Episode 15 of iZombie, “Blaine’s World,” aired Tuesday night. It was the season finale of a show that has had some highs and lows, but ended strong with Tuesday’s story. The series’ creator, Rob Thomas, has done a great job making the show stand out from his previous effort, the hit show Veronica Mars. The show was successful enough with audiences that it has been picked up for a second season, and the tantalizing plot threads left dangling promise some compelling television.
For those who haven’t been following along, iZombie is a show the tells the story of Liv Moore, a resident who gets turned into a zombie at a crazy boat party. As a zombie, she is able to absorb the memories and personalities of people whose brains she eats. Being the enterprising young go-getter that she is, she gets a job at a medical examiner’s office to help bring insight to unsolved murder cases.
The premise works well because throughout the series, Liv comes across as the type of person who would never sit still for too long. Anyone who knows someone like this will also immediately understand that death would be no impediment for them to keep going. And going. And going. So it makes sense that she would find such a useful way to put her new abilities to work.
In her work, Liv develops a relationship with Detective Babineaux and their investigations and interrogations make up a good part of what the show is about. Their professional and friendly rapport is great and the show does a great job of exploring the dynamic between these two. There is plenty of room for clever humor in the show; Detective Babineaux believes that Liv’s “visions” of the dead people’s memories come from her being psychic. Because that is so much more plausible than her being a zombie.
The premise of Liv eating victims’ brains and gaining aspects of their personalities as well as snippets of their memories is very original, but there were some real missed opportunities in the way it ended up playing out in the show. The plot device brought to mind the first season of the HBO show Six Feet Under. Each episode centered around a random person dying in a very unusual fashion, and how their corpse was handled at the funeral home where the show was set.
Disappointingly, iZombie rarely found the time to dig too deeply into the personality and quirks of the character whose traits Liv was taking on. It may have just been the constraints of the format of the show, but it seemed like the writing frequently relied on cliched stereotypes to convey the idea of the character. For example, one of the early episodes centered around the murder of a Latin-American painter, so Liv ended up being lusty and seductive. In another episode, the victim was a cheerleader so Liv ends up being perky and ditzy.
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Actress Rose McIver did a remarkable job putting together a hodge podge of characters in an admirable performance. Each affectation came across without feeling too contrived, but the shallowness of the writing generally dragged down what could have been a very cool and different story each week.
The pacing of the season felt off as well. Max Rager, the company that is eventually revealed as responsible for the zombie outbreak, doesn’t get any serious air time until the middle of the season. There are some other overarching interpersonal plots, and the murder mystery aspect of the show does a decent job of carrying the early episodes, but it would have been nice to have those plot hooks show up a little earlier on. As it stands, the show starts off being good, but doesn’t get great until the plot really comes in strong later in the season.
Once it found the plotline, the show became more and more entertaining and the season finale did a phenomenal job of bringing all the major characters into the story, making sure that everyone’s life was touched by the events that take place. The consequences of everything that takes place in the finale are unclear; whether that can be chalked up to great storytelling or partially blamed on the rushed feeling of having most of the main plot loaded into the second half of the season is up for debate.
The whole idea of a zombie who eats brains to gain the memories and personality traits of dead people is a really fresh take on a now-tired topic: zombies. I’m excited that the show was picked up for a second season. Hopefully the writers will find a way to push things further and dig a little deeper into the people whose brains Liv consumes. I can’t wait for the show to get steady on its feet and really explore some of the unresolved stories from last night’s fantastic season finale.
