Veronica Mars eats brains, has visions, solves crimes: an iZombie thread

I reaaalllly wanted to like this but I had to peace out near the end of S1. I found the universe and especially the zombie baddie not terribly compelling. It gets better, you say?

So far it's shined when it's heavier!

I loved Veronica Mars. Will try this.

The main character is pretty much Veronica Mars.

I reaaalllly wanted to like this but I had to peace out near the end of S1. I found the universe and especially the zombie baddie not terribly compelling. It gets better, you say?

I see how the Big Bad isn't that interesting, but I what I'm getting more from is the emoing from the protagonists, which sounds terrible but my tastes may be terrible.

My gf's niece stayed over this weekend and watched this for hours on end. Which is the first I'd seen of it. So this thread suddenly popping up is a bit eerie. Did this, like, just pop up on Netflix or something?

I gather the first two seasons have been available for a while (I did see it on my feed), and the third just got added which is probably why it's on the radar again.

As for me, I'd just run out of things on Netflix to watch and was surprised to see that it was a 97% match for me.

PS I'm your girlfriend's niece.

Cool, hope the pizza and brownies were up to snuff.

I was watching this at broadcast pace and the latest season was a real slog in places. Gets really bogged down in the 4 (5, maybe) giant slow moving plot arcs.

i started watching this on netflix last night, it's so good! feels very slept on.

Boy, season 2 is heading in a place I didn't expect it to go.

Cute VM reference in the dialogue in season 2.

This show was written to be binged-watched, grrr.

Oy, the end of the Rick Fox episode!

Based on the pilot, this is my new favourite show. Fiancée will be jealous.

I can understand aldo's complaints about the pace being a slog, and I'm only nearing the end of season 2. I think I'd prefer if the show had fewer mysteries of the week and have more episodes center directly on the grand arc.

Loving this so far, and three eps into S2 they've used two songs from 1985. When "All You Zombies" started I thought, ok, that's a little on-the-nose, but weirdly, it worked. Ditto "Voices Carry."

There's an incredibly beautiful episode early in season 3.

BTW never would've guessed that Rose McIver is a Kiwi.

Hmm, not sure about how season 3 ends.

I'm about 15 eps into s2 now and this is great. The music references are ubiquitous. One thing that's interesting to me is that they've put a new twist on the old trope of the elitist classical music-loving arch-villain. Blaine does appreciate his Brahms and Debussy (on LP, no less) but he is no less passionate about Kurt Cobain, Elvis Costello, Les Misérables, or Procol Harum: he has the eclectic voraciousness of an ilxor. Perhaps this is the new conception of what an intimidating snob is like in the postmodern era?

wait til you get to the (now out of date) emp reference

It would be so much butter if they just got rid of Blaine and made it a straight procedural. Someone's killed, eat brains, change character, catch bad guy. The arcs are terrible.

Blaine is my favourite part (although I'm not sure what I think of this new direction he's going in from s2e16)! I don't really think the 'weekly' mysteries are strong enough to sustain the show on their own, especially compared to the well-crafted mystery stories in VM: they are usually just resolved via some kind of deus ex machina mechanism (usually in Liv's visions), which would get old for me without the longer arcs.

fun show, I too wrote it off initially because of the shitty-looking Netflix thumbnail.

am about halfway through season 2 now - Rose McIver is really great at pulling off all the different personality changes. not into the whole Liv-Major thing though, feels like Veronica and Duncan all over again (the dude who plays Major is miles better than the one who plays Duncan, but still...).

does VegGrrrl watch this show? I feel like she should.

Season 4!!!

Starts with a bang, looking forward to the rest

Go Hawks!

Tbh, I loved the first two seasons but the storylines had grown so convoluted (at least for me) in s3 that I struggled to even keep it all straight by the time s4e1 came around. I did rewatch a lot of s1 recently and remembered how much I liked it, though.

S4 started fairly weakly imo but picked up well a few episodes in. Not sure there will be a season 5.

Yeah, it wasn’t great, it really picked up again. I still love it.

I started watching this and realized I have no clue how season 3 ended and current zombie status of everyone.

Basically

I do love the cast though.

yeah we had to struggle to remember who was zombie and who wasn't, the whole switching people's status back and forth with the vaccine thing in S2/S3 didn't help

this season wound up GREAT. It got renewed for its last season too. Excited to see things get wound up - feel like that'll help with loose ends.

