Everybody's favourite zom-com-rom-dram is back!
iZombie - Season 3
- Thread starter Sparkle Fabulosa
- Start date
New longer trailer. 
I wonder if they can come up with another totally outrageous villain like Stephen Weber's character in season 2? From the promos it looks like they don't intend on giving up their sense of humor, which is good. If this show stops being funny it'll lose most of it's appeal to me.
Good episode. Season premieres are often mostly about housekeeping--wrapping up loose ends from last season, setting up new plotlines and characters, establishing the new normal--and this was no exception, but the "D-Day" plotline is promising. I was slightly disappointed that Liv didn't get a new brain/personality, but I guess they had a lot going on this ep already. Time enough for that next week, I suppose.
Rob Thomas (the one who didn't get eaten by zombies) says there won't be a big bad this season:
http://www.tvguide.com/news/izombie-season3-preview/
It looks like they're going for moral ambiguity. The threat doesn't come from a single person, it comes from humanity's fear and intolerance and the likelihood of a race war between humans and zombies if the latter's existence is discovered.
It is hard to hear the punny name "Fillmore Graves" without expecting it to be an evil organization, but apparently that isn't the intention. Vivian and her group came off as very sympathetic and nuanced. Which, to me, is far more interesting than a cackling supervillain.
I liked it that they avoided the "brain-of-the-week" syndrome here. It's a sign that the show has matured beyond episodic storytelling and is becoming more about its larger story arc of the potentially global ramifications of the existence of intelligent zombies. That's what science fiction should do -- not just use its concepts for weekly crimesolving or personal stories, but explore their larger ramifications and the changes they could bring to the world. Of course, Liv's and Major's need to eat brains and the resultant personality changes will still be a part of the show, but it doesn't have to be the same one-brain-per-week formula all the time.
Oh, by the way, did anyone else catch the West Wing in-joke here? Vivian's soldiers were zombified to save their lives after they were exposed to a bioweapon in Equatorial Kundu.
Not sure I ever really considered iZombie a serious science fiction show, but the "D-Day" storyline could be interesting.
I confess: I was expecting a final stinger in which we found out that the head of "Filmore Graves" was behind the murders--and was surprised when they didn't go there.
And dare I admit that I only just now got the "Filmore Graves" joke.
Well, even comedy science fiction can do interesting worldbuilding if it's done well. And genre labels aside, if you're doing a show built around a premise that could potentially change the world, it's kind of a waste if you never do anything with it besides crimesolving and goofy personality changes.
I guess I think of the show as more of a black comedy/superhero/horror show, with a police procedural format. A certain degree of world-building is needed to set up the premise, but otherwise it's basically a supernatural twist on a quirky detective show . . . . MONK or VERONICA MARS with bonus brain-eating.
It's interesting. Superheros and science fiction tend to clash this way. Traditionally, comics avoid the fact that their premises (aliens, shrinking rays, Norse gods hanging out in NYC) would cause profound social changes in real life, in order to have Superman and the Fantastic Four hanging out in a world that more or less resembles our own. (WATCHMEN'S big idea, back in the day, was to reject this approach and try to imagine how the existence of superheroes would affect the world in real life.)
So I'm not sure "world-building" is really the point of a quirky comic-book adaptation.
It's interesting. Superheros and science fiction tend to clash this way. Traditionally, comics avoid the fact that their premises (aliens, shrinking rays, Norse gods hanging out in NYC) would cause profound social changes in real life, in order to have Superman and the Fantastic Four hanging out in a world that more or less resembles our own. (WATCHMEN'S big idea, back in the day, was to reject this approach and try to imagine how the existence of superheroes would affect the world in real life.)
So I'm not sure "world-building" is really the point of a quirky comic-book adaptation.
And that's their shortcoming. It's more interesting to explore how the world is changed by a phenomenon than just to keep it all secret and limited and maintain the pretense that it's happening in the real world. That was the strength of a show like The 4400, in that the superpowers were overt and actually had an impact on the world. It was a refreshing change from the hackneyed formula where everything stays secret. And we do see this in mass-media superhero universes, too. Both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Arrowverse have given us worlds that have grown and evolved in response to the existence of superheroes and supervillains, that have changed in at least some ways to be different from our own world. The MCU has brought Inhumans into the open, Supergirl has alien amnesty, and stories about the impact of these new phenomena are actually being told rather than artificially avoided for the sake of an enforced status quo.
