Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

iZombie: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie Review

The Apocalypse Is Coming! The Apocalypse Is Coming!

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 6, 2018

As iZombie begins its fourth season on The CW, it's a good time to look back over Season 3, which, like the series' first two seasons, has been released on Blu-ray by the Warner Archive Collection. After expanding the show to a nineteen-episode length in Season 2, The CW cut it back to its original allotment of thirteen episodes a season, but the shortened overall running time didn't dampen the enthusiasm of creators Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright for complex plotting. Indeed, the showrunners and their writers' room have crammed more layers of conspiracy, deception, romantic complication and increasingly dotty zombie lore into Season 3 than in all of Seasons 1 and 2 combined.

It's a heady mix—if you can keep track of it all. But that's the problem. Season 3 is so overstuffed that, by the time you reach the final episode, with revelations arriving at such a furious pace that you can barely take one in before the next one has pushed it aside, the viewer needs a guidebook to keep it all straight. Even Thomas had to admit that the creative team's reach had exceeded their grasp, as they were forced to leave one of Season 3's most perplexing mysteries unresolved. Why? Because there just wasn't enough time. (And two episodes into Season 4, it's not only unresolved, but it hasn't even been addressed.)

The usual spoiler warning applies for any reader who is unfamiliar with iZombie's previous seasons. For a spoiler-free introduction to the show, please see the Season 1 review.

Season 3 picks up immediately where Season 2 left off, with the disastrous launch party for the Max Rager company's new energy drink, Super Max. (The elapsed time between seasons is "2.8 Minutes Later", according to the pun-laden intertitle graphics that remain one of the show's most entertaining devices.) In addition to freeing the zombie captives held for experimentation in Max Rager's secret basement lab, and causing multiple deaths, including that of Max Rager's evil CEO, the violent confrontation revealed new dimensions to the zombie epidemic. It's no longer limited to Seattle. To the astonishment of our heroine, Liv More (Rose McGiver), and her gang of friends and colleagues, the military contractor that has acquired Max Rager is an international enterprise led and staffed by brain-eaters.

The company's name is Fillmore-Graves—say it slowly, split into three words—and it is run by the imperious Vivian Stoll (Andrea Savage) and her spit-and-polish brother-in-law, Chase Graves (Jason Dohring, yet another of the series' Veronica Mars alumni). Fillmore-Graves is the very opposite of the amateur operation cobbled together by Liv and her friends to hold back the zombie tide. They're tightly organized, widely diversified and heavily armed. They're busily preparing for the inevitable conflict when humans discover zombies' existence (or, in Fillmore-Graves' parlance, "Discovery Day"). Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica's reboot, the zombies of Fillmore-Graves have a plan.

The uneasy alliance that forms between Liv's gang and Fillmore-Graves is only one of the many layers of Season 3's often bewilderingly complex narrative. The efforts by medical examiner Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli) to find a cure to zombie-ism are their own tangled web, as Ravi continues to search for the mysterious ingredient (so-called "tainted Utopium") that is an essential component of both the original infection and its cure. Meanwhile, Ravi struggles to counteract the side effects of his previous efforts, and Liv's former fiancé, Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley), struggles with the aftereffects of Cure 1, which ultimately end in death, while he contemplates the risks of taking Cure 2, which leads to total amnesia.

Or does it? The only person who has so far taken Cure 2 is the villainous Blaine DeBeers (David Anders), formerly a zombie entrepreneur who killed some people for their brains and made zombies out of others so that he could hook them like a drug dealer on his supply of sweetbread sustenance. With his memory wiped clean, Blaine has been reborn as a decent guy who wants to atone for the past misdeeds of which others have informed him. But not everyone believes his transformation, including Don E (Bryce Hodgson), Blaine's former lieutenant, who goes off in search of new alliances and ends up bouncing from one kind of trouble to another. Ravi, too, doubts Blaine's new persona, but that has more to do with his jealousy over the budding romance between Blaine and Peyton Charles (Aly Michalka), Liv's best friend and an assistant D.A. for whom Blaine had become an informant before losing his memory.

But wait, there's more! An aggressive and heavily armed "zombie truther" movement is attempting to awaken Seattle's populace to the threat living among them. Its leader, Harley Johns (Andrew Caldwell), may or may not be responsible for the execution-style murder of a zombie family and the attempted assassination of a rising political star suspected of being a Manchurian candidate for the expanding zombie horde. Reporters for both traditional and social media are sniffing around the zombie rumors looking for confirmation (or maybe just clicks). Ravi's former boss at the CDC (Christina Cox) shows up in Seattle, and she's ostensibly inquiring into some unusual autopsy results involving human brains in the digestive tract of apparently human corpses—but she might also be tracking a deadly flu pandemic. Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), who's the last of Liv's circle to learn that she's a zombie, is just getting used to the fact that his partner's uncannily helpful insights are the result of consuming murder victims' brains, when he's faced with the return of former lover FBI Special Agent Dale Bozzio (Jessica Harmon). Bozzio has yet to forgive Clive for lying about a case, and now he has even more to lie about.

