iZombie: Love & Basketball Recap

Synopsis: Liv eats basketball coach brains and ends up working through a lot of her problems with Major. In the meantime, Ravi discovers an anti-zombie serum and Suzuki’s wife brings a sample of frozen brain to Babineau.

Rating: ★★★★★

The episode picks up right where it left off last week: with Major and Liv having a majorly hot makeout session. Everyone wins and no one gets hurt!

Well, not quite. Liv cuts the liplocking short. She’s worried that she may still turn Major into a zombie from fluid transfer or scratch. Over the collective groan of the audience, Major suggests that there’s nothing they can’t solve with a few condoms. He wants Liv back in his life, and he’s more than willing to Pretty Woman their situation until they can find a more permanent fix. It’s a major 180 for Major but hey, I can get behind his sudden willingness to jump into a romance with Liv again.

Liv disagrees and places a kissing moratorium on Major. The two try to get through the rest of their interactions platonically for the rest of the episode, but Major admits to Liv that he wants them to be together as a couple at the end of the episode.

Anyway, in other news, the Jesus-peddling utopium dealer (now a zombie) from a few episodes back finally agreed to cut the tainted utopium so Ravi can develop another vial of the cure serum. Unfortunately for the dealer, he gets a little too excited at the prospect of a cure and injects himself with the zombie-making serum. He dies. Pretty brutally.

Two beats later, Blaine realizes that a zombie-killing serum is superhelpful and he and Ravi arm wrestle across the morgue for the vial of serum. Ravi wins the scuffle by shattering the bottle of zom-killer and sending Blaine on his merry way.

Over at Max Rager, secretary/daughter/resident redhead continues to harass Major to kill the potential zombies. She also solicits him for sexytimes, but those advances are easier to ignore. Mostly because if Major rejects her physically, he doesn’t have to face the mass-murder of innocent people like he does if he doesn’t do his hitman job correctly.

Major visits another list zombie and sees that he has a son and a wife. He refuses to kill another innocent, so he returns to the Rager offices empty-handed – he lies to redhead and tells her that none of the 8 people he checked on the list were zombies. Redhead isn’t convinced; each name has a statistical probability of being a zombie, and it’s highly improbable that all 8 people weren’t infected.

In other news, redhead needs blood from a functional zombie for a formula for the company’s new energy drink, which she grabs from Liv after she not-so-accidentally stabs her hand while cutting vegetables. There’s tension between the roomies this week after redhead learns that Liv is hooking up with her Major squeeze. Liv, however, is obLivious.

As for the murder-of-the-week, Liv eats a security guard/youth league basketball coach’s brains and convinces Major to start volunteering as a coach for the kids as part of his sobriety treatment. After confronting a basketball player’s dad who abuses his son, the team discover that a bookie was murdered near the building. An executive in the security guard’s building killed the bookie and then the in-house fixer cleaned up the mess, shooting the security guard to tie up loose ends.

The episode concludes with some flirtatious banter between the FBI agent and Clive – she reveals that the missing murdered astronaut’s DNA was found at Meat Cute, which complicates the station’s narrative. Clive also contacts Suzuki’s wife to get more details about his mental state before the Meat Cute shooting, and she brings the detective a sample of Tupperwared brain she found in her freezer.