Indeed, usually in these shows where there's a subclass of people who have special abilities and are being hunted/persecuted for it -- like in Alphas or The CW's The Tomorrow People, for instance -- it's actually counterproductive for the protagonists to keep their superpowered/alien/magical/whatever nature secret, since that just gives their enemies license to act against them in the shadows. The best thing for them would be to hire a good lawyer and PR representative, go public, and assert their civil rights, garner public sympathy and expose the efforts of the government/evil organization to persecute and experiment on them. In cases like that, keeping the secret is so counterproductive for the characters that it's obviously just a contrived excuse to maintain the pretense that the show is set in our world -- which is stupid, because it obviously isn't, being a TV show and all.
Conversely, if the alien/supernatural ones are the villains, it can be deeply counterproductive for the human good guys to keep their existence secret. One example was the dreadful War of the Worlds: The Series from 1988. By keeping the return of the 1953 alien invaders a secret, the "good guys" were responsible for countless civilian casualties, because they never warned people that there were dangerous, murderous terrorists in their midst, never told them what to watch out for to protect themselves. And it was doubly stupid because it was a sequel to a movie about a completely overt, global alien invasion, yet it pretended the public had somehow forgotten about the war and the existence of aliens.
This show is actually an exception to that rule, though, because people like Vivian and Major do make a good case -- the "highly infectious, brain-eating zombies" would be met with fear and disgust and probably violence. It's good to see acknowledgment of the fact that the secret can't be kept forever, and that tension between the importance of keeping the secret and the inevitability of its exposure, and the question of what can be done to prevent a massacre when the truth does come out, is a very intelligent and interesting angle to explore, and one that's all too rarely made use of. The later seasons of Stargate SG-1 flirted with questions about the ethics of keeping the Stargate program and alien life a secret, but it didn't work very well there, because by that point, they no longer had any remotely sensible reason for keeping it secret from the general public. Earth was a major player in galactic affairs, there were tons of characters in government and industry and the like that already knew about the Stargate, so the secrecy didn't really serve any narrative purpose by then. Here, the secrecy does serve a purpose, but it's also very sensible to recognize that it can't last.
There's no reason a quirky show can't be smart too. There's a lot of potential in the show's premise, and it'd be a waste not to explore it. The long-term dangers of the existence of zombies -- both the risk of a zombie apocalypse and the risk of the well-meaning zombies who are just trying to survive being persecuted/slaughtered -- have been looming in the background of this show from the beginning. It was always clear to me that the producers were thinking about those questions. What makes the show effective is that there's this genuine undercurrent of horror beneath the surface snark and silliness, as there was with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although iZombie's world is a lot more focused and better thought-out than Buffy's was.
Fair enough. Although I balk a little at descriptions like "smart" or "shortcomings," which implies that a more science-fictional approach is inherently superior than other takes on the material. And I certainly wasn't suggesting that "quirky" equals "dumb". To my mind, witty dialogue, clever plot twists, engaging characters, and grisly black humor are just "smart" as any sort of sf world-building.
Not every genre show ought to be judged by science fictional standards. SUPERMAN fails as hard science fiction. Doesn't hurt it one bit. It's not a "shortcoming," because superheros are a different genre with different priorities. And one genre doesn't necessarily trump another.
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Like I said, I don't see it as being about genre labels, just about exploring the ramifications of your ideas rather than letting them go to waste. You can have good worldbuilding in any genre. For instance, in a spy show, good worldbuilding would mean that the actions the spies took on overseas missions would have long-term geopolitical ramifications and consequences that would create new problems and change the status quo of the series over time, rather than each mission being an isolated incident never mentioned again.
Besides, iZombie is a science fiction show and always has been. Yes, it's zombies, but it's the kind of zombies that are the result of a chemically induced disease rather than a supernatural curse or spell. So it's not like it's a choice between science fiction and something else, it's about how well it develops the potential inherent in its SF elements.
There's no competition or conflict between the two. On the contrary -- they enrich each other.
When did I say that science fiction had to be "hard?" Like I said, it's about developing the potential of your story's premise rather than letting it lie fallow. That's just as much an issue for a story about superheroes or fairyfolk or whatever. Like, if you're doing a show about witches or demons in the present-day world, do you just make up a random bestiary and set of magical phenomena and toss them around willy-nilly without any internal consistency, or do you present a cohesive set of rules about how magic works and what it can and can't do, along with a well-drawn world of magical entities that you build on and develop over time? Do you just do crises of the week with no lasting impact, or do you explore the evolving consequences of the main characters' actions and the tensions that arise between the mundane and magical worlds? Look at The Dresden Files. It's a pure fantasy world, but it's a consistent, evolving world that gets explored and developed more fully with each book, and where actions have consequences and the status quo changes over time.
