Sebastian rallies, after being buried in a shallow grave, and kills Kimber Cooper—a cheerleader too nice for her own good, killed because she wants to say a few kind words about the mystery dead guy. The others—members of a metal band, The Asshats—bolt. Kimber’s body is discovered by a hiker’s dog. Actually, Fido only brought his owner a foot. Liv panics when Ravi points out that this is likely a zombie killing. With plenty reason, too. The body count raised by her kind is reaching terrifying numbers. Eventually humans will notice.
What can humans go without? Watching Liv make a room-temperature chocolate milkshake from Kimber’s two-week old, liquefied brain. Even I got a little queasy. She should’ve warmed the brain to make hot chocolate. Gives it a buttery aftertaste.
Cheerleader brain makes Liv difficult to tolerate. She uses lazy teen-speak to coerce Kimber’s friend into giving up her location for the night of her disappearance—at rehearsal for The Asshats. Bubbly Liv is annoying. Luckily, she ditches the cheerleader brain at one point. Unfortunately, it’s so she can eat the brain belonging to Nate, one of the guys from the band who Kimber hooked up with. Liv and Clive discover Nate’s body in the band’s rehearsal space when they head over to ask about the stolen car. Before Liv gets a bite of Nate, Clive takes a taste of the pizza she put his brain on. If only Clive knew . . . .
Nate was perpetually high while alive, something Liv contracts from her lunch. She reneges on promises made to Peyton—girl chat and spin class—in favor of smoking and chasing case leads from Nate’s text history. Mostly smoking, though. During the one viable vision from her time with Nate’s brain, Liv discovers he and Cameron, another band member, argued about whether or not they should go to the cops about the hit-and-run. There’s also money involved somewhere, it pops up in this vision and in a text sent from Kimber’s phone a week after her death. Theresa, the band’s drummer, comes forward about hitting Sebastian with the stolen car. After she sits with a sketch artist to recreate Sebastian’s horrifically scarred face, Theresa is texted by Cameron to meet at a hotel and not trust anyone. She’s attacked in the hotel room. The last we see of Theresa, she’s struggling to reach the phone and call for help.
While Liv plays brain ping pong, Major prepares for war. He records a video in case he dies confronting Blain. His grand plan involves casing Meat Cute by posing as a health inspector—putting him face-to-face with Blaine. Of course Blaine smells something fishy. He hasn’t been this successful murdering people without exercising caution. There’s a few more additions to Major’s personal weapons cache, including a grenade. No amount of preparation will change the fact that Major is acting impulsively and fails to cover all his bases. Dupont gets wind of the surprise inspection and puts a name to the face which annoys Blaine. Seizing the opportunity, Dupont abducts Major and presents him to Blaine as, “The guy who knows too much.”
Peyton learns far too much, as well. Sebastian snaps, speeding up the inevitable meeting with Liv, the zombie detective after he’s driven to kill his aunt. He breaks into the apartment, knocking Peyton unconscious. Then decides to make dinner. Sure. Every bad guy stops for a meal when plotting his next murders, right? (Hannibal, you don’t get a say in this.) Liv and Sebastian fight. They both go full-on zombie. Liv is stabbed multiple times before gaining the upperhand and murdering Sebastian.
What neither notice is, Peyton regains consciousness seconds before. Liv has no option but to tell the truth—she’s not bleeding and her eyes went freaky-red because she’s a zombie. Peyton takes it about as well as expected. She runs. Doesn’t tell Liv or Ravi where she’s going. Just vanishes with the suitcases she packed for a romantic trip with Ravi. What will Peyton do with what she knows? Is she heading for the police station? How much long will the zombies fly under the radar? I’m going to say, not much longer.
The episode focuses on Addy and Mack, who have yet to catch up with the escort crew after the zunami separated them. Citizen Z has tried and failed to reconnect them, leaving the couple in Four Corners, Utah with virtually no resources. Luckily, they find a creek to get water–at least they have a hand-up on the others, who relied on Murphy’s ruthlessness to obtain a two-day food/water supply.There’s trouble in paradise. Addy refuses to talk about the memories haunting her. Mack is frustrated. He doesn’t understand why she won’t open up to him, trust him with everything. Their argument is cut short when they move on from the creek. Addy wants to stay, it’s beautiful and relaxing next to the water. Mack points out, “Beauty attracts trouble. You should know that.” He’s got a point, even if it’s a slightly snippy way to say that Addy’s a magnet for trouble.
