iZombie is well into the second half of its season and what is most impressive is how well the show is managing its multiple storylines. The last few episodes have managed to reveal major information that brings each character closer to the truth, without making all of the big reveals feel rushed. At first when Blaine's goons revealed they had captured Major, it seemed like the show was skipping a lot of plot development. By the end of the episode however, it made sense. The working relationship between Major and Blaine just became yet another in a long list of weird symbioses that have formed between the characters on the show. Yes, it's annoying that Major has revealed his secret to Blaine and not any of his close friends who could help watch his back, but the writers are determined to keep that secret, so I just have to hope that the payoff is worth the frustration.
Blaine had a bit of a showcase in this week's episode. As despicable as Blaine is (and I'm glad the writers don't shy away from highlighting this quality), the writers have still managed to make him sympathetic enough that seeing his story continue on is intriguing. As a viewer, I don't like Blaine, but I still want the writers to keep finding ways to bring him into Liv's life. He's such a great foil for Liv and her friends. Here, his daddy issues were on full display, and the writers managed to show Blaine in both his most sympathetic and his most savage states.
On the Meat Cute side of things Dale and Clive keep getting closer and closer to the truth. I see no way that Clive can avoid stumbling onto the "zombie" of it all, especially given just how much the show keeps proving that he is more than just a bumbling cop. His instincts made him keep investigating the Meat Cute massacre, his work with Dale has led him to find out that both Blaine and Major are somehow involved in everything, and he even pointed out in this episode that he has caught on to the fact that Liv takes on the personalities of the victims in each case they investigate. That last detail was a nice one for the writers to throw in, cause if Clive truly is a good detective, then there's no way he wouldn't notice Liv's personality changes. They're just too obvious to miss.
Now that the writers of the show have spent some time developing Clive as a character, I think it's about time that they writer an episode where Liv is out of the picture and Ravi has to help Clive instead. Ravi is the perfect comedic counterpart to Clive and every scene they share together inevitably becomes the funniest scene of the episode. Ravi mocking Clive about never using Dale's first name around them was proof of that. Ravi might be too busy trying to find a Utopium cure, though. After discovering the bodies of the men who swallowed the tainted Utopium, and learning that the effects of the zombie cure not only wore off of "New Hope," but eventually led to her death, the zombie cure has become more pivotal than ever.
With everything that is going on on the show, the zombie cure often gets pushed to the side. From a writing standpoint, that's probably on purpose. The zombie cure makes the show deal with some big issues. Without the cure, Major and Blaine will die, and Seattle will forever be plagued with a growing zombie problem. If a genuine cure is discovered, Liv no longer has to be a zombie, and there's no reason for the show to carry on. As interesting as everything else on the show is, I can't wait to see how the writers resolve the issue of the zombie cure.
The case this week, like last week, was used more to develop the Boss/Blaine plot than anything else. It gave Liv major insights into what the town's Utopium dealers have been up to, including where to find the tainted Utopium, and it gave Liv another personality to play with for the week. It was more fun seeing Liv come up with outrageous stories on the "pathological liar" brain this week, than it was seeing her take a selfie with everything on last week's "social media addict" brain. The changing personalities give each episode a fresh feel, even as the cases the come from become less and less important.
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