Wednesday, April 5, 2017

iZombie - Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother


Picking up 2.8 minutes after the Second Season finale, the main focus of "Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother" is to cover up what happened at Max Rager and have the characters deal with the new status quo of knowing there's a new player in town in the private military company full of zombies. There's no murder of the week to solve here, as the show deals with the fallout of last season and sets up major arcs for this year. For Ravi (Rahul Kohli) this means working on a new cure for the unintended side-effects of his old cure. For Blaine (David Anders) this means beginning to act a bit more like his old self, while still be not quite sure who that was. For Major (Robert Buckley), that means struggling to live in a world where everyone sees him as the Chaos Killer.

God, I missed this show, the odd characters and storylines, the puntastic titles and still-shots following each commercial break, and the constant tease of the world learning that zombies walk among them. The season premiere has a couple of set-ups which are almost too perfect. The tragedy following a conflicted Babineaux's (Malcolm Goodwin) discovery of a friend in Victoria Stoll's (Andrea Savage) compound is the exact right thing to get him lined up with Team Z. Too convenient? Or did events have a helping hand? Peyton (Aly Michalka) gets stuck following Ravi's discovery of her relationship with Blaine as the show hedges its bets on what's best for our zombie heroine's best friend in the romance department as Ravi's sulking leads her to look for comfort elsewhere.

The one character I haven't yet mentioned is Liv (Rose McIver). With so many other peices and characters to set-up for this season, our plucky heroine gets less focus than normal. She's a rather bland military brain the entire episode which limits the wacky hijinks (although the teaser for next week looks that those will be back in force) and with no murder to solve she's left in a reactionary role for most of the episode. Given the events with Babineaux's friends, Liv does make an important decision about Team Z and Stoll's offer (as does Major). Just what the zombie commander of a private zombie is truly after, however, remains to be seen.

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