Maybe leaving the creek isn’t such a good idea. Their motorcycle runs out of gas down the road. The couple set up camp at a rundown warehouse—in front of said warehouse, not inside under an actual roof. Because that makes sense. Sleep out in the open with only a couple broken steel sheets to make a tent. The downtime gives Mack a chance to pry into Addy’s problem again. She finally tells him about the flashbacks. She thinks it’s a memory, but isn’t sure. Mack may be the guy fighting a zombie in these mental hiccups, but again she isn’t sure. With a total lack of nothing to go on, they devolve into an awkward game of Twenty Questions in which they realize they know nothing about each other—meanwhile they’ve failed to secure food, water, gas, and electricity so they can contact Citizen Z.
“We never stood a chance, Mack.” Addy points out that without the zombie apocalypse, they would have never made a logical couple. They have little to nothing in common. Heck, she doesn’t even fully remember the night they met. Addy can’t see a future for herself, let alone a future with Mack. Kids and marriage? Impossible. Mack wants to prove her wrong. He asks her out on a date. While he’s fashioning their meager supplies into a gourmet “dinner,” Addy sleeps in their makeshift tent. Mack comes back and opts to let her sleep. He dozes off, as well.
This is where the annoying part comes in. Everything from here on out is a series of dream sequences. Mack wakes and hears Addy scream. He runs after her, encountering a trail of dead zombies who’ve been bitten by something—a rattlesnake. There’s also one live zombie left. In each dream sequence, Mack fights the zombie in some way and dies. In dream four, he survives long enough to find a random wall with a door in the middle of a warehouse before he’s killed.
It’s not until dream number five that things notably change up. This time Addy is still in their tent when Mack wakes. He tells her he thinks he’s been dreaming about the future. They hear the same zombie roar from Mack’s dream. They run off, taking the same path from the dream, but everything is different. No dead zombies. No snake. The door is still there, along with the live zombie. They break through the boards on the inside of the door, but not in time. The zombie bites and kills Addy. Dream six, Addy is gone again. Mack goes straight to the mystery door. The zombie waits, but doesn’t interfere. The boards behind the door are gone, allowing him to rush down into a basement. There’s a dying kid, bitten by a female zombie who attacks Mack. He stabs her repeatedly in the torso.“Why won’t you die?”
Addy wakes Mack from the dream because he’s yelling at the dream zombie woman. He asks Addy where the necklace came from. Suddenly we’re in Addy’s dream sequence, not Mack’s. She goes to the door. She kills the male zombie which has killed Mack so many times.
Down in the basement, Addy is the one who stabs the female zombie. After the zombie finally dies, Addy opens her hand to reveal her necklace. Suddenly we’re back at the creek. Mack sleeps beside the motorcycle. Addy weeps hysterically down by the water. She remembers the first night of the zombie apocalypse now. Remembers she didn’t know how to kill a zombie and that her mother was the first she gave mercy. Forty minutes of a reoccurring nightmare—which we thought were Mack’s for thirty minutes—just to tell viewers she’s having issues about killing her mother. 10k killed his father and they handled it with two or three flashbacks.
Addy and Mack aren’t characters who can carry off their own episode, let alone an episode where the writers decided to play with weird story-telling techniques. The next episode better have more than two main characters. This was ridiculous and did nothing for the main plot.
The victim is Scott E, the guy who told Major he’d seen zombies after their group session together. At first it looks like Scott’s death is suicide. Ravi points out the obvious—there isn’t enough blood in the bathtub where Major found the corpse. The suicide is staged. At the lab, they discover that Scott overdosed before his wrists were cut by a crude shiv. Unfortunately, the medication in his system is one anyone on staff at the hospital can get their hands on, along with any patients not too keen on taking their pills as prescribed.
Their suspect list is, as always, too long to manage. For a heartbeat, Major is on that list. He tells Liv about Scott’s obsession with zombies and the video his deceased chess partner shot at Lake Washington the night Liv was turned—which he apparently sent to someone at a TV station. The only obvious option: Liv eats crazy brain and waits for a vision. Actual police work is so last year.