There's an incredibly beautiful episode early in season 3.

Does anyone have any idea which episode I was talking about here?

Also, yay! Didn't expect season 4 to reach Netflix so quickly.

I'm still not totally clear on what's going on with all the storylines and who's a zombie but Liv being a hockey goon with an April Wine soundtrack = I'm still on board for now.

I just re-read the episodes summaries from season three to clear up what the zombie status of everyone. I must have missed Ravi only being a zombie a couple of days out of the month.

IIRC he decided to test his zombie vax on himself right at the end of season 3.

The first two episodes have been dud. :\

It is quite similar to X Files, in that the more it focuses on a central narrative arc the less interesting it is, but it gets dopey and fun again quite quickly.

**SPOILERS**

Reading the episode summaries exhausts me tbh (and, actually, I'd seen the first four eps of s4 when Netflix Canada had them up a while ago so it all blended together). Is Wikipedia or the iZombie wiki better? I try both. If I'm following: Ravi wanted to test his most recent zombie vaccine and asked Liv to scratch him, which results in him becoming zombie-like for brief periods. Liv had scratched Major in s1 or s2, then he was treated with an earlier version of the zombie cure, which caused the side effect of temporary amnesia and also only worked temporarily. This was also applied to Blaine. Was there a version of the cure in between those two? Now we have New Seattle, which is a walled all-zombie enclave run as a military dictatorship by the Fillmore-Graves corporation, and regular Seattle, which is still human-dominated, and run as a quasi-democracy. Fillmore-Graves is also responsible for feeding these zombies, with rations that are increasingly strained - and I don't exactly recall where these are coming from. But there are anti-zombie terrorists, who Fillmore-Graves fight with. Coyotes like Renegade help humans reconnect with their zombie loved ones within the walled city, sometimes by scratching them. Fillmore Graves really doesn't want new zombies, though, because it's hard enough to feed the existing population. Dale Bozzio is a zombie, for a reason that I don't remember, and so she and Clive have an open relationship where they satisfy their sexual needs outside their partnership. Blaine's role is that F-G looks the other way while he runs his covert high-end brains distribution operation and nightclub in exchange for his services with killing anyone F-G wants taken out? I think Max Rager is basically over now? And now Liz is, for some reason, taking over Renegade's old role as a coyote after she was guillotined.

+ there's Angus's bizarre cult

I think the brains Filmore-Graves rations come from bequeathed corpses? Like organ donations. I'm not sure if that could account for the numbers.

Bozzio being a zombie seems totally random.

Honestly, all this stuff seems distant from the qualities that drew me to the show in the first place.

lol I just got why the fancy restaurant is called "Romero's"

The rom com brain episodes really drew me back in.

this season started off wobbly but finished extremely strong

hockey player brain was indeed excellent

The rom com brain episodes really drew me back in.

Watched part 1 and yes, it was a lot of fun!

I must have fallen asleep, but why is Liv no longer dressing like a zombie?

yeah we just finished that one, handled very well

also holy fuck at the riled up zombie mob

Finished this season last night. So good.

Wow, I was surprised by how strongly this season finished.

final season starts tonight!

!!!!

I didn't think there'd be another - that's great news.

For Yanks who watch on NF:

Season 5 begins airing on The CW on May 2nd, 2019 and will be due to wrap up on at the end of July 2019. Netflix then gets new The CW shows around a week after the finale airs. The show will then likely be available on Netflix in either late July or early August 2019.

Source (also includes CA and UK schedules): https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/izombie-season-5-netflix-release-schedule-2019/

Dear Britain,

I can confirm that @NetflixUK has made the first episode of season 5 of #iZOMBiE available to watch NOW. Directed by the wonderful @danetheridge and written by the equally wonderful @RobThomas, the brain this week is a little gift to you... 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/8nPvKzqEmD

— Rahul Kohli (@RahulKohli13) May 3, 2019

Oh yeah, it's available in Canada too. I guess we're on the Brit schedule.

I honestly don't remember everything that happened in the last season. I did start rewatching some of s1.

There was zombie trafficking and she became princess of Aldovia.

Thx

Awesome, psyched

A totally-not-unbearable performance from Rahul Kohli to ease us into the new season.

