iZombie – Conspiracy Weary

By: Emily Cross

Picking up right where we left off last week, Harley Johns (Andrew Caldwell) has Ravi (Rahul Kohli) at gunpoint. Harley doesn’t shoot Ravi, but clocks him hard with the gun. He and his brothers then torture Don E (Bryce Hodgson) with the cattle prod, provoking his full-on zombie state. They hear thumps at the door. Bo (James Pizzinato) goes to check it out only to find Liv (Rose McIver) in full-on zombie mode. She punches him out. Meanwhile, Blaine (David Anders) breaks through the skylight with a gas bomb. Chaos reigns. In the midst of it, Liv gets shot in the back. Rachel (Ella Cannon) escapes outside to see a caravan of military vehicles ride up (which we know is Fillmore-Graves). Inside, Harley finds himself face-to-face with Blaine and tries to shoot him, but is out of bullets. As he tries to run outside, he sees two of his brothers, Geoff (Daniel Boileau) and Dickywayne (Brendan Fletcher), try to make a stand against Fillmore-Graves and get killed. Harley runs out a back door.

As Ravi makes sure Liv is okay, Fillmore-Graves busts in. Major (Robert Buckley) is among them and is surprised to see Liv. After the rubble clears, Liv and Blaine speak to Chase (Jason Dohring). He tells them that Fillmore-Graves had been bugging Harley’s truck and knew to bust in because they were monitoring the livestream. He also asks if Liv knows anything about a cabin outside the city the Johns could have been using, but Liv has no idea. She wants to take point on finding the cabin and looking into the guns that were found in Harley’s truck. She suspects they were the same guns used in the Baracus assassination attempt and the Tuttle-Reid murders. Justin (Tongayi Chirisa), who found the guns, makes sure Liv is okay. Ravi searches for Rachel, but has no luck.

Inside, Don E and Blaine snack on the brains of Bo Johns, who was killed in the midst of the chaos. Liv joins the party in the hopes that Bo will have information about the cabin.

At home, Major tells Ravi about Shawna and their sex fort. Ravi is understandably concerned. When there’s a knock on the door, Ravi answers it to find an upset Rachel who is on edge about what she just witnessed. Sensing a moment, Ravi tries to kiss her, but it backfires. Before they can work things out, she sees Major. After identifying him as the Chaos Killer, she leaves.

Later, Shawna (Sarah Jurgens) and Major are hanging out in his room. She informs him he’s taking her dancing. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea because of the whole Chaos Killer thing. She eventually convinces him to say yes since what the rest of the world thinks of him is irrelevant and then pulls out a selfie stick to take a picture of them together. Hmmm…

Peyton (Aly Michalka) wakes up to Liv, who claims she’s got Weckler news. She tells Peyton that Oberman, Weckler’s killer, is dead too and Weckler’s daughter Tatum is evasive before launching into some conspiracy theories. Clearly Bo Johns’ paranoid brain is getting to her, which Peyton points out.

At the morgue, Ravi fills Clive (Malcolm Goodwin) in. Liv arrives with the guns. She takes measures to make sure no one can see or listen by playing loud music. Clive and Ravi aren’t happy, convincing Liv the precautions aren’t necessary. She tells them that the guns were the same kind used in the Baracus assassination attempt and Wally’s murder. Clive can get ballistics done, off the books, to confirm.

It will take a couple of days to get the property records for the cabin so they decide to go back to the gun range to try to trigger a vision. Ravi has a suggestion, which brings us The Scratching Post where Blaine and Don E share Tupac-isn’t-dead theories. Liv reminds them how crazy they are, while offering her own theory about Biggie Smalls. Clive, fed up with everyone needs them to get on the road to the gun range.

Peyton gets Weckler’s personal effects, which include a picture of Tatum and a mysterious key.

Mostly naked Chase! Hello. As Chase is getting spray-tanned, Carey (Anjali Jay) tells him most people didn’t believe in the livestream due to Fillmore-Graves’s disinformation campaign. Zack (Aiden Kahn) enters to tell Chase he had a vision and knows how to find the Johns cabin. Chase wants to keep this information from Liv and friends.