While Liv suffers the effects of Scott’s brain pretty quickly, the visions take a while to filter through. Through the first, they learn he’s been sleeping with a woman who wants a baby, despite his disapproval. It’s not the woman he was sleeping with at the hospital—Brie—and they’re back to no solid leads. That is until Johnny Frost, local weatherman and oddball supreme, comes in to identify Scott’s body. Hey, look, someone who may have the zombie video. Except, he doesn’t. Johnny does know where Scott hides important things. Off they go to commit crime, breaking into Scott’s apartment to find his laptop. They use the laptop to track Scott’s missing cell phone after failing to find the video. The search sends them to an orderly’s apartment, where they find not only the missing phone, but a bunch of pills and personal items stolen from hospital patients. Faced with serious time for drug possession with intent to sell, the orderly turns on Dr. Maddy Larson—Scott’s doctor and sometimes bed-buddy. Guess what? She’s pregnant. Dr. Larson admits to killing Scott, claiming she was afraid he’d tell her husband.
Throughout the case, Major dogs Liv’s steps. Checks himself out of the hospital. He talks to Clive more than her, digging deep to track down information on the zombies his deceased friend claimed to see. Eventually, Major ends up minutes behind Liv after she breaks into Scott’s house and leaves. He finds nothing, she took everything of note, but he does make an impressive climb from a window to avoid running into Blaine—who is likewise tracking the mythical zombie video to destroy it after paying a surprise visit to the morgue and chatting with Liv. After escaping Scott’s apartment, Major hides in Blaine’s trunk. Blaine unwittingly takes him right to the base of his operation. The following day, Major steals several coolers containing bits from an astronaut’s brain.
Or does he? See, the predominant side-effect from eating Scott’s brain came in the form of vivid hallucinations. Most in the form of a cartoon devil endlessly harassing Liv about case details he “knew” but she couldn’t figure out. At the end of the episode, we learn that Johnny Frost is likewise a hallucination. As well as Major. Well, in part at least. There’s the moment in this episode. The moment when Liv finally comes clean about Lake Washington and zombies. She and Major are finally on the same page. But the Major she confesses to and kisses isn’t real. The real Major is more focused on finding the truth himself. He barges into Liv’s apartment armed with Blaine’s coolers of astronaut brain, ruining the illusion from the night before, and declaring war on every zombie in existence.
The reveal is well done. At no point did anything not line up, giving up the truth through poor timeline handling or shoddy dialog. Where was this level of writing back in the baby-crazy episodes? At least this show is ramped to end the season on a higher note than it began.
Thirsty, hungry, and hesitant to stress their truck, the group hasn’t made it far from the massive zombie horde sweeping westward across the central states. Matter of fact, the horde moves faster than our heroes.
Well, except Murphy. Dehydration hasn’t done a thing to tarnish his shining personality.
Desperate to survive the zunami—zombie tsunami, coined by Citizen Z—everyone clambers into the town’s mortuary. Seeing as it’s made to store corpses, not keep animated ones out, the building isn’t anywhere near secure. Roberta has one choice: make her people climb into the morgue’s refrigerated body storage or watch them overrun and eaten alive. Again, except Murphy. Everyone reluctantly agrees to chill out and hide until the undead move on. They clear the storage shelves, making room for Doc, Cassandra, 10k, and some random guy who ran into the building with them. Roberta is left without a cubby to hide in when she fails her gut-check and can’t move a dead zombie. Left with no time to spare, Murphy tells her to climb into a body bag. It’s almost touching, Murphy standing over Roberta, his presence unnoticed by the dead as he protects her.
Then Murphy walks away.
His affinity for the dead guys gives him free pass to surf the zunami without care. In the minutes during the heaviest wave of the zunami, Murphy finds two survivors holed up in an apartment building, food and water, and his inner not-giving-a-damn. Yes, the savior of the human race robs a terrified mother and child, then leaves the building’s door open so the undead husband/father may rejoin his family. What a tender-hearted guy. I’m getting the warm-fuzzies.
It’s not all bad from Murphy. He doubles back to the mortuary. In the nick of time, too. A particularly bright zombie takes a closer look at Roberta’s body bag and realizes, “Ooo, a burrito!” Using his zombie mojo, Murphy calls the dead guy off and saves the day. The group, grateful for the water and food Murphy found, finally accepts him as more than a sarcastic burden to haul across the country. Their time is running short. Murphy is becoming more zombie than human. What does this mean for the cure?
