CWArrow got real weird tonight, guys—oh, wait, it was iZombie taking on a bit of vigilante justice.
It honestly felt like we were watching yet another CW superhero crossover for a second there in iZombie's midseason finale, as Liv's weekly brain-induced drug trip took her to the rooftops of Seattle to emulate the alter ego of the latest dead guy who went by the name of "The Fog."
As soon as we managed to stop laughing after we heard his catchphrase—"I'm the Fog, and I'm thick with justice"—we found ourselves enjoying an action-packed episode that both thrilled us and broke our hearts, just as all the best superhero tales are supposed to these days.
We discovered that while Liv actually does have the skills to make superhero-ing a regular gig, she also has that problem that superheroes often have: they can't hold down a relationship.
Unfortunately, Liv and Major have downgraded to off-again status once again, and we had the heartbreaking realization that their break-up made sense. No matter how hard he tried, Major just couldn't get behind Liv's zombie-ism.
"We belong with our own kind," she told him, and he took off, leaving Liv alone with the spiced apple cider he'd been warming on the stove. (Can Robert Buckley come over to our house to make holiday staples for us please??)
The break-up, however, was not the episode's biggest bummer. Not only did Clive ban Liv from police work, but Ravi discovered that New Hope, his cured zombie rat, was back to being a zombie rat, meaning the cure is definitely not permanent, which is bad news for quite a few people.
We hopped on the phone with executive producer Rob Thomas to find out what's to come when the show returns in 2016 (which he shared…to an extent) and provide us a few words of comfort (which he did not).
That tainted Utopium is more important than ever: The fact that the previous version of the cure is now known to wear off "puts a ticking clock on the quest to find the tainted Utopium," Thomas tells us. "Now you can pretty much bet that if New Hope is now a zombie, that Blaine and Major's days are counting down as well. So now they have a basic idea where the tainted Utopium might be, and it's a rush to find it."
There can't be a perfect cure, at least not on this show: "Season three, just a straight medical examiner show," Thomas joked, and honestly that is a show we'd still watch. "There are spaces in between the cure not working and it working perfectly. There is room in between those two things, so yeah, three episodes from now, we will not have completely cured zombie-ism, but there will be developments on the cure front.
Liv and Major's break-up is Dawson's Creek's fault: OK, not really, but kind of! "When I got my first job in television, it was on Dawson's Creek, and the first lesson I learned was get into a scene late and get out early, and the second one was happy couples make for bad television," Thomas explains. "I know some shows have pulled it off, but particularly on a show about young people in their 20s, there's just not so much drama in playing a long happy relationship. Certainly, I like these two together, but they're facing some real uphill battles, and we kind of wanted to show the audience in these episodes that they were together what kinds of challenges they were facing."
So basically: No happiness for Liv and Major anytime soon!
Major will not become a zombie and get back together with Liv (at least not yet): We had beautiful dreams of this happening, but Thomas told us that whether the Liv/Major relationship would work if they were both zombies is not even a thing that the writers are thinking about.
Major will also not spiral out of control and get into drugs again: Despite the fact that he and Liv are broken up once more, he's in a different place now. "You won't see him go into a drug hole again. The first part of the season is kind of floundering and trying to get his bearings and trying to get his head above water, and kind of becoming a man of action, you know, becoming the person who decides, OK, I'm figuring out how to get out of this situation. It's much more about taking Major from defense to offense."
Clive is not an idiot: He's not going to find out the truth about Liv anytime soon, but he's not totally oblivious to the fact that she's a great big weirdo.
"It's the genie you cannot put back in the bottle. Once Clive knows, he knows, and we can never play those fun beats of Clive not knowing again. So it's very much a topic of discussion in the writers' room, and we are going to learn that Clive has some insights that he isn't necessarily sharing with Liv. We'll hear about some of that soon. But if you think about it, just imagine you're a Seattle cop, and yeah, you're working with this pale blonde psychic, it would take a lot for you to go, and she's a zombie."
Rob knows you love Veronica Mars, and there will be more references to come: Thomas got excited when we asked about it, but unfortunately stayed mum on exactly what we can look forward to. "There's a thing I don't think I can tease, but there will be more nods to Veronica Mars coming up, and I think they're cool ones."
As for the references we've already seen, some are deliberate, like Liv saying, "A long time ago, we used to be friends." Other times, call backs are totally unintentional. "A couple of weeks ago, we had a 'Help me, Zombie Wan Kenobi' line that none of us remembered being in Veronica Mars, but there is a 'Help me, Mars Wan Kenobi' that somehow made it through. So I saw all these tweets like, 'Hey, what a great shout out!' Honestly it was just us screwing up and forgetting we already used that joke."
iZombie returns to the CW in 2016.