do with them? The fact that he was going to waste one of them on torturing information out of a random zombie does not bode well for the future of New Seattle or the zombie hordes. If New Seattle has any chance of making it out of this situation with its soul intact, people like Blaine are going to have to be a lot more of a team player—or be convinced that it is in their best interest to help the desperate zombies currently filling up the city’s streets.

Blaine might want to ask his dad about the situation amongst the masses. Though we didn’t see Rufus in this week’s episode, the revelation that New Seattle is moving towards an apocalyptic situation only increases the potency of Rufus’ religious message. As these zombies grow more and more desperate, and Filmore-Graves is unable to meet more and more of their needs, the zombies of New Seattle are going to turn elsewhere for guidance.