Up in the middle of nowhere, things get weird . . . er. Citizen Z stops a cyber-attack on his system. Moments later, an unidentified object falls from the sky, landing near the NSA base. Turns out, there is a guy inside, an astronaut from the International Space Station who was stranded up there for three years during the zombie outbreak. Yuri is convinced the air isn’t safe in the base. Citizen Z brushes it off, inviting his new guest inside for copious amounts of vodka, video games, and a round of indoor golf.
No amount of distraction placates Yuri. His actions grow odder; what he says make no sense to Citizen Z—not because Yuri’s mother language isn’t Engligh. Yuri snaps, attacking Citizen Z, forcing him to listen to the same question over and over: What’s wrong with the dog? Turns out, the HVAC system for the base malfunctioned. There’s virtually no oxygen. Yuri never existed. He is a hallucination coughed up by an oxygen-starved mind.
I have to admit, it’s a cool way to mix up the scenes in the base. However, the repetitive dialog for these scenes makes it feel like it was written by someone likewise suffering oxygen deprivation.
Liv, obviously, isn’t handling Lowell’s murder well while operating on PTSD brain. The police drag her into interrogation after neighbors report gunfire at his apartment and they discover the body. She’s lying badly, about to be arrested for the murder, when Lt. Suzuki—Blaine’s pet zombie-cop—walks in and says Lowell shot himself, case closed. Is this to save Liv, Blaine, or keep the undead truth under lock and key? All of the above, I’d say. Suzuki knows what happened. He has to. Blaine dragged him too deep into the muck around his brain delivery scheme for him to deny anything z-related coming through his office—including Liv herself.
How does Liv celebrate escaping jail and a murder charge? Dives face-first into an alcoholic’s brain. This particular alcoholic happens to be Rebecca Hinton, the reporter who broke the story about the police department’s failure to allocate resources to find the missing skate park kids. Her death has nothing to do with Blaine and company, though. Over the last few months, she chased a story about seemingly random, violent outbursts—including a young man, Jason, who snapped and assaulted people in a library. Long story short, Max Rager is at the center of attacks in at least three cities.
Day-drunk and brimming with journalistic bravado, Liv marches into the Max Rager offices. Bypassing the high-strung office assistant, Adele, she comes face-to-face with Vaughn Du Clark. He attempts to charm away the accusations. Their conversation is cut short by Adele and two security officers. Apparently they were smart enough to call in to check Liv’s credentials. Oops, not actually a cop. Time to go. Go get drunker, of course.
At the bar, one of Rebecca’s sources for her story comes forward. Sebastian tells Liv about a second informant, someone on the inside still. It sets a fire under Liv to find answers. Alcohol and fire, a great combination.
She finds Rebecca’s inside source at a morning Pilates class. Adele hesitates before agreeing to make a deal—and runs the second Liv leaves her alone. Neither make it far. Sebastian waits in the parking garage, easily taking the women. Liv wakes on a boat with Sebastian and a corpse. Into the drink goes Adele. Sebastian takes time to taunt Liv. Bad move. She’s sobering up and it doesn’t take much to go full-on-zombie. Liv saves herself, running the Max Rager hitman over with his boat.
Except he tasted her blood first. Dun, dun, duuun . . . .
A far more pressing problem—which Liv ignores—is Major’s descent into madness. Clive can’t find anything to substantiate Major’s story. Dupont is at the gym, bench-pressing a small car. Obviously he doesn’t have three bullets in his chest. Worried, Clive advises Major find psychological help. Ravi unfortunately has to parrot the idea. When he asks Liv to tell Major, she shoots it down.
“He’s lost his job. He’s breaking into cars. He’s shooting people. He’s doing all of this when he thinks the Candy Man is killing kids. What’s his move when he finds out he’s eating them?”
She has a point. Some people aren’t built to handle the truth. Isn’t she selling Major short, though? He’s proven there’s not much which will dissuade him from finding the truth, no matter how odd. So zombies are real and have a taste for young brains, it’s not too far of a stretch from thinking that body builders munched ’em to build muscle. Cannibalism is cannibalism. No one says anything to Major. He leaves for Blooming Grove mental hospital after taking care of Liv after yet another binge-drinking night. At the hospital, he meets a man who likewise faced a zombie and walked away to tell the tale. Sad when a complete stranger is more helpful than the woman he was supposed to marry.
Liv does come to terms with Lowell’s passing and her part in it. Ravi signs a falsified coroner’s report stating Lowell killed himself. Now more than ever, Liv is determined to kill Blaine. I think this time she won’t hesitate with her finger on the trigger.
