Episode Title: Physician, Heal Thy Selfie
Original Airdate: 2-9-16
The show stepped slightly away from its regular formula this week as Liv and Clive are handed three HEADLESS corpses. Unable to snack ‘n’ solve, Liv instead lunches on the brains of an iPhone junkie, whose murderless death was the result of tweeting-and-walking (in front of a city bus). Liv laps up internet fame, as she is unable to stop tweeting and instagramming every moment of her day, while Clive grows crankier that she’s unable to have one of her visions to help the case.
Peyton decides to quit her job, but when she goes to the DA’s house, he’s missing and evidence of the “Chaos Killer” is literally written on the walls. However, Major didn’t do anything to the DA. Turns out the DA was indeed a zombie that Major lied to Van du Clark about early in the game, before he started turning the undead into frozen zombie pops, a lie VDC confronts Major about. Major owns up to it, saying he couldn’t kill the DA because he had a son, but VDC, being a heartless bastard, doesn’t care. He tells Major to find the missing DA and take him out or he will have innocent people killed everyday until Major does his job.
Through actual detective work, Liv and Clive determine that the DA was abducted by three of Stacy Boss’s men (one of them his nephew) to send a message about the DA’s investigation against Boss. Unfortunately for them, his captors didn’t know he was a zombie, hence the three headless bodies that washed up on shore. Once the police figure out the connection of the DA to the bodies they search his lakehouse, and Liv finds him hiding in the crawlspace. She’s sympathetic to his situation, telling Major and Ravi what’s going on, which is how Major finds the DA to fake yet another death to satisfy the evil VDC, also officially leaving Peyton completely in charge of the Boss case after the mayor denies her resignation.
The set up was very clever; I’ll give them that. What’s our heroine to do when her victim’s are missing the one thing she needs most in this world. Of course they found a way around it, and what unfolds is proof that Clive is actually good at his job without his pasty “psychic’ partner’s visions. And though her brain-of-the-week made Liv obnoxious, it worked well, and eventually led to discovery of Blaine being the new U dealer in town.
Unfortunately, the rest of the episode felt very cluttered. So much happened that I had a very difficult time whittling it down to the description above. Aside from the case, the addition of plots with both Boss and VDC felt like overkill. Throw in all the relationship issues between Peyton and Blaine, Peyton and Ravi, Liv and Drake, Blaine and Boss, and I feel like I need to come up for air. On a positive note, it didn’t feel like too much while watching, but after letting it sit all night, I get a headache just recounting it all.
I’ve thought the writers were sometimes biting off more than they could chew with the world of iZombie and this episode proved it. Something, or someone, needs to go, whether it’s Max Rager or Stacy Boss. It feels like they’re battling two big bads at once and it’s become too convoluted to keep up. Not as a bad as Season 2 of True Detective convoluted, but on its way. Here’s hoping they straighten this mess out and get back to a fun show with a complex, not confusing, backdrop.
Channel: Superhero 