Thursday, March 24, 2016

iZombie, Season 2, Episode 15: He Blinded Me With Science



iZombie is back and so is back from the dead Blaine, newly zombied and happy to groan “brains” at Ravi.

Because he’s Blaine, and he’s nearly always awesome (though don’t make jokes about Ravi being attracted to him if you’re not going to through in an actual LGBT character please). He snarks. Ravi snarks (he is also an awesome snarker. In fact this whole show is all about the awesome snark).

But, on a more serious note, it also means that Blaine may be about to die like the zombie rats who took the cure did… and while no-one cares too much about Blaine dying, having all the city’s zombies lose their source of brains would be a very very very very bad thing.

Thankfully to help that, the murder this week is a research scientist – which both Liv and Blaine partake in and start spouting surprising scientific insight

Ok, can I have a little side here – Liv is a doctor. Liv was brilliant in medical school. The amount of surprise she faces because she speaks all sciency is kind of annoying. Liv isn’t uneducated, her knowing these things is not surprising.

Anyway the murder investigation does lead them to Max Rager since the dead woman did work there for some time. This leads to some clumsy undercover work, Liv terrifying Ravi by putting on make up to look human (or, more likely, took the make up OFF and returned to the actor’s actual skin and hair tone. And yes, it does look creepy when Ravi says it) and getting a vision of fully rotty zombies in Vaughn’s basement lab

Unfortunately for Liv, it turns out the murderer was someone else entirely, found by Clive doing actual police work (I appreciate this. I like that even with Liv’s visions, we’re still seeing Clive solve these cases with dedicated, conventional investigating despite Liv’s enthusiasms).


Blaine does get very mopey and emotional about his potential upcoming death (as well as keeping his head down to allow Stacey Boss to think he’s dead. Blaine’s not challenging him again). He’s also showing signs of illness… he has a cure from Ravi, but it’s completely untested…

We also have some very dramatic changes with Max Rager – and Vaughn another gloriously terrible villain. But we do get a hint of one thing he cares about – Gilda. Despite her endless contempt for him and his often dismissal of her, he’s surprisingly outraged when Gilda shows her black eye after her little confrontation with Liv. However, that care only seems to go so far:  Vaughn is still working on his new energy drink which he’s warned will still make people aggressive like the previous drink AND makes people super fast and strong at the same time.

He tests it on his pet zombie – and then taunts it. At which point the super strong zombie gets free, eats his scientist and chases Vaughn and Gilda. Vaughn… abandons her while he escapes in the lift.

He looks shaken, upset and horrified by what happened – but he still abandoned his daughter to an angry raging zombie. He sits, looking shaken, when the lift chimes and out strides… Gilda. Looking bloody, in pain and she hammers on the door demanding to be let in. Vaughn doesn’t – again he locks his daughter out

Did Gilda become a zombie? It seems unlikely that she got out of that without taking any injury at all.

There’s one more little twist – Liv gets suspicious of Drake due to his unreliable behaviour. She stalks him – and sees he works for Stacey Boss. She plans a public confrontation – but Blaine sets Major on Drake as his next zombie target to placate Max Rager (adding to his freezer of inanimate zombies). Drake doesn’t show up to the meeting with Liv which is likely going to cause all kinds of angst

And to mix it up some more – Clive and Dale have done some more research on Blaine… and found human brains.

This episode had a lot of game changers in it – Blaine, Drake, Gilda, Clive and Vaughn – this is going to be interesting. I also wonder whether taking out one of Stacey Boss’s minions is going to antagonist him – Vaugn vs Stacey? That should be interesting