Their mechanic is out of commission—Roberta checked out after giving Charles mercy and isn’t planning to come back anytime soon. The others want to give her space to mourn. Murphy knows if she falls down that rabbit hole, they’re all doomed to follow suit.
“She’s got post-traumatic stress? The whole world’s got post-traumatic stress. Actually there isn’t anything post about it; we all got plain ol’ present-tense all traumatic, all stress, all the time. What makes her so special?”
Roberta is allowed to marinate in her feelings for the majority of the episode. Once 10k patches the radiator hose—and Doc stupidly dumps their entire water supply in the radiator—they find a trading outpost, where Warren proceeds to drink her weight in moonshine. Literally. That’s all she does until the last five minutes or so of the episode. Then when facing off with a zombie bartender, suddenly she’s ready to talk. Not to the living or the bar tender, but her lover, Charles. She blames him for dying and abandoning her to hopelessness, burdening her with a “beautiful lie” about the possibility of a better future with him by her side. In minutes she goes through half the stages of grief, landing on anger. Her anger transforms her into an efficient killer. But has she really moved on from the grief?
Mack is more than ready to move on. After the truck broke down, he and Addy scout ahead, looking for a place to pick up parts or even a mechanic who’ll do more than nap in the broke-down vehicle. Of course, they find nothing. Major Williams warned them, there isn’t much west of where his camp had been. Seizing the opportunity, Mack suggests he and Addy take their mysteriously-located motorcycle and run off together.
“Addy, the only promise we ever made was to each other—stay alive.”
She can’t leave Warren, can’t leave the memory of Garnett and how he saved her from the cannibals. Most importantly, she can’t trust Mack to not decide he’d be better on his own a week or two down the road. Reasonable. He’s willing to cut-and-run on people who’ve kept them alive for weeks. Who risked everything to save Addy when it wasn’t in their best interest. Mack can’t handle turmoil. With the weird flashbacks Addy’s had over the last few episodes, turmoil is all she’s got to offer. She needs the solidity of a large group in case she freaks—it’ll save Mack’s life at the very least. He agrees to go back. Senses there’s something she’s not telling him. It doesn’t matter. By the time they make it back to where they left the others with the truck, everyone is gone. Better yet, there’s a wall of zombies heading their way.
Cars are the number one fatality on this show. The trusty ol’ truck is showing some wear and tear—again. So of course the solution is to enter 10k in a live zombie-shooting contest at the outpost they found on accident. The prize is a .50 caliber rifle, which they plan to trade for a functioning car. The deal-makers are named Sketchy and Skeezy. I’m feeling huge waves of trust from these guys. Doc knows them from back in New York and vouches for their intentions. Spoilers: The plan doesn’t work. Of course. These guys aren’t allowed to have a reliable car, it’d make it too difficult to cause problems for them plot-wise.
Murphy is nervous and getting dumb with panic. He attacks a guy, Forman, to steal his car. During the struggle, he goes rabid, biting Forman’s neck. A little blood. One ticked-off drunk. And now there’s a witch-hunt on for Murphy. That’s when everything goes downhill—and how Roberta ends up chatting with a zombie bartender. Forman and his posse catch up with Murphy during the shooting contest. Doc, who’s been at 10k’s side with Cassandra, hears a ruckus and they dart off to save Murphy’s backside. A few misfired guns take out three or four innocent bystanders—including one poor sap using the outhouse and Forman. They turn zombie instantly. Except Forman. He’s just dead. Murphy inspects the bite mark he left and finds his tooth embedded in the wound. Turns out he is the cure after all. Here I thought they’d go through all this trouble for the cure to fail catastrophically upon arrival in California.
There’s still time for things to go wrong. They have to stay ahead of the zunami, first and foremost.