I was also a little surprised that we didn't get the old murder/brain of the week formula, but they obviously had a lot of setting up to do for this season. Hope the fun comes back next week.
And yeah, also surprised that the lady at the end didn't grow a mustache and start twirling it. It's a long season though. Major will find some dirt soon enough.
One theme that they started thinking about is that this show can never have a cure. The idea that zombies are out there and Ravi will never cure them all successfully. So eventually there will have to be a d-day, because zombies are never going away in this universe.
If they took it past d-day, and it was common knowledge that zombies ate brains of already-deceased individuals at the morgue/etc, I would love to hear public complaints from certain beliefs about not desecrating the bodies of the dead. "Okay, I accept zombies' rights, but just don't eat brains from certain religions" and stuff like that.
And yeah, also surprised that the lady at the end didn't grow a mustache and start twirling it. It's a long season though. Major will find some dirt soon enough.
One theme that they started thinking about is that this show can never have a cure. The idea that zombies are out there and Ravi will never cure them all successfully. So eventually there will have to be a d-day, because zombies are never going away in this universe.
If they took it past d-day, and it was common knowledge that zombies ate brains of already-deceased individuals at the morgue/etc, I would love to hear public complaints from certain beliefs about not desecrating the bodies of the dead. "Okay, I accept zombies' rights, but just don't eat brains from certain religions" and stuff like that.
The "brain/case of the week" stuff comes back in the next episode. This one "broke the mold" because it needed to set up the larger, overarching conflict of the season and establish a new "status quo", especially after what happened in the Season 2 finale.
But there's no reason a show has to have an unvarying "mold." It's pretty common these days for shows that start out procedural to leave that behind more and more as they become more immersed in the broader ramifications of their concepts. As their stories mature, they get bigger and more intricate. For instance, Person of Interest started out being about using ubiquitous surveillance controlled by a sentient AI to prevent individuals from being murdered, but it ended up being a show about the dangers and abuses of the surveillance state and a battle between sentient AIs to determine the very future of humanity. Dollhouse started out being about a character who got a new identity downloaded into her brain each week and used them to solve problems-of-the-week, but it soon became a show driven by the societal consequences and ethical ramifications of brain-rewriting technology and the characters fighting to deal with its literally apocalyptic consequences. Lucifer started out as a show about the Devil helping an LAPD detective solve murders, but it's now become more about the intrigue surrounding Lucifer and his divine family, and the detective has turned out to play a role in that larger saga. And so on.
I agree with the principle of what you're saying, @Christopher, but it has previously been said - and, as I noted, demonstrated thanks to the preview for next week's episode, that the procedural aspects of the show are never going to be abandoned completely.
iZombie isn't "obligated" to keep to the "case/brain of the week" stuff that they've done for the past two seasons, but they still are, even as they explore a story that is less about an overarching "Big Bad" and more about a larger, more philosophical question of what happens in a world where zombies and humans both exist if there's no way for them to CO-EXIST.
iZombie isn't "obligated" to keep to the "case/brain of the week" stuff that they've done for the past two seasons, but they still are, even as they explore a story that is less about an overarching "Big Bad" and more about a larger, more philosophical question of what happens in a world where zombies and humans both exist if there's no way for them to CO-EXIST.
I never said they would be. Most things are not zero-sum choices between opposites; life is about complexity and nuance. Person of Interest never fully gave up its person-of-the-week format, which was good, because the importance of protecting individuals, of not sacrificing them for the sake of the big picture, was fundamental to the thematic point of the series. But it was also good that it grew beyond that and created one of the best SFTV series in history by really embracing the larger ramifications of its premise. In fact, it suffered from taking too long to kick off a real exploration of those deeper questions.
Good writing, like most things in life, is about finding the best balance between different factors and considerations. That's why I get so frustrated when people online insist on the false premise that episodic and serial storytelling are mutually exclusive or antagonistic approaches. The best shows are the ones whose episodes are good in themselves and add up to something greater than the sum of the parts.
My comment from earlier about iZombie "breaking the mold" wasn't so much a criticism, or even directed at any one person, more a clarification that the procedural elements of the show will be making a return in the next episode even though they were absent from this one.
