A brain straight from the loony bin plays havoc on Liv’s life, as her latest investigation sees her crossing paths with Blaine.

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“SINGLE, VERY WHITE FEMALE”

Note: The following review goes into detail about the episode. SPOILER ALERT!

Bravo iZombie, bravo. I consider myself completely fine-tuned to suss out when a show is trying to fool me, but “Astroburger” really got me good. Looking down at my notes for the episode, I had scribbled “lackluster use of the ‘brain of the week’” a couple of times. But by the end of the episode, it actually turned out it had been the most effective use of a “brain of the week” so far. I started to suspect that something was up when Major reacted all too calmly to Liv’s big zombie confession—because let’s be honest, nobody would act that cool. To find out that most of Liv’s interactions with Major throughout the episode were hallucinations was a really good twist, though. Throw in the hilarious Johnny Frost hallucinations and Liv had one hell of a trip this week.

Aside from the one twist, I’m not sure if I actually like this route better. It felt so refreshing to see Liv being honest with Major, even though something was so obviously off with his reaction. It would have been nice to see a different take on the “keeping secrets to protect you” trope, but alas, the lies will continue for now. Major is in a whole lot of danger, and he really could have been spared some of this if Liv had just fessed up. He broke into an apartment, nearly got caught by Blaine and then jumped into the trunk of Blaine’s car! This is completely reckless behavior, and there’d be no need for any of it if he was working with Liv. Of course Liv’s main reservation is how Major will react to the news, and she may well be right to be afraid of that considering Major’s “kill them all” speech at the end.

I’m enjoying David Ander’s depiction of Blaine. He’s sleazy and despicable, but you also have to hand it to him for being such a crafty businessman. We saw him getting pressured a couple of weeks ago to procure some more “exotic” brains, and now we see him making a huge amount of money off selling astronaut brains to his richer clientele. He’s not a fool at all, and once he found out that there was a connection between Lowell and Liv, he reinserted himself back into her life. It’s funny to think, but Liv has now had two opportunities to kill Blaine in the last three episodes, and hasn’t been able to go through with it at the last second in either of them. She does have a point about not knowing whether poison would kill a zombie or not, but it was surely worth trying something.

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The police procedural stuff still isn’t all that interesting, but at least the case tied directly into our main story arc. Having the victim be the guy from the mental hospital who told Major about zombies was a smart play. It allowed all of our storylines to converge once again in as believable a manner as possible. By the time it was revealed that the doctor was the killer, it wasn’t all that much of a surprise. I am beginning to wonder how long Clive will continue believing Liv’s story. She’s acted weird around him in the past on several occasions, and now he’s seen her getting into a shouting match with a vending machine. As a good detective in a city starting to go crazy, I’d expect him to start putting some of the pieces together sooner rather than later. Although perhaps with Major on the cusp of learning the whole truth, perhaps Clive will be left out of the loop until next season.

THE BREAKDOWN

iZombie made me feel like a fool this week, and I absolutely love that. I don’t get caught out very often by these kind of twists, so learning that Liv had been having some major hallucinations (pun absolutely intended), I had to tip my hat to them. This little show on the CW continues to surprise and entertain each week, and it looks like that’ll continue at a rather fast pace as we head towards the season finale.

90/100 – Superb

Were you fooled by Liv’s hallucinations this week, or were you not buying any of it from the very start? Tweet me @OldSnake24. And be sure to follow us @YouNerded!

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