An ex-sniper, Everett Adams, is found with a gunshot wound on a paintball course during a Big Brothers Big Sisters event. There’s no witnesses. No real evidence. Seems like this is winding up to be another “accidental clue” case. Adams’ “little brother”, Harris Jenkins, is on the scene. Harris tells Clive and Liv all about the sordid details of Adams’ nasty divorce with his wife, Penny, and subsequent custody battle for Anna, their daughter, after she remarried. Open and closed case. Except, there’s still no evidence. Liv chows down on Adams’ brain and becomes Super Soldier Zombie—complete with PTSD. Trying to control the effects of the PTSD, she gives into Adams’ athletic/competitive side and heads to the paintball field. Where she accidentally finds a bullet casing the entire police and forensic teams managed to miss. Sure, I’ll buy it. Do the writers also have magic beans for sale? The casing wasn’t where forensics said the shooter’s perch was located. Cue loads of head-scratching . . . until Clive digs deeper into the ex-wife’s new husband, Sean Taylor. Who just happens to work with new drone technology. Case solved by actual police work. Wow.
On to more important things. Is Ravi turning into a brain-munching fiend after stupidly handling Zombie Rat? He’s as nervous as a sexually active teen girl with a late period. Constantly checking and rechecking his vitals. Asking Liv roundabout questions about how she knew she was a zombie after waking on the beach in a body bag. In the end, it’s a false alarm. Whatever strain of zombie virus infects the rat didn’t pass on. Liv, of course, is pretty miffed when Ravi tells her the truth. If he’d stop hiding things from her all the time, he wouldn’t get in half the trouble.
Major could use a dose of truth, as well. His quest to figure out why Dupont had a brain in his car leads to a weird land of Youtube gun training sessions, odd Google searches, and the wacky idea that Dupont eats brains to build muscle mass. Chasing the latter idea, he ends up in a gym, where in the course of five minutes, he manages to make his new trainer think he’s flipped his lid. Which he has. Because no one will pull him aside and say, “By the way, that guy you’re chasing is a zombie. Yes they exist. Stop chasing zombies. It’s bad for your longevity.” The trainer gossips about the whackjob who wants to eat brains to build muscle. Dupont overhears and tracks Major down on Blaine’s orders. There’s a fight. Major’s Youtube training lessons come in handy and he shots Dupont three times.
One phone call to his detective buddy and Clive comes in to find . . . no corpse. No blood on the floor. Just a bullet, a broken mirror, and a dent in the wall. Even he thinks Major needs a long vacation and many talks with a psychologist.
At last Liv is on the same page as the rest of us. She knows Lowell lied about his brain source and that Blaine is actually providing her honey with meals. Unfortunately, instead of approaching the revelation with a calm, cool head, she attacks Lowell. He gets defensive. Liv is still no closer to contacting Blaine to do something about his murderous rampage. It isn’t until Ravi makes Liv stop and put herself in Lowell’s shoes that she sees reason. How would she eat if she didn’t work in the morgue? She came into the undead world prepared to survive. Others like Lowell aren’t as lucky. Blaine turns them and part of the deal is Brains on Wheels. They know no better alternative. With empathy gnawing on her soldier-altered mind, Liv heads home. Lowell shows up unannounced, covered in dirt, with a brown paper bag. He sat in a graveyard all afternoon watching a man’s funeral. The same man whose grave he dug up. Whose head he tore apart to remove the brain—for Liv, as a peace-offering.
“We eat people,” Lowell tells Liv. As though he hadn’t put the pieces together before then. They kiss and make up. After, they hatch a plan to kill Blaine. Lowell lures their creator to his place. Liv will use her newfound sniper skills to take Blaine out. Sounds pretty easy. Until Liv’s conscience kicks in. If she kills Blaine, she’ll become someone like him—completely opposite from the Liv she was before the zombie-making accident. She calls it off. Then Lowell does the worst thing possible, he tries to protect her from this awful act by doing it himself. Blaine blocks the murder attempt and shoots Lowell.
Where can they go from here? If Liv isn’t willing to kill Blaine when she had the chance, she’ll have to go the legal route. How much can she dance around the Z-word while pointing Clive and the police in the right direction? The truth will come out eventually. It always does.
Last episode, Lowell was a minor distraction compared to the rampant Baby Fever cooking Liv’s brain. This time around, she’s so caught up in her new lover and how he makes her feel, she ignores the people who’ve been by her side pre-and-post zombie infection. When Major calls from jail, she ignores it in favor of a rather intense foot massage. Later in the episode, she agonizes over whether or not she actually has a relationship with Lowell or uses him for bedroom antics—despite the fact that in the previous episode, they spent an entire night hanging out as friends because Lowell ate a gay brain. The agonizing doesn’t amount to any growth on her part, his part, or for their relationship. They talk for a couple minutes, it magically fixes everything she sees is wrong, and they end up in bed together again. Liv can’t handle her own relationship, but analyzes everyone’s personal lives in the episode with help from the most recent case on the morgue’s table. The hypocrisy is strong with this one.
