iZombie 2.05: "Love and Basketball"

“Say it with me now. Rigorous testing. For months.”
- Ravi

Thing are about to get freaky for Liv and Major. He showed up at the end of last week’s episode needing help, which apparently meant a heavy duty make out sessions with living dead ex. She’s into it at first and then starts overanalyzing everything. She worries that they don’t know enough about how the zombie disease is transmitted. While Liv is shutting Major down, a night security guard gets murdered on the job. The next morning, Liv checks Major’s vitals (he’s still alive) and says that a relationship is off limits until there’s actually a cure. He is not too happy about that. But it seems like that might not be too far in the future because the guy that Blaine turned into a zombie to force him to cut the dirty Utopium agrees to do it.

Ravi and Liv have a bit of fun goofing off at the crime scene before heading back to the lab. Clive wants Liv to check out some security footage but she hasn’t had brains yet so she does some ridiculous psychic fake-outs before chowing down on a brain omelet. Just as Liv heads to the station and starts yapping on about basketball, a bunch of kids show up claiming the dead guy was their basketball coach. Well, that explains a lot. The kids say they know who killed their coach. The father of one of the boys who quit a few weeks ago. Liv and Clive go to see the guy and he is a piece of work. He gets in Liv’s face as she’s having visions. She sees him choke the coach because the coach reported him to child protective services for hitting his kid. Yeah, I kind of want this douchebag to be guilty. Unfortunately, the alibi checks out. That doesn’t stop Clive from going by his house later that night and beating the crap out of him for laying hands on his son. To be fair to Clive, the asshole did lay hands on him first.

Major is still kind of struggling with the whole Max Rager deal. Liv’s roommate is still flirting with him (it is just so gross) and drags him in to give the head R&D scientist more information on why he needs a stronger sedative. She says they need blood from a coherent zombie to figure out how to make Super Max not create zombies. At home that night, Major is tempted to use more Utopium but Liv comes in and gives him a basketball-brains speech about not giving up. It was kind of funny.

To help keep Major’s mind off drugs, Liv enlists him to be the new basketball coach. While he and Liv spend time with the kids, Clive gets chewed out by his boss for calling the former captain’s widow and asking about whether he was suicidal. Later on, the new FBI agent he is paired with points out that his theory about the Meat Cute explosion might be right because they found a strand of hair from the famous astronaut in the drain at Meat Cute. Oh snap! Even bigger snap? Ravi gets a batch of tainted Utopium delivered so now it’s time for some months of rigorous testing (much to Liv’s dismay). She wants to be with Major now! She even shares this little tidbit with her roommate (about the make out session).

Elsewhere, while Clive is trying to figure out who helped the team crowdfund the $5,000 necessary to go to a summer basketball camp, Major is on the hunt for more zombies. But I think he’s going to be having some second thoughts about the guy he picked. Especially after he sees the guys’ little boy show up at the restaurant. I really want Major to tell Liv about everything. That ways he can go full on zombie on her roommate and just eat her!

Things get super awkward and kind of hilarious when one of the three people that Liv couldn’t identify shows up dead in Tacoma. Ravi is not happy to have to go there because the ME that runs the office down there applied for his job and the guy is kind of a dick. Claiming Ravi was a diversity hire. They learn that the guy was an enforcer for some bookies and he went to the 14th floor of the building where the coach was killed. Clive and Liv pay the firm a visit and end up confronting one of the attorneys who clearly has a gambling problem. They also throw in Hearst College (oh Veronica Mars) reference which made me smile. So they know who killed the enforcer but I still haven’t figured out who killed the coach. They bring the attorney in for questioning and he gives it up. He didn’t kill the coach but the firm has a fixer whom he called and that guy instructed him to clean up the scene. The attorney swears he didn’t kill the coach (it was the fixer) or that he knew that was part of the plan.

Perhaps the funniest part of this episode involves Ravi trying to name the new test rats and mixing up the Utopium and Max Rager when Blaine shows up. He promised the poor zombie guy he’d get the cure as soon as possible. The zombie guy has tagged along and injects himself with the mixture before Ravi can stop him. It turns him all rotten and he dies. Oops. Ravi, rather angrily, yells at Blaine that the Utopium clearly wasn’t mixed right and thus begins the struggle for the remaining drug. It takes them under gurneys, through tables of instruments and over corpses until Ravi finally smashes the vial. I haven’t laughed so hard during a drama in a long time! It was great.

Major turns in his “zombie killing” sheet for the week saying he checked eight potentials and none of them were zombies. Liv’s annoying roommate (who did manage to get some of Liv’s blood earlier) points out they have some kind of analysis which predicts the probability each person is a zombie and that given the people he checked, it is statistically low that none of them would have been a zombie. Major warns her not to give him the odds (I’m guessing so he can just ruin all their plans). He goes home, flushes the remaining Utopium and then cleans himself up. Liv is downstairs playing with Minor when he says that he can’t just be friends. He wants to try a relationship again. I am kind of rooting for them now. Season 1, I was all about Liv and Lowell but Major is growing on me in a good way. Maybe being with Liv will keep his head on straight and get him out of the zombie killing game.