overnights

iZombie Recap: Caffeine High

iZombie

Eternal Sunshine of the Caffeinated Mind
Season 2 Episode 14
Editor’s Rating 4 stars
Eternal Sunshine of the Caffeinated Mind

iZombie

Eternal Sunshine of the Caffeinated Mind
Season 2 Episode 14
Editor’s Rating 4 stars
Rose McIver as Liv. Photo: Bettina Strauss/CW

The first part of tonight’s iZombie is easygoing. It cheerily bounces along as Liv, fresh off the brain of an overly optimistic barista, investigates the case of the week. But in the last ten minutes things take a turn, and the writers start throwing out twists all over the place. By the time “Eternal Sunshine of the Caffeinated Mind” is over, we’re very far from that rosy beginning.

This episode contains three major plot developments, so I’ll break each down separately. Let’s start with the Drake of it all.

Schemin’ on the Low

To celebrate his first kill for Mr. Boss, Drake decides to cancel plans with Liv and go out on the town with his boys. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised that Drake is the type of guy to have “boys.” As they’re leaving the club later that night, however, Detective Lou Benedetto (Veronica Mars’s Enrico Colantoni) shows up and arrests Drake.

Inside a police-interrogation room, it’s revealed that he’s a deep undercover agent. If you’re keeping track, that means Drake is a triple agent — he’s playing both Mr. Boss and Blaine. I’ve got to applaud iZombie for this one, because I didn’t see such a big reveal coming. Remember when Drake was supposed kill Terrell Johnson? Well, that didn’t happen. Terrell is now enjoying life in witness protection. (And I’m just going to assume that he’s protected by a no-nonsense U.S. Marshal played by Mary McCormack.)

Before his fellow detectives let Drake leave, they show him surveillance footage of him visiting the morgue. They order him to stop dating Liv because it’s placing their operation in too much jeopardy. Drake refuses to do so; Liv, he claims, is the only good thing in his life.

What isn’t clear, though, is how much the detectives know about Drake’s activities. Do they know he is also working for Blaine? Also, since Drake is an agent, does he already know that Blaine is the new dealer they’re trying to find? He must, right? Even if he did know, I guess he wouldn’t be able to tell them because that would risk revealing that he’s a zombie.

Coffee, Please!

This case of the week is pretty lackluster, ending with both satisfying and unsatisfying notes. The victim, a very cheery owner of a Seattle coffee shop called Positivity, suffers a Looney Tunes–esque death: She’s crushed by an AC unit.

Eventually, Clive and Liv realize that the coffee-shop owner’s daughter, Cher (Hannibal’s Kacey Rohl), was behind the murder. She convinced her gullible boyfriend to kill her mother for her so they could use her inheritance to move to France and study art. At first, Clive and Liv convince Gilbert to confess for the crime and implicate Cher, but she then manipulates him into taking the blame for everything.

With no confession and no direct evidence tying her to the murder, Clive is forced to let her go. In the end, Cher sells her mother’s business and hops in a cab heading to the airport. Honestly, I liked the fact that Clive and Liv couldn’t tie this case up neatly. It shakes up the formula, and it’ll be interesting to see how this loss affects them.

Throughout the episode, Liv rides the caffeine high from the victim’s brain. And, as with every high, there’s a crash. While she cooks dinner in anticipation of Drake coming over that night, the effects of the brain wear off, and she realizes how naïvely she’s been acting. Before Drake arrives, Major shows up, clearly intent on coming clean to Liv about what he’s been doing. Before he spills the beans, he’s interrupted by Gilda’s arrival. It’s awkward, but they play it off like they haven’t met. But as Major leaves, he yells, “Bye, Rita,” and Liv figures it out — “Rita” is the girl who Major slept with. A furious Liv punches Rita in the face, then kicks her out of the house.

Dead … Again

One of Mr. Boss’s henchmen tells him a story about a time when Blaine convinced local cops to crack down a rival gang by murdering a beat cop, all so he could secure a corner. From this story, Mr. Boss figures out that Blaine is the new Utopium dealer and is using the D.A.’s office to take out Mr. Boss’s operation.

Later, Mr. Boss’s henchman shows up at the funeral home and kidnaps Blaine, who is playing the organ after having sex with Candy Baker in a two-person coffin. (I guess that’s … relaxing?) Blaine wakes up in a car with Mr. Boss and his men, and they drag him out to the forest. Then they slit his throat and bury him.

The next day, Don E. returns to the funeral home and finds the formerly human Candy munching on brains. Meanwhile, in the forest, a now-zombified Blaine claws his way out of his grave, steals a blanket from a group of Girl Scouts, and marches back into town to get revenge. The Candy reveal means that Blaine was closer to turning back into a zombie than we realized, which means Major is in the same dire situation. On the upside, if things don’t work out with Drake, Liv will be able to sleep with Major again. But once she finds out what he’s been doing, will she actually want to?

Postmortem:

  • Also, Ravi tries using the tainted Utopium to remake his initial formula for the cure. He hopes it will slow Major’s transformation back into a zombie — but thank God he decided to test it on a rat first. The cure turns the zombie rat into an even more vicious zombie rat, which means very bad things for Major.
  • Did anyone else feel like Enrico Colantoni was kind of wasted?
  • Ravi starts hitting on the barista he sees every morning, but stops after she admits she’s never seen Star Wars. Clearly, that’s a dealbreaker.
  • “Your lips are moving, but it’s the system talking,” says Pam, Liv’s former prison cellmate who coincidentally worked at the coffee shop, when Clive arrests her.
  • “Candy, where’s your trivia genie costume?” Blaine asks, which leads to them doing it.  
  • Of course Blaine is singing “A Whiter Shade of Pale” right before he’s dumped into that hole in the ground.
  • After this episode, iZombie will go on another mini-hiatus. See you on March 22!

iZombie Recap: Caffeine High