Peyton brings Tatum (Ava Frye) in to talk about Weckler. She asks her about memory card and offers her theory that someone on the memory card killed Weckler. She shows Tatum the key, which is to a safe deposit box. It now belongs to Tatum, but Peyton wants to come along when she opens it. Tatum refuses, but she doesn’t know which bank. Peyton can help her figure it out and offers a deal. Tatum agrees.

At the bank, they open the safe deposit box, which contains a music box that belonged to Tatum’s mother. The memory card is inside. Tatum is about to leave when she has a vision. Peyton clearly recognizes the facial expressions – or lack thereof.

At the gun range, Clive says “chase sequence” and Liv, Don E and Blaine all have the same vision: Justin chasing down Harley’s truck. They split up: Don E and Blaine go downstairs while Clive and Liv stay upstairs. Liv soon has a vision: Harley and Bo knew Fillmore-Graves put a bug in the truck.

Cut to Fillmore-Graves taking out the cabin. Justin and Major get a text from Liv warning them. They tell Chase, who pulls the troops back. One team doesn’t acknowledge and gets blown up from booby traps.

Ravi sleeps at the morgue and wakes up to Liv. She tells him about the cabin and the two dead Fillmore-Graves soldiers. She then asks Ravi why he’s not sleeping at home. It’s because Major and Shawna are pretty… expressive in their activities. Liv wants Major to be happy, but thinks something is off about Shawna. This naturally leads her to cyberstalk Shawna. Later, she tells Major what she found and shows him Shawna’s Tumblr page, full of photos of them together and texts they’ve sent to each other. Major is skeeved out.

Rachel visits the morgue and apologizes for not returning Ravi’s calls; she had a lot to process. He promises her he’s not a zombie. She wonders how much crazier the rest of the story can be. Ravi tells her the whole story and promises her that zombies aren’t monsters.

In digging into the cabin, Liv and Clive find that it was long abandoned, and was clearly a baited trap. They then meet with Clive’s ballistics guy, who confirms the guns match the slugs found at the crime scenes

Shawna arrives at Major’s house and he calls her out on what Liv found. She claims she’s trying to rehabilitate his image, showing the world the real Major. He wants to go back to when no one knew him, but that ship has sailed. All the same, he breaks up with her.

Fillmore-Graves soldiers mourn their lost in the locker room. They’re getting ready to run drills. Zack shows them all a t-shirt with a picture of Major and Shawna with the caption “Killer Abs.”

Peyton is watching the news coverage of the mayoral election when Liv comes home. Peyton tells her about Weckler’s safe deposit box. She shows her the recording of Weckler (Gordon Woolvett) killing Roxanne. He called someone right after the murder, telling the person they made him do it and they have to help him fix it. She tells Liv that Tatum is a zombie. They theorize that Baracus is behind all of this: he is in the footage so he turned Tatum into a zombie to coerce Weckler into stealing the memory card. He then had Weckler killed (and then Weckler’s killer killed) so that he didn’t ruin the campaign. On that note, Baracus (Kurt Evans) is declared mayor. Clive calls Liv to tell her that there was a noise complaint about construction noise at cabin eight weeks ago.

We see different reporters pitching story ideas to their idea. It turns out that Rachel is a reporter. She tells her editor there’s been some developments on the zombie story

Liv and Clive check out the cabin. Clive finds an outhouse, when there is a perfectly fine toilet inside. The outhouse isn’t an outhouse, but an entryway to an underground bunker. In the bunker, Liv and Clive find Harley who fires off a shot at them, but Clive is quicker. He shoots Harley, killing him. It doesn’t bring Wally back, but Clive thought it would at least feel good. Liv tells Clive that she had a vision that Harley and Bo were outside of Wally’s house at the time of the murders so they didn’t do it. Clive is upset that he just killed an innocent man, but Harley isn’t dead. Somehow, he got turned into a zombie.

Major drives up to Fillmore-Graves, listening to people scorning him on the radio for selling t-shirts of himself (even though we know he isn’t!). Inside, the soldiers have a wake for their two dead men. This time, Chase joins in. Major gets drunk and seems carefree for once

On a walk, Ravi sees a newspaper with the headline “Zombies are Real” written by Rachel. Betrayed!