The season 3 finale for iZombie was the kind of episode that surprised everyone — even series star Rahul Kohli, who didn’t see a major twist coming for his own character.
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There were several major plot developments in the last ten minutes of the show’s 2017 finale, but the one that surprised Kohli the most was the one that saw Ravi intentionally allow himself to be scratched by Liv, in order to test his newly-designed zombie vaccine.
“I always knew Rob Thomas’s plans for the world; he had said to us for years, season 4 is where we get into more apocalyptic stuff, where the landscape changes,” Kohli told ComicBook.com. “I always believed, we all firmly believed, that Clive and Ravi would remain human, untouched, and that’s now a question mark on Ravi’s status. That was a big surprise. I think Ravi and Clive are the audience; we’re the humans and we live amongst the zombies, so the fact that that’s in jeopardy, I was quite surprised.”
Would he want to be a zombie, now that the option is open to him, or would he rather continue to be the representative for the audience in the show’s rapidly-changing universe?
Well, he had another idea entirely — but he tells fans not to hold their breath.
“What I wanted was, I grew up watching Bill Bixby in the Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferrigno,” Kohl said. “So what I wanted was for Ravi to have this full-on zombie mode Hulk thing, so whenever something happened or he got angry, that’s what would trigger it. No brains, no pale skin, no nothing. It would just be an homage to The Incredible Hulk. That’s not going to happen; I’ve been told to shut my face.”
Season 4 will provide the biggest changes yet for The CW‘s DC Comics adaptation.
“We’re going to pick up next season three months later, and the United States has walled off Seattle like it’s West Berlin,” showrunner Rob Thomas told ComicBook.com. “Chase is hanging on by a very thin thread; it’s like every day is the Cuban missile crisis. Brains are coming in, but they aren’t getting as many as they expected, and zombies are hungry. In fact, the opening sequence in season four is going to follow a brain from the moment a man dies somewhere in Texas to the moment it reaches the brain tube and is ingested by a Seattle zombie. In fact, it’s even going to start earlier than that. We’re going to see a commercial on TV; we want to get someone like Laura Linney making a commercial pleading for the people of the United States to sign their brain donor card.”
As fans might remember from True Blood, though, bringing the truth to light is no guarantee that Liv and other zombies can live peacefully alongside humanity. In fact, it might exacerbate things and create larger and more aggressive groups in the vein of the “zombie truthers” seen in season 3.
“Seattle is going to be like living in West Berlin, and inside here, there are going to be these humans who are willing to try to live peacefully side-by-side with zombies, there are going to be humans who are incredibly resentful of zombies,” Thomas continued. “We had a lot of fun trying to name a human terrorist organization; rejected names include Up With People and The Human Shield. There are going to be zombies who consider eating humans when they get hungry. It is a city barely under control, and meanwhile, they’re still trying to have buses run on time and mail get delivered and murders get solved, and Chase Graves is trying to keep it running. Liv is still going to be solving murders, but the city itself is going to feel very, very different.”
iZombie will return in early 2018 on The CW.