Then there's the blue juice created by Ravi to reverse memory loss, which has the unexpected side effect of making zombie visions more prolonged and powerful. And Major's ongoing search for the zombie hooker named Natalie (Brooke Lyons), whom he swore to rescue. And Liv's budding romance with a Fillmore-Graves soldier named Justin (Tongayi Chirisa). And just when you thought it couldn't get more complicated, crime kingpin Stacey Boss (Eddie Jemison) returns to town, looking to settle some old scores.

Liv and Clive still investigate a murder in every episode, and Liv still transforms into a version of the victim whose brain she consumes, but like everything else in Season 3, the transformations and the police cases get short shrift, because the writers have to hurry on to the next double-cross, shocking twist or hopeless romance. Go back to an earlier season and watch a standout episode like "Astroburger" (Season 1, ep. 11), where both the investigation and Liv's absorption of the victim's characteristics were allowed to play out more intricately and at greater length, and you're reminded of how inventive iZombie could be before it became cluttered with a surfeit of subplots. Nothing has time to develop or sink in. The twists feel arbitrary, and the story is hopelessly fractured. Near the end of the season, when the identity of a crucial mastermind who's been pulling a vast number of strings is finally revealed, your reaction is more likely to be "Who's that?" rather than "Ah hah!", because the character has barely been on screen long enough to register during the preceding episodes.

iZombie still has a lot to recommend it, including an appealing cast, a wicked sense of humor and the endless gourmet inventiveness with which Liv prepares the brains on which she's dining—the show's chef really does deserve her own Blu-ray special feature—but if Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright want to keep people's attention, they need to curb their instinct for excess. Either that, or convince The CW to give them more air time. Season 4 will once again be limited to thirteen episodes, and I recommend taking notes.

iZombie: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

iZombie continues to be shot digitally, primarily by cinematographer Michael Wale (Continuum). Season 3 retains the visual style established in previous episodes, with the palette often mimicking Michael Allred's original renderings for the Vertigo series from which iZombie is adapted. (The opening title sequence continues to recap Liv's back story in graphic panels, and if you watch closely, you'll notice that new panels are routinely added.) If anything, Season 3's colors offer even more dramatic variations than previously, especially in the contrast between the dull, institutional hues of the Fillmore-Graves' offices and barracks, as compared to such varied and colorful environments as the pre-school in episode 7 ("Dirt Nap Time"), the well-stocked produce aisles of a Whole Foods-like grocery store in episode 6 ("Some Like It Hot Mess") and, of course, the bright lights of the zombie bar known as The Scratching Post, which appears in multiple episodes. Blacks are solid, whites are crisp, and colors are fully saturated, though not to excess. The Warner Archive Collection has distributed the season's thirteen episodes over three BD-50s, all of which feature a clean, sharp and detailed image free of noise or interference. The average bitrate varies from a low of around 24.5 Mbps to a high of over 31 Mbps, with a capable encode and no anomalies.

iZombie: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As in Season 2, iZombie's 5.1 soundtrack, once again presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, is an effective but restrained affair, with modest use of the rear speakers. It employs the same "whoosh" effect and utensil sounds to accompany Liv's culinary preparations, and the zombie visions (some newly intensified by Ravi's blue juice preparation) use the surrounds to help differentiate themselves from routine flashbacks. The military activities of Fillmore-Graves and the target practice of the zombie "truthers" provide more opportunities for loud effects than we've seen in previous seasons, and there are a few big moments that can't be discussed without spoilers, except to say that the soundtrack handles them well. Once again, Josh Kramon (Veronica Mars) provides the inventive score, nimbly jumping from silly to serious, and back again.

iZombie: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1)


• Disc 1
• 2. Zombie Knows Best (4:51)
• 3. Eat, Pray, Liv (0:24)


• Disc 2
• 5. Spanking the Zombie (3:42)
• 6. Some Like It Hot Mess (2:27)
• 8. Eat a Knievel (0:52)



• iZombie: 2016 Comic-Con Panel (disc 3) (1080i; 1.78:1; 29:05): Participants include creators Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright and actors Rose McGiver ("Liv"), Rahul Kohli ("Ravi"), Malcolm Goodwin ("Clive"), Aly Michalka ("Peyton") and David Anders ("Blaine").

iZombie: The Complete Third Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

iZombie seemed to be morphing into a different series in Season 3, and it's apparent from what we've already seen of the current season so far that the metamorphosis is continuing. When the series began, it sustained a cheeky, satirical tone buoyed by Rose McIver's seemingly effortless transformations into a new personality each week. A zombie apocalypse loomed, but for two seasons the threat remained a distant prospect. Now that the apocalypse has arrived, the show is struggling to find a new tone. While the result may not yet be The Walking Dead, that's mostly because Season 3 gets so bogged down in conspiracy theories that it never quite makes up its mind about what kind of show it wants to be. There are promising early signs in Season 4 that creators Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright are digging their way out of the messy combination of loose threads and dead ends with which Season 3 concluded, but it's a daunting task. In the meantime, WAC's Blu-ray set is a superior presentation, which is best watched on a binge basis, because it's easier to remember the players and their shifting agendas without a scorecard. Recommended.