'iZombie' Keeps Getting Sexier and Angrier

After a several-week hiatus, iZombie returned with a low stakes murder-of-the-week episode that included several odd moves by characters that ultimately held no consequences.

While we are all fans of iZombie at Inverse, the show still hasn’t figured out how much Liv’s weekly brain consumption is supposed to affect the other characters. If you’ll recall, Major broke up with Liv a while ago because she was acting too clingy due to a brain she’d eaten, and Clive fired her while she was under the effects of the vigilante brain. Somehow, neither of these decisions greatly affected Liv’s lifestyle. In order for a show like iZombie to keep a sense of momentum, Liv has to be occasionally excused for whatever zaniness her brain diet causes, which makes minor characters like Major and Clive look like pushovers for placating her odd behavior.

That is exactly why Blaine is so important to iZombie. From the moment he first appeared on screen, he has been both a comical and dangerous presence in Liv’s world. In a show based around a mercurial protagonist, Blaine provides a welcomed bit of consistency while remaining immensely watchable. Furthermore, his decisions matter. In last night’s episode of iZombie, the plot finally started to catch up to Blaine. Just as the audience was beginning to forget about the homeless teens, last night’s episode ended with Liv listing all of Blaine’s victims. Considering that he began the episode by playing a creepy old organ and ended it by requesting fuzzy handcuffs while in police custody, it is understandable that we forgot about his transgressions. The guy’s a bucket of laughs!

And while Rob Thomas promised viewers “hook-ups galore” in the above video teaser for the episode, what we got was in many ways another straightforward Brain-of-the-Week plot. Liv, having eaten a romance novelist’s brain, proceeded to fantasize about a guy with a neck tattoo, spank Ravi, get all hot and bothered while taking blood from a zombie, sneak romance brains into said zombie’s dinner in order to seduce him, and suggestively rub her hand on a leather jacket. Oh yeah: elsewhere, Blaine had sex with Peyton after delivering the most fantastic pick-up line of all time:

Peyton: I think you put some serious time into this look.

Blaine: Well, we can’t all look like we were created in a lab by 14-year-old boys, can we?

Bam! We’re done here, folks. Peyton fell for it and now she might have to deal with the zombie virus, which — as we’ve learned — is transmitted sexually. The only upside to the situation is that Peyton is apparently sharing things with Liv again, which means that their mutual silent treatment won’t get in the way of plot development as the season progresses.

While we still don’t know what consequences — if any — are in store for Peyton and Blaine, we did get an update on Major trying to hide the fact that he is the real Chaos Killer. (He had to give away his dog in order to hide the fact that he stole him from one of his murder victims.) Ravi’s role was rather minimal this episode, which makes one yearn for his days of constantly vying for Peyton’s attention.

iZombie continues to be both funny and delightfully gory, as reflected in the scene in which Ravi and Liv excitedly tell Clive about the gruesome details of the body they’re working on. This episode, however, also illuminates one of the show’s central issues: its lack of involvement in any central pairing. Now that we’re past the ordeal that was Liv & Major, all of our characters are operating in isolation, orbiting around each other and trying to keep their little secrets, without any of the sexual friction that makes CW shows so compulsively watchable. For an episode meant to mirror 50 Shades of Grey levels of cheesy titillation, this week’s iZombie felt like a forgettable first date. Here’s hoping someone — anyone — makes a move next week!