‘iZombie’ recap: Cosplay and catastrophe in ‘Cape Town’

Believe me when I say that I take no pleasure in this statement about what just happened between our “iZombie” heroine and her hunky boyfriend: I told you so.

Liv Moore (Rose McIver) breaks up with Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley) because, as she rationally, heartbreakingly, predictably explains: “We both know, deep down, that this can’t work. Being a zombie has changed me. You love the woman I was before. You tolerate the woman I am now. The truth is, we belong with our own kind.”

And so it ends, at least for now, and that’s only the second saddest thing to happen in this episode. Even worse than the seismic split between the one-time soul mates? Liv goes so far rogue while on vigilante brains that Clive cuts her off from police work.

Two – count ‘em, two – relationships end in the space of one hour. As if the well-meaning leading lady of this dram-rom-zom-com hasn’t suffered enough already? Harsh!

And Liv doesn’t even know the latest downer development from the morgue, where lab rat New Hope has reverted to her former zombie status. As Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli) narrates into his iPhone, the same will likely happen to Major and Blaine (David Anders).

That cure was strictly experimental, and it appears that it only lasts about five months. What do Major and Blaine – but mostly Major – have to live for if they’re destined to rejoin the walking dead?

Again, harsh!

Also: no Peyton in this fall finale episode. Triple harsh!

This series is all about consequences and blowback, and it’s finally tackling the elephant in the room, namely that eating various brains and soaking up murder victims’ personality traits takes a tremendous toll on Liv and those closest to her. She and Major have been suffering the effects of stalker brain from last week, which makes her troll his social media and snoop on his cellphone. The results are devastating.

Even when she snacks on different gray matter – belonging to a bludgeoned would-be superhero – she can’t get those sexts from Major’s former lover out of her head.

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Major suggests “milder brains” like synthetics to cut out the roller-coaster mood swings. But she knows that’s not a solution. Major, meantime, has yet to come clean with her about his blackmail at the hands of the Max Rager honchos. He’s afraid to tell her that he’s systematically plucking the undead off the streets of Seattle and dumping them into a deep freeze.

He tells his erstwhile bosses that he’s shooting the zombies and tossing them in the river when in fact he’s stockpiling them until there’s a bona fide cure, if that day ever comes.

He thinks she would find his actions “reprehensible,” he tells Natalie, one of his zombie targets, whom he ends up having a heart-to-heart with before he tosses her into the freezer like a side of beef.

She agrees to it, by the way, since she’s miserable in her role as an undead hooker. “I have sex for food,” Natalie tells Major, giving us all a pretty good peek into why she comes close to offing herself before he intervenes.

Major also tells Natalie that he’s trying to keep Liv safe by being “a good soldier” for Max Rager. If he doesn’t do their bidding, they’ll kill Liv. But the company’s uber-villain chief executive has more ammunition: he could expose Major’s homicidal rampage at Meat Cute. So, boxed in and hands tied don’t even begin to describe this situation. Poor Major. Poor dumped and abused Major.

There’s one glimmer of goodness in “Cape Town,” and it comes from Blaine, of all people. He introduces Liv to a shady character named Drake, who’s the only living person with insider info about that tainted Utopium. Without the drug, Ravi can’t possibly concoct a cure for zombieism. So Liv needs to do everything she can to see that Drake stays alive long enough to help.

The problem is he’s nearly dead from a gunshot wound when Blaine wheels him into the morgue. Solution? Liv has to turn him into a zombie, via a lethal scratch. She does it, but she’s clearly traumatized as a result. Not to put too fine a point on it, but come on, people, can Liv catch a break here? Ever?

Drake embeds himself with Mr. Boss, so maybe there’s potential for him to find that cache of buried Utopium? Put a pin in that because it’s going to be important later.

I’ll spend a limited amount of time on the murder of the week, only because it serves a few purposes. First, it lets us know that Seattle has a thriving amateur superhero scene, with Superfly and the elderly Gray Area among the cosplay crime fighters. (Ravi geeking out at this newfound knowledge is priceless.) And second, it shows that so many roads now lead to Mr. Boss, the local kingpin who claims he’s just a CPA and devotes time to playing Santa at the holidays.

The victim is Chris Allred, a high school shop teacher by day, not-so-mysterious vigilante called The Fog by night. The cops all know him, according to Det. Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), and disapprove of his outside-the-law activity on the streets.

When he turns up dead in the back of a garbage truck, Liv makes a hero sammie out of his pseudo-superhero cerebellum. She starts spouting truth and justice one-liners and quickly gets in over her head investigating some heavy artillery in Mr. Boss’ warehouse.

Because she oversteps so far, almost getting shot in the process, Clive tells her that their partnership is over. She’s not a cop and he can’t continue treating her like one. She’s become a liability, and he gives her the boot.

If there’s one thing Liv has always had, even in the darkest days since that ill-fated boat party, it’s her work. Now she’s lost that, too.

Where will this leave her, emotionally and logistically, when the show returns for at least 10 more episodes next year? Sadly, we’ll all have to wait until Jan. 12 to find out.