Tuesday, March 24, 2015

iZombie 1.02: "Brother, Can You Spare a Brain?"

“How do you get your brains?”
“Oh, the hardest way possible. I grave rob. Super fun.”
- Liv and Blaine

So I think I forgot to mention it when I recapped the pilot but I really like how they do the transitions in the acts like they were comic book pages. I think that’s just very clever. This week’s case involves a dead painter with a paintbrush stuck through his eye. Clive thinks it was the guy’s wife but Liv and Ravi aren’t so sure. Once Liv finally eats some of the artist’s brains, she gets a rather erotic vision of the dead guy with another woman. She brings the info to Clive and they go to question the wife only to find the mistress there. And the wife knows about it! She says she respected her husband’s process and knew of all of his lovers and that monogamy wasn’t a big deal in their relationship. Clive is skeptical while Liv is just lustily distracted by the mistress present at the time. Clive still insists it was the wife until Ravi sends over info that the killer was over six feet tall. So his next suspect is a friend/art dealer of the dead painter who fits the height requirement. But the dealer is surprised to hear the wife admitted to have affairs of her own.

Liv’s private life is kind of complicated these days. Her ex-fiancé just shows up with a box of her stuff and it’s rather awkward, especially since Liv still has feelings for him and just worries about passing on being a zombie accidentally. Speaking of passing on being a zombie, she’s having nightmares about the zombie who likely turned her. Poor Liv. She is just not having a very good day. It seems one of the skills she picks up from the dead painter is his artistic eye. This sort of comes in handy when a police sketch artist that Ravi ran into in the lunch area offers to draw the zombie guy that Liv keeps dreaming about. Liv kind of keeps critiquing his drawing and he storms off in a huff. Liv finishes it and then we see her painting all kinds of stuff. In voiceover, she says she sees everything in a room when she walks in. Again, handy because when she gets to the morgue next, her mystery zombie, Blaine, is waiting for her.

Even though I have my doubts as to Blaine’s intentions (mainly from reading interviews with the cast and Rob Thomas and sitting through the San Diego Comic Con panel), it was kind of adorable to see Blaine and Liv bond a bit over their circumstances. Things do get a little frosty when Liv admits that Blaine was the one who infected her and then she’s wary of leaving him alone with Ravi when she gets another visions about the case. Liv sees that it was one of the mistress’s ex-boyfriends who may have threatened the artist. Clive is ahead of her on this one and an interview with the boyfriend reveals that this particular mistress go dropped for the art dealer’s 18-year-old daughter. Can I just say ew!

Also a little on the squicky side, we find Blaine hitting on an older woman at a bar. His charms (because let’s admit that they exist because David Anders is quite handsome even as a zombie) work and she takes him back to her place where things get hot and heavy very fast. Interesting that this episode is rather sexualized. I’m not complaining but it was just kind of a surprise. And he even shows back up at the morgue later to beg off some brains from Liv. She’s a bit unsure of whether to trust him even though he says being undead has made him reevaluate his life choices. She’s not wrong to mistrust him as he does end up getting into a car with some former drug associates and literally tear their brains out. He’s definitely not trustworthy and yet I just can’t help wanting him to hook up with Liv. In a weird sense, I think for me they might be the new LoVe. Not surprisingly, Blaine has turned the woman from the bar into a zombie and he ends up extorting $25,000 per month out of her to get brains to survive. He is rather ingenious.

And if things weren’t weird enough for Liv with this case and finding her zombie sire (is that even a real thing?), she’s in the zone when Major comes over to drop off the juicer that Liv’s roommate asked for (yeah he kept all the engagement gifts) and not only does she act really affectionate toward him but she’s also listening to a jazz mix CD he made for her that until now, she hated. That is probably going to come back and bite her in the butt when the brain effects wear off.

There’s an art show in remembrance of the dead artist and so Clive asks Liv to go with in case she gets a hit or something. Ravi invites himself along for no other reason than the drink, look at pervy art and hot models. It turns out that the art dealer had left the restaurant during the murder window and went to an ATM close to the loft where the artist was killed. As Clive is questioning to wife again, Liv is wandering around the loft, trying to get something to jog a new vision to figure out who actually killed him (though the art dealer does benefit greatly from his death…his art is now worth a lot more so he gets more from sales). Unfortunately for the mistress’s ex-boyfriend, he finds Liv in a darkened room and confronts her. Yeah, just not a good move, dude.

Liv manages to break the asshole’s nose and gets another vision that ends up solving the case. It turns out the wife did do it because her husband was leaving her to have a baby with his art dealer’s daughter. Yeah, that’s all kinds of messed up! As the case wraps up, Live doesn’t want to give up the way she’s been seeing the world but it ends badly with her and Major. She kind of comes on to him and he rightfully kicks her out of his place. But she does realize that there are still parts of her that can come alive even though she’s undead. As a second episode, I thought this established the formula for the show very well and I am enjoying Liv’s journey so far.

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