iZombie 2.13: "The Whopper"

“Someone should teach you how to humblebrag. People might hate you less.”
-Blaine

This episode might have been a little light on the case-of-the-week front, but it delivered plenty in the way of mythology. And while I do love a well-executed “iZombie” case of the week, the mythology is certainly becoming interesting. To tell you the truth, there’s so much mythology happening on the show right now that I kind of wish they had done a bit more of a slow burn. There are two main mythology plots happening at the moment, although I can see how they are starting to come together. The first is Max Rager and their plan to kill zomies. The second is Mr. Boss and Blaine’s attempt to take him down. I think it might have worked better if the Max Rager stuff had wrapped up by the end of this season, and Mr. Boss was next season’s arc. Although given this creative team, I’m sure both plots will come together in spectacular fashion by the season finale. I really should just trust in Rob Thomas!

Anyway, this episode begins with Major and Ravi continuing to dig for the corpses of the tainted Utopium dealers. This time, Major finds something. It’s a body, but it’s not the body they were looking for. This person has been dead for a couple years. Major and Ravi don’t want to tell Babineaux what they were really up to, so they make up a not-super-convincing story about how they were geocaching, which is the coolest thing ever. Privately, Ravi tells Liv that he thinks her eating this brain could help them find the Utopium dealers they were actually looking for. After all, it’s unlikely that two thugs would use the same burial ground. The victim had a napkin with a phone number on it, and Liv and Babineaux talk to the woman who belongs to that phone number. She says the deceased is a guy who hit on her at a bar once, then never called her (for now obvious reasons). He claimed to be an FBI agent.

Liv and Babineaux go to the aforementioned bar, and they learn from the bartender that the deceased is Corey “Big Fish” Carp. He had a reputation for siting around the bar telling tall tales after collecting change from the bar’s arcade machines. Liv and Babineaux notice that the arcade machines are owned by a company whose address is at one of Mr. Boss’ warehouses. The motive for the murder is quickly determined when they find a bunch of quarters in the wheel well of Big Fish’s vehicle. A gun that was found with Big Fish was also used in the murder of a dock worker who was about to testify in court about Utopium smuggling. Terrell Johnson was suspected of the crime, but the police could never find any concrete evidence. Mr. Boss gets word that Johnson is going to be on police radar again, so he sends Drake to deal with him.

Drake, who is a little out of sorts since he’s on hypochondriac brain at the moment, gets the call when hanging out with Liv, so he has to make up an excuse to leave. Meanwhile, Liv has a vision of Johnson standing over the dockworker’s body. By the time Liv and Babineaux arrive at Johnson’s house, though, he’s long gone. Drake had already been there. I was worried that Drake might have killed him, but it looks like Johnson escaped to Mexico. Or maybe he did kill him and just made it look like Johnson left for Mexico. Who knows? Drake finally arrives at Liv’s house very late at night, and this triggers another vision. Liv sees Drake get shot by Big Fish before Don E finally takes him out. Drake explains that Big Fish killed the drug dealers they were looking for, and when he found out that Drake and Don E were looking for the bodies, he tried to stop them.

Drake is supposed to escort Liv to one of the drug dealers’ houses, but he stands her up (again), so she uses her pathological liar brain powers to think on the fly and tell the deceased’s mother a plausible story involving Stars and Stripes to explain why she is there asking questions. She sees a photograph of the two drug dealers together, and this triggers yet another vision. This is an important one, because the vision shows where the drug dealers, and the tainted utopium, are buried. The vision couldn’t have come at a better time. New Hope, the rat that took the zombie “cure” and later re-zombified, has just died, and Ravi suspects Major and Blaine are living on borrowed time.

Major, for his part, has been kidnapped by Blaine’s goons. When he is released at Shady Plots, Blaine is shocked to learn that he is the real Chaos Killer. Blaine is pretty much ready to kill Major right then and there. Major has one serious saving grace, though. He still has Blaine’s father, and Blaine needs his father. You see, earlier in the episode, Blaine went to the reading of his father’s will, where his father said that if his death was due to foul play, Blaine would get nothing and his abusive nanny would get everything. So if Blaine’s father is still alive, this inheritance mess is null and void. Major explains his whole hired zombie killer deal (although he doesn’t reveal his Max Rager connections), and Blaine has two conditions for Major. He needs his father’s body, and he is going to tell Major who on the potential zombie list goes.

When Major turns over Angus to Blaine, Blaine has a heck of a time dressing up in old age make-up to freak out Angus as he regains consciousness. Angus is appropriately freaked, and then Blaine does the big reveal that Angus hasn’t been frozen for all that long afterwards. He demands that his father make a new will that doesn’t cut Blaine out, and when Angus seems reluctant, he leaves him in the hands of two of his goons, who have no doubt been instructed to torture him until he agrees to do the new will. Bozzio has an FBI van staked out outside Shady Plots, and a photograph catches a bit of Major’s chin. She recognizes Major, and I guess we’ll see what the fallout from that is next week. For now, our team is ecstatic that they now have access to the tainted utopium.