Episode Title: The Exterminator
Original Airdate: 3-31-15
iZombie is back with another strong episode, if you’re not watching this show yet you really should be. It reminds me of Buffy in several ways besides the fact that it has a strong female lead and plenty of quick, witty dialogue. What it really does well that Buffy also did is to take aspects of real life and filter them through this extremely bizarre premise to make it allegorical. Besides that, there’s great characters all around and still a bit of an overarching mystery that is inching its way along in the sidelines. Plus, this episode has a small role from Brian Krakow from My So-Called Life, I haven’t seen that actor in ages, and boy does he look extremely different. I’m sure my wife would tell me that he could give Jordan Catalano a run for his money now. But I’m getting a ways away from the subject at hand here.
This week’s brain of the week belongs to a contract killer who is also a sociopath and really good at trivia. The allegorical nature that I mentioned earlier comes in play with Liv’s regular life. She has two very emotional moments that she has to cope with, but when she has the brain juice of the killer working through her, she becomes emotionally detached from it all. It becomes a way to help deal with the pain of seeing someone you love move on with their life, or coming to terms with a friend who has passed away. It just so happens in this case, that friend became a zombie trapped in a sewage drain who almost killed her co-worker and she had to beat to death with a lead pipe. As you would in that situation. There’s a great moment at the end of the episode where she has the chance to make the decision between not feeling and grieving, and she chooses grief. It’s a very humanizing moment for her, and one of the reasons why I’m loving this show so much week after week.
There’s also a couple tidbits of overall story that happens this week. Blaine makes a couple brief appearances, first off he comes by to question Liv about ditching him on the brains front last week and she rightly tells him off instead. There’s also a kid who comes to Liv with her ex-fiance to ask for help with a missing person, and mingled in with that conversation is talk about a guy the kids are calling “The Candyman” who has a connection with the same drug that was laced with a little something extra that created the zombieism in the first place. Not only that, but the kid runs into Blaine at the end of the episode, likely to meet a similar fate as his friend as brain food. We also get to meet zombie number four, Liv’s friend from the pilot who has survived these past several months without food and is still mobile, but completely gone by this point. I doubt we will meet any other original zombies past this point, any others will likely be ones newly created by Blaine.
And just to touch on the actual brain of the week case, it was a fun and interesting one that gets to see a lot of persistence by Liv, and we get to see a bit of the lawyer side of her sister. I didn’t even realize before now that she was a lawyer. I still truly enjoy how this show uses the personality bleed to keep the same character week after week, but she essentially gets to play a different personality each episode, like the sex-crazed artist last week and the detached sociopath this week. It’s probably no surprise that this also reminds me a little bit of Dollhouse, another Whedon show, in that respect. There was also a great moment where Liv was essentially fighting for her own personality when Ravi fell into the Marcy-Zombie pit and hitman-Liv wanted to just sit back and watch it happen, but real-Liv snapped out of it to jump in and save him. Looking forward to what next week brings.
Channel: Superhero 