Since Liv is missing in action, Major relies on his roommate and friend, Ravi, to bail him out. Ravi is beat to the punch by Peyton, Liv’s roommate, who finds just the right loophole to get Major out of jail without bail.
Everyone Liv is close to comes to her ex’s aid. Ravi even carefully breaks the news that the police found the bodies of the missing boys. However, he can’t bring himself to tell Liv what’s happened to Major—aside from informing her about Major’s recent break-up. What is Ravi protecting her from? She’s pretty much gone through the worst thing possible in her life; finding out her ex played Batman, was caught, and beaten for his part in antagonizing an already tense police department isn’t going to ruin however long she’ll stuck in zombie limbo. It’s an absurd character decision. The show is full of them. Like Ravi’s failure to properly handle his undead rat friend at the end of the episode. Maybe a human shouldn’t handle the infected rodent, like, at all. Even with chainmail gloves. Spoilers: It proves to be an incredibly stupid idea.
The case is a nightmare—overly complicated like so many others this season just to drum up false tension. A radio relationship gossip queen, Sasha Arconi, is murdered on-air, electrocuted by her microphone. There’s no security in the building, anyone could’ve walked in to rewire the murder weapon. One caller is suspected after calling out the plate number for the car belonging to her husband’s mistress. Just so happens, the car belongs to Sasha. Problem is, Sasha believed in free love. There’s no telling how many lovers she has floating around in the world.
One lover in particular hosts a rival sports talk show, Morning Hurl. Their on-air hatred is the stuff of legends. It’s also disgusting. Morning Hurl’s host, Chuck Burd, is King Pig in the land of Misogyny. A shame since they brought in Battlestar Galactica star Aaron Douglas to play Burd. Everything from the character’s mouth degrades Liv or the deceased in sexual ways.
Is this necessary? Is this entertaining? Is this appropriate for a show touting a supposedly strong female lead? Bringing in Burd one episode after they forced Liv to become baby crazy isn’t wise. It perpetuates her role as victim. Sure, she talks a big game when Burd confronts her, but that’s thanks to Sasha’s brain. Liv is a passive vehicle for her meals and their personalities. They didn’t even need Burd for the plot to work. He is a red herring. The real killer is, of course, a woman jealous over professional success. Because women are incapable of coexisting in a competitive work environment. Sure.
To make everything more convoluted, at the end of the episode, Liv sees Blaine walking into Lowell’s apartment building. She should’ve thought about how her new lover sated his brain habit long before now. Oh, and the brain they ate for breakfast after a night in the sack? Just so happens to be Jerome’s. Major buys a gun after delving deeper into why Dupont had a brain in his car. Because guns solve everything. How these characters haven’t killed each other by accident yet boggles the mind.
This week’s case is pretty straight-forward. An underage girl, pregnant with her skeevy boyfriend’s baby, missing for eight months, and found near-dead in the woods by a bunch of teens her age. Obviously the boyfriend did it, angry with the girl for getting pregnant. Or was it her parents, enraged by her poor decisions and choice in boyfriend? A pack of wild dogs? Bigfoot? Even with Liv chowing down on Emily Sparrow’s brain for brunch, this case goes nowhere fast.
It’s a wonder any case is solved in that city. These fearless crime-fighters have terminal cases of “Ooo, shiny.” In the end, none of the suspects kidnapped the girl, which lead to her escape and death from the effort. Important clues happen by accident, save one moment of actual police work—charting Emily’s escape path via river instead of the assumed walking path the task force originally mapped out. At one point, they had one of the kidnappers in the station and were none the wiser. The police work is akin to how children play when their parents force them out into the sun—half-hearted, rules made up as they go, yet somehow they’re always the winner by the time play hour is up.
What happened to Liv? Normally her “Ooo, shiny” isn’t this bad. She’s pretty dog-and-bone when it comes to a new case, simply for the fact that she’s, essentially, the victim every week. Yes, it’s a show with a female lead which forces her into the victim role every week. Sounds a little fishy. This time around, it is worse. She’s distracted by Lowell’s sudden distance. Then Liv gets Baby Fever.