Hm, I think I agree with a lot of this: https://tv.avclub.com/izombie-returns-for-its-final-season-not-with-a-figura-1834491839 . I liked this as a funny show about a hot zombie detective solving cases of the week; I don't know that it was ever built to support the large-scale story arcs and themes that seem to be consuming it now. (Admittedly, I'm also just bad at keeping up with those things, which is an obstacle for me with most sci-fi and fantasy; I struggle to even remember who e.g. Thumb Breaker Barnes was or why Blaine has an assistant who cries uncontrollably, let alone all of the details of the current political organization of Zombie Seattle). The whole zombification/smuggling crusade seems like a terrible idea to begin with so I have trouble sympathizing with any of it.

why Blaine has an assistant who cries uncontrollably

It's a glandular problem.

Anyway, I was not as impressed with the last season for the reasons you mention. Rob Thomas is good at writing personal melodrama, not so much at writing about Issues (see the feminist stuff in VM).

yeah, I am not even going to try to remember what the overly complicated storylines were supposed to be anymore.

First ep was a clunker, all told, but like everybody else I don't care about the story arc and just wanted it to be police-procedural-on-brains-of-the-week.

X-Files had a similar dynamic, mytharc episodes became tiresome and hard to follow but monster-of-the-week episodes could still knock it out of the park

I'm guessing those storylines are fun to write or something, because they're usually a chore to watch

That was the first time I bailed on an episode.

S5e3 was a bit of an improvement, with a renewed focus on the murder and brains of the week and great scenes of McIver dancing. (Liv had to eat the brains of a competitive dancer.) I still can't get much into all the Fillmore Graves/Renegade/walled Seattle/humans vs zombie malarkey but that stuff doesn't take over the whole episode like it seemed to with the first two episodes. (Funny to reread the thread and see myself defending the longer story arcs in the first two seasons: I did like the Blaine storyline at that point and the Max Rager stuff.)

S5E4 another crapfest though. The series is going to whimper out.

This episode was good!

E5 was! At least it's clear now that the writers did think that this whole Blaine-run system was madness, although we had to sit through a lot before getting here. Maybe the next twist will be a revelation that being a zombie is not necessarily a good thing after all.

Wtf with John Tracy's French accent btw?

Yeah, I meant ep 5.

Revelation about Al in e6 was p disappointing.

So I guess that's that then. A good series on the whole, even if the last season was spotty.

Is the last episode not out in the US yet?

We're on the UK schedule in Canada. I still haven't finished e12; wasn't getting that excited about this whole break-in story.

It aired last week in the US. Definitely a spotty season, and way too confusing. But I was impressed that they managed to find a not-clumsy way to tie up the loose ends in the final episode.

sund4r, I dunno where you're watching the show, but Netflix uses (or used, I guess) the regular American schedule.

*by where, I mean like which channel, I know you're in Canada obv

Netflix is different in the US and Canada.

I used to cross the border regularly and my Netflix offerings would change each time.

https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/news/izombie-season-5-netflix-release-schedule-us-international/

Finale was solid.

Rewatching this: it’s jarring to watch Major watching ‘how do guns work’ YouTube videos in light of who he became.

I'm 3 eps into the latest season, I know folks have already mentioned Kareem's cameo in the Veronica Mars thread, but I still did a double-take when his name showed up in the credits and again in his scene.

It's a shame that the dance episode focuses more on Ravi, because IIRC Rose McIver actually has a dance background and what we see her do is fairly creditable! Unfortunately, the actors playing the two male dancers probably aren't real dancers. (We do at least get some ringers in during that one demo.)

That is the worst hair piece I've ever seen.

The drag episode is such a letdown! The queens didn't have proper makeup, Liv was channeling Katherine Hepburn more than Joan Crawford, etc. But then I guess that whoever wrote the episode does watch Unnhh or however it's spelled.

OK I watched the penultimate episode and it was remarkably good! Love some heist action even if it's a little underdeveloped. (Speaking of underdeveloped the BOB story line kind of fizzles anticlimactically, doesn't it?)

Oh

when you finally realise her name is Liv Moore pic.twitter.com/IiUqvNtfRe

— Rahul Kohli (@RahulKohli13) April 6, 2020

wait til you get to the (now out of date) emp reference

Haha, I only just noticed this reference was in the Patriot Brains episode. I had thought Maura was joking about this.

I watched this whole show and remember nothing about it.

Blaine gets an exclusive pass to hear an unreleased Kurt Cobain demo at EMP.