After a short break, the second season of iZombie is back and hits the ground running. ‘Method Head’ as of now, is probably the funniest, most interesting, and overall best episode of iZombie thus far.
Review of iZombie Season 2 Episode 10 ‘Method Head’
There is a ton to cover in this most recent episode of iZombie, this episode probably got the most done. It even ended on a cliff-hanger arguably worse than the mid-season climax.
Firstly Major and Blaine both learned the temporary nature of their cured-ness, however, this is played pretty lightly. Not much time is dedicated to either’s reaction to this.
On the bright side, the show’s decision to progress through time was utterly brilliant, it allowed the show to make it’s Christmas jokes (like Ravi and Liv digging in field at midnight with joyful Christmas music… great moment), this point in the narrative (where “Cape Town” left off) doesn’t have much going on anyway.
The episode’s murder in Zombie High was pretty fantastic. The jokes about cliches really wrote themselves, the mystery was interesting enough, and that meta joke about zombies as protagonists was just magnificent. The only issue that could really be brought up would be that fact that Zombie High was introduced the very same episode it became relevant, while this isn’t bad per se, it does seem like a wasted opportunity.
During the primary time skips, it was really interesting to see Liv from more of an outside perspective. For this first time in the entirety of the show’s run, Liv had a vision we didn’t see. While the vision itself was not relevant to the actual case, it still resulted in feeling farther separated from Liv this point, which the show did nothing with.
Liv’s brain this week was pretty good, it enabled a pretty great moment (detailed below) and wasn’t too obtrusive. However, there were a couple of missed chances, such as the fact that Liv was a fan of this brain, there are so many things that could have happened here, the fact that it didn’t is a little disappointed. Additionally, it took a good while for Liv to actually eat the brain while this is not indicative of poor writing (on the contrary the pacing was great), it does reveal the shift in priorities in the second half of this season. With the episodic murders taking a back seat.
It is at this moment that I would like to highlight some of the just perfect quips ‘Method Head’ delivers. iZombie has always been a witty show brimming with one-liners, however ‘Method Head’ takes the cake, both in quality and quantity. Here I would like to spotlight a couple of them: “Beard color… white as snow”, “She’s seen every episode… on purpose”, “A major Major problem? Or a minor Major problem?”, “Marlon Brandouche”, “I did! It’s like mental pork rinds, I can’t stop!”, and finally, “And by canvas I mean… have sex with.” The reason this last line really stands it is due to the masterful subversion of expectations. As mentioned above iZombie has always been witty, thus, it is typical to begin expecting such wit, this line specifically messes with that, and instead delivers on the delightfully dull, “I mean have sex with.”
There were larger moments too, such as Liv’s rant about true acting (Rose and Rahul), Liv’s quip about Power Rangers, and as always the brain preparing montages are mouth-watering.
Regarding other plotlines, Blaine continues to freak about his clientage being picked off. It’s kind of surprising Blaine doesn’t suspect Major for killing his zombie clients, not many people know about zombies, and Major does have a history of going all zombie-hunter before.
The bit with an employee speaking out against Max Rager was really, really interesting while I can fully understand both Major and the writers for stopping that idea in its tracks, that would have been a really cool direction.
Finally, we learn Dale, our favorite female FBI agent (and… canvas), is about to find Major, through Minor and is going to hunt down Blaine. Leaving us with one of the biggest iZombie cliff-hangers since the first finale.
Overall ‘Method Head’ was pretty much one of the greatest episodes to fall into our laps as humble viewers. While the safe route was chosen quite often, and gives us visions of fascinating plotlines that will never be explored, that doesn’t affect the quality of what we did get. Which was just a great episode.
