The plot of iZombie is an intricate web of lies. Each week, one character starts pulling at one of the dangling threads, threatening to undo the entire construction. The routine continues in this episode, which ends with one of our favorite characters tugging hard enough to make a horrifying discovery. With so much happening, it’s an honest marvel that the show still makes sense.
“Pour Some Sugar, Zombie” opens with Peyton moving back in with Liv. Ravi and Major are on hand to do all of the lifting, and once that’s done, the four friends sit around and enjoy some beer. This leads to one of the show’s most charming bits of banter.
Peyton: Oh this is fun. Please try and rent the apartment across the hall —
Liv: So, we can be like the friends from Friends!
Ravi: Fantastic idea! Peyton is Monica-esque. You’re clearly a Rachel. Type A [points at Peyton]. Relationship drama [points at Liv].
Liv: Yeah, remember the episode when Ross and Rachel break up because she’s a zombie who wants to solve murders?
Major: That was so us.
I’m not even a huge Friends fan, but I just love these moments when the crew hangs out as friends. Unfortunately, the hang is interrupted by Peyton’s cell phone. It’s Cassidy, a stripper who was dating one of Mr. Boss’s henchmen and now wants to turn on him because she discovered he was cheating. She says she knows the location to one of the stash houses — but before she can tell Peyton anything else, someone hits her in the head with a tire iron. Time to go back to reality.
At first glance, the case seems pretty open and shut: Cassidy’s boyfriend, Nick the Stick, is on probation and his ankle monitor places him at the scene of her murder. Liv is relieved because she doesn’t feel like dealing with stripper brain. But Peyton, who is looking for a lead in her big Stacy Boss case, begs her to eat the brain to help find that stash house. Being the good friend that she is, Liv obliges.
Cassidy’s brain makes Liv very sassy. Needing something to trigger her memory, she and Peyton head to the strip club, where Liv gives Peyton a lap dance. It’s one of the funniest, most awkward lap dances I’ve ever seen on TV, especially because Liv is upset that Peyton doesn’t find it hot. Although the lap dance doesn’t trigger anything, a confrontation with another stripper in the bathroom does. Liv remembers Cassidy banging on the door of the stash house and catches a last name on a mailbox, which admittedly isn’t much.
That night, Peyton and Liv decide to pay Blaine a visit because he’s been skipping his regular meetings and leaving weird voice mails. When they get to the funeral home, they find he’s had some kind of personality change since taking the zombie cure last week — he’s really nice and also really confused.
The next day, Nick’s ankle monitor is found in some kid’s backpack and he’s nowhere to be found. Clive and Liv try to track down Lorelei, the other stripper he was sleeping with, and Lorelei leads them right to him. Nick says he was asleep in bed at the time of the murder and when he woke up, his ankle monitor was gone. When they bring Lorelei back to the interrogation room, she breaks down crying, which leads to one of sassy Liv’s funniest lines of the night: “It’s like a fricking Adele concert in here.”
Thankfully, a witness saw the murder and identified the car as a blue Chevelle. This clue leads Clive and Liv to a familiar face: Johnny Frost (Daran Norris), the sleazy weatherman from season one. Frost was one of Cassidy’s regulars. On the night of the murder, they had a fight because he accused her of stealing his identity and dropping racks on eyelash extensions, shoes, and a blue Chevelle. A photocopy of the driver’s license used to buy the car leads Clive and Liv to Nick’s best friend Pablo, who also works for Boss and is dating a stripper named Destiny.
Now they have four suspects: Nick, Lorelei, Destiny, and Pablo. Lorelei is the first one to break, natch. Basically, Destiny helped Lorelei get a blacked-out Nick into the back of the car, then Lorelei offered to drive Destiny home. When they drove past Cassidy, Destiny decided to hit her with a tire iron because she knew she was planning on going to the police, which would be bad news for Pablo. Case closed, moving on!
Throughout the episode, Liv worries about Drake, whom she hasn’t heard from since he stood her up last week. A vice detective comes looking for him, but Liv can’t help. So, she pays his mother a visit, hoping he’s just hiding. But Drake’s mom is distraught — she hasn’t heard from him in four days, which leads her to believe Mr. Boss killed him after figuring out he was an undercover cop. Yep, Liv finally finds out the truth.
Meanwhile, Ravi has a busy week himself. First, there’s the Blaine of it all. Concerned about Blaine’s memory loss, Don E. and Chief bring him in for an examination. After some tests, Ravi discovers that Blaine is human again, but the cure is also the source of his problems. At this point, he’s quite far gone and doesn’t even remember zombies are real. (He looks horrified when he finds out they do exist.) It can’t be said enough how great David Anders is in this role. He believably takes this character to many different places.
Then, a newspaper timeline of the Chaos Killer’s victims causes Ravi to discover that Minor was one of the victims’ dogs. This raises his suspicions about Major. Dale Bozzio shows him the picture of Major and Blaine, but Ravi lies and says he doesn’t recognize Major. Clearly worried, Ravi decides to break into Major’s safe, where he finds his victim log, the sedative, and the spray paint.
In a strong, emotional performance from Rahul Kohli, a horrified Ravi confronts Major. “I have the right to know if I’m living with a murderer!” he says. Ravi’s sense of betrayal is even more effective given that the episode began with such a lighthearted scene. The dramatic shift to this final sequence shows off iZombie’s remarkable ability to juggle many tones at once. Before the episode ends, the stress of the situation overwhelms Major and he starts to go full zombie. Ravi sedates him before things get out of hand — but that’s only a temporary measure. Major is officially a major problem.
Leftovers:
- Liv’s Meal of the Week: BLT (Brain, Lettuce and Tomato).
- Peyton tracks down Mr. Boss’s stash house and raids it. When Don E. finds out, he asks Chief to turn him into a zombie so that no one can kill him once they start their utopium business back up again.
- “I bet you think this dead stripper is about you, don’t you?” Ravi to Liv, when she laments her relationship problems.
- “If I had known you would be stopping by, I would’ve worn my less bloody lab coat,” Ravi to Peyton, when she stops by the morgue.
- “[You took] the cure to being an undead psychopath. Now you’re just a psychopath. You might have to change your business cards,” Liv to Blaine, when they tell him he’s human again.
