iZombie S:01 E:09

Episode Title: Patriot Brains
Original Airdate: 5-12-15

This week Liv gets a hold of some military grade brains and decides that it’s time to go after Blaine once and for all, Ravi chronicles the data of his time post-zombie-rat-bite, we get the guest appearance of a Veronica Mars alum, and somebody dies at the end! Overall a very important episode in terms of the ongoing storylines and the case of the week was actually also pretty interesting and kept me guessing throughout.

One thing that tends to be a new problem in this day and age is how information has come to affect us in ways that we might now always expect. There is always the risk of spoilers when you don’t watch a show live, but sometimes those spoilers can come from unexpected places. Like just recently it was announced that Bradley James who plays Liv’s recent zombie love interest Lowell has been tapped to play the lead role in this Fall’s Damien. And even though these episodes have already been filmed, that pretty much seals his fate on the show in one way or another, and when you’re dealing with so many deaths it was only a matter of time before Lowell bit the dust. To the show’s credit, it couldn’t have been handled in a much better way than this. And when I say better, I mean intentionally gut wrenching. We only just learned that Lowell is on Blaine’s brain plan, but he comes around pretty quickly with a change of heart by digging up his own lunch after a funeral. But when Liv’s brain-induced sniper instincts aren’t enough to push her over the edge to become a killer, Lowell steps in and fails to do the job himself which will likely push Blaine onto the offensive.

On the other side of things, Major plays up the more comedic side of playing detective as he continues his blind investigation of Blaine’s muscle. Only he’s not on board with the zombie notion just yet and instead goes barking up the body building tree which brings down some unwanted attention to himself. Now, if someone told me that a character was going to die in this episode, a betting man would have put his money on Major, especially when he goes up against Julien. But instead Major puts three bullets in Julien’s chest and calls Babineaux, but there’s no blood, no corpse, just some bullet shells and a broken mirror. I think this will push Major’s investigation over the edge into zombie territory finally. There’s also a nice connection that clues Ravi and Liv into the fact that Blaine has an inside man or men within the Seattle police department. There’s also a fun little bit as Ravi wonders if his zombie rat bite will infect him with zombie-ism, but as a predicted last week it doesn’t jump species and he survives the episode completely unscathed. And finally, while I never watched Veronica Mars when it was on, or afterwards really, my wife binge-watched the first two seasons after I told her about the connection to this show so I caught a large handful of episodes recently and it was a nice touch to see Wallace pop in even though my wife did not recognize him at all. Really great episode that sets up something big about to go down here very soon.