It’s lazy writing to take a female character who, when able to have children, was too busy building a career to commit to baking buns in her oven. Now Liv’s physically incapable of getting pregnant and can’t stop thinking about how quickly she can pop out a dozen kids. Yes, I’ll grant that being half-dead will change a person. But so much as to take a career-driven woman and land her in a rocking chair, knitting booties for the dozen kids she day-dreams about? It’s too fanciful, even for a show with coherent zombies. She’s mourning important human things, you say? She already gave up regular human life during her residency before Blaine infected her—willingly sacrificing sleep, time with family, her relationship with Major, regular friendships, and even a normal diet. Medical school was her everything, just as zombieism is now.
Major is, well, Major. He’s digging deeper into the missing kid’s case—getting his backside handed to him once wasn’t enough to slow him at all. Now Major’s dragging Clive into murky waters. After an ambush phone call between the two—witnessed by a reporter Major brought on to help him uncover the truth the cops don’t want to find—there’s trouble coming their way. Clive is demoted to paper-pushing in the Sparrow case after his bosses see the quote he accidentally gave, posted in bold writing on the next day’s paper. Major escapes unscathed until he stupidly follows the Candy Man—Julien Dupont. He’s caught by cops after breaking into Dupont’s car. Oh and he finds a brain hidden at the bottom of an ice chest. Dupont explains it away, mentioning the café Blaine uses as a front for his brain business. The cops let him go, but drag Major to the station. They lock him in with a biker gang and no supervision. There are a lot of accidental fists meeting his face. Just like Clive accidentally provided the media more fodder against the police department. Tit for tat.
“I’m missing a rat. Liv, you’re rocking a rat.” Ravi’s zombie-cure experiments move onto the next phase—rat testing to determine what mix of Utopia and Max Rager creates zombies. Great. Good. A cure is important. Except it works a little too well, leaving one rat full-on zombie.
Just what the show needs, more zombies. How about less zombies and more focus on the over-arching story line?
Corpse time. Simon Cutler was a grade-A d-bag with a God complex and far too much time to spend on a computer. When Ravi and Liv get the call—while Liv sutures the cuts on Major’s forehead from his fight in the previous episode—to pick up the deceased, they had no clue he’d marinated in his own juices for ten days in his basement.
Yes, Liv made a smoothie from brain matter so decomposed, they probably had to pour it out of the guy’s head. Even I draw the line there. Brain isn’t like steak; aging doesn’t do a thing to improve flavor or texture. Simon’s brain gives Liv a wicked case of agoraphobia, cravings for cheese curls, and mad computer skills. She puts the latter to use, breaking into the dead guy’s computer at Clive’s insistence. A possible lead through a video game falls flat, and eats up screen time which could’ve been spent actually building the plot for the murder case. Honestly, they solve this one by accident. It’s a bittersweet case once everything is on the table. Simon unleashed his anger on a customer service representative, going so far as to put her on the registered sex offender’s list and releasing false nude photos online. After a year dealing with his torture, the poor girl killed herself. Her brother tracked Simon via a Yelp review and took his revenge with no regrets. Unfortunately this story is buried under Liv’s love life and the snail-paced Blaine story arc.
Speaking of, Blaine has to clean house again. His woman-of-the-month, Jackie, loses her temper after a botched brain delivery and eats the delivery boy. It happens to the best of us, Jackie. However, Blaine isn’t as forgiving. One drill bit to the head later, Jackie has eaten her last free meal. Ever. It’s not the last heard from the dead delivery boy. His body is found, leading Clive straight to Blaine’s slaughterhouse/café. He doesn’t get any information from Blaine and nearly gets himself killed. Bravo, Detective. Meanwhile, Major stumbles on footage which places Blaine in the skate park with the guy he thinks is the Candy Man. Ravi sees and takes the problem to Liv. What the heck can she do about it? Major won’t listen if she tells him to drop it. Clive will get dead, or undead, if he comes at Blaine again. Rock, Hard Place, please meet Liv.
A surprisingly easy decision is the choice to give it a shot with Lowell. It’s easy to talk to him, zombie to zombie. Liv only really has Ravi to talk dead things with. Even then, there’s things he just can’t understand. Right now, that’s Lowell’s appeal. He empathizes with her problems. Brings her anxiety pills after Simon’s brain throws her for a loop. Lowell even got out of Dodge when things ramped up in the murder investigation without complaint. He’s too good to be true and that makes for boring television. But they kiss, so someone, somewhere must be pleased.
