Warning: serious spoilers ahead for “Looking For Mr. Goodbrain, Part 2,” the season 3 finale of iZombie.
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iZombie‘s third season just wrapped up — and to say it did so with a bang would be an insult to the numerous bangs both literal and metaphorical.
The series will never be the same after a twist big bad reveal, another twist to set up the next season, and a cliffhanger that leaves one of our heroes in danger of becoming one of the undead.
So, what were the biggest moments, the craziest moments, and the things that left our jaws on the floor tonight?
Read on…!
TORSO WALKER
Most of the big, shocking moments on tonight’s iZombie were character- or story-driven. This isn’t exactly The Walking Dead, where there are a lot of big shocks that come from gore…
…except that tonight, one of them was.
In what was possibly the most gruesome special effect ever seen on The CW, one of Major’s platoon survived the explosion at the end of last week’s episode — sort of. He appeared briefly as a dismembered corpse,everything from the waist down missing, dragging himself along the ground with his belly and terrifying a pair of moms walking through the neighborhood with their strollers.
We have to assume that given the level of damage to his body, he would have been a Romero if we had ever had a chance to explore what happened to him, but alas (?) — he was run over by a truck just moments after being introduced, producing a second round of screaming from the suburban moms.
This one is likely going to be the grossest zombie we see on iZombie, unless the show radically changes with its new, ahem, political arrangement next season.
A BAD TIME TO CLEAN YOUR GLOCK
In terms of plot spoilers, this one was pretty big.
Throughout the season, fans have wondered whether Fillmore Graves would actually turn out to be the season-long big bad. Would they somehow be responsible for the death of the zombie family at the start of the season?
With the death of Vivian Stoll and the Aleutian flu storyline in the second half of the season, it became clear that, yes, someone inside of FG was likely responsible for some, if not all, of the chaos going on in Seattle.
Enter Carey Gold, introduced early in the season, who turned out to be the bad guy, rather than the more-obvious choice of Chase Graves.
In fact, when he discovered what she had been up to, Chase decided to put a stop to it — and a faction of security officers loyal to her cause almost put the kibosh on those plans, except that when they assumed he was unarmed (by design; his main firearm was in pieces on his desk while he cleaned it), he had the opportunity to get a jump on them, killing all three and then Carey.
“SCRATCH ME”
Major finally found someplace he belonged this season, for the first time since he was fired from Helton Shelter in season 1…
…and then when he took the zombie cure, he was essentially forced out of Fillmore Graves; humans, after all, cannot be soldiers there.
There hadn’t been anybody happier to be rid of zombiedom than Major; he was livid when Liv first scratched him to save his life, and bugged Ravi constantly to get him “fixed.”
Tonight, though, scarred by the loss of his zombie brothers-in-arms, Major made a surprising decision: he asked Chase to scratch him and make him a zombie, so that he could rejoin Fillmore Graves and help make the world better for zombies.
While he promised Chase that he understood what that meant, and was absolutely on FG’s side with D-Day looming, it will be interesting to see whether a fundamentally good person like Major can truly do what’s needed in season 4.
CLIVE REVEALS THE TRUTH TO DALE
As each season has wrapped up, another member of the extended Team Z family has become aware of the truth about zombies.
In season 1, it was Peyton — who freaked out and ran for a while, then returned at the start of season 2.
In season 2, it was Clive, who lost his girlfriend over it because he had to get Major released in order to avoid a zombie apocalypse in jail.
This time around, Dale Bozzio — the girlfriend in question — is back, and it’s her turn to learn the truth, effectively setting the stage for a dramatically different relationship between the pair next season.
She handles it about as well as Clive did — she’s more shocked by the fact that Clive had managed to keep it from her than the fact that it’s a reality, apparently.
ZOMBOZZIO
…that relationship gets even more different when Dale manages to go get herself a flu shot — one tained with zombie blood.
That’s right: just moments after learning that zombies even exist, Bozzio suddenly is one, and it’s not something we get to see really play through very much because there’s so little time left in the episode and a ton of story still to deal with.
Seeing Liv and Major deal with the challenges of dating while undead was one thing — she had broken up with him because of it, and then by the time he knew the truth there was a ton of baggage there.
Here, it’s a little different: Clive and Bozzio are more or less starting a fresh relationship, and this is just part of the makeup of that relationship.
It should be interesting to see how that plays out next season.
D-DAY
Discovery Day, the day that humans become aware of the existence of zombies, has arrived for the citizens of Seattle. After creating a widespread panic about the Aleutian flu, Filmore Graves injected vials of the vaccination with zombie blood, turning all of those who were given it into zombies.
Liv Moore (Rose McIver) convinced local newsman Johnny Frost (Daran Norris) to announce the existence of zombies due to the vaccine, thus preventing more humans from getting injected. Soon after, Chase Graves (Jason Dohring) sent out a video message to panicking citizens. In it, he revealed to the country that zombies are real, and would continue to remain confined to Seattle if the rest of America donated the brains of their deceased to Filmore Graves.
The biggest change going forward is going to be the fact that Seattle is the zombie homeland, walled off from the rest of the country and struggling to get by.
The cultural shift will take a show that has previously existed in a world basically identical to ours, except that zombies exist in secret, to one more like True Blood, where there were complicated political and social relationships between the vampires and humanity after the deay vampires were finally revealed to the world.
“It’s hard to underestimate what Chase Graves’ video announcement would have meant to the world,” showrunner Rob Thomas told ComicBook.com. “It would have been the news story of the year in every language, everywhere in the world. It would have stopped people; everyone would have known where they were when they heard that zombies are real, and they are holding a major city hostage for our brains. You would remember where you were when you heard that. And so it is earth-shattering in that way, and it would be such a crazy world to live in because it’s not like they have the bomb; it’s like they have 10,000 bombs. And they’re not the bomb becuase the bomb would wipe out a city and stop. Any one of these could cause the world to end.”
RAVI
In the closing moments of the episode, we had one final WTF moment waiting for us around a corner.
Liv came to the morgue, where Ravi believes he has invented a vaccine to prevent zombism…and he wanted her to scratch him, so that he could test his theory.
It was a great, quiet moment in the midst of the crazy, widescreen chaos of the show’s final half hour or so…and it set up quite a cliffhanger: will Ravi be a zombie next season? If not, will he have a working vaccine? Given what Thomas has said about the show’s future, it seems like a working vaccine would — as Ravi suggested — be worth a lot of money.
The real question might be whether Ravi will end up in Chase Graves’s crosshairs next season if a vaccine is effective. After all, if brains are a bit more scarce than expected, it’s entirely plausible to think he wouldn’t like anything that weakens his negotiating strength with the rest of the world.
MORE iZOMBIE
In the third season, Liv has discovered there are more zombies living in Seattle than she previously believed. In fact, there is a private military contractor employing a small zombie army, and that army is preparing for the day humans learn of their existence. Major finds a job and acceptance in this army.
Liv and Clive investigate the murder of a zombie family that may just set off an all-out zombie-human war. Ravi’s former boss at the Center for Disease Control shows up in Seattle to investigate the Max Rager massacre. Blaine finds living as a human with no memory of his evil past is more blessing than curse. Peyton pulls at a thread in one of her cases that may lead to the villain that’s pulling all the strings.
This season, Liv will eat the brains and take on the traits of a dominatrix, a JACKASS-style stunt man, an office gossip, a pre-school teacher, a conspiracy theorist, a dungeon master, and many more.
Along the way, there will be a lot of corporate intrigue, some relationships tested to their breaking point, and a zombie speakeasy called “The Scratching Post.”
iZombie airs Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
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