iZombie either does episodes that are light on the murder and heavy on their awesome zombie mafia/breaking Major/evil Red Bull CEO, or it’s all the brain of the week with little of the best parts. This episode, however, was somehow an almost 50:50 mix and it worked.

We also got a nice twist on the brain of the week that I didn’t see coming.

So let’s get to it.

We open at a frat party (yeah, I know, but bear with me). Apparently Netflix must have just gotten Animal House, because these 20 somethings all decided to recreate it, even going so far as having our brain of the week dressed as Caesar. But, out of nowhere, a blue muskrat wearing a sea captain’s hat shows up and stabs Caesar to death. Round up that Captain and maybe Tennille as an accomplice.

While standing over the body, Ravi says: “He came, he saw, he was stabbed several times by a small cylindrical object.”

This is why you don’t dress like Caesar, you’re just asking to get stabbed forty times in the back. Come on, frat guys, you should really use common sense and have a friend watch your back for stab wounds during the night. Maybe if you didn’t dress so roman emperor-y, people wouldn’t feel the animalistic urge to stab you in the back. I’m just giving you sound advice here.

Back at Blaine’s Mortuary and Buffet, my all time favorite villain is plotting how to expand his utopium business. Seems there’s someone named Mr. Boss? (possibly Voss, though Mr. Boss is better. He’s so awesome that he doesn’t care he’s got a stupid name) that’s got the entire town under his drug running and other evil machinations thumb. It’s Kingpin, but without the pathos or Vanessa.

Blaine’s got a bunch of new drug runners to do his work while he stays in the shadows, and after assurances that he’ll watch out for them, he sends them out into the wide world. Don E’s back, confirming my suspicions that this was our poor Scott E’s twin brother. Blaine, probably bored, asks why Don E had Scott E (not a single Star Trek joke? Not even now? Sadness) committed.

Don E: “He thought zombies were running around Seattle.”
Blaine, while introducing Don E to a zombie noshing on a corpse’s brains: “That’s just silly, sometimes they loiter.”

Back to the brain of the week, which has Liv shouting Dude and Bro a lot (I wouldn’t make a drinking game out of the bro count unless you are mortal enemies with your liver). Clive’s doing his thing and figured out that our dead Caesar was normally named Chad, because of course he was. Nothing good comes from someone named Chad. This Chad was particularly horrific, with his love of “pranks” or as the Geneva convention calls them, “cruel and unusual torture.”

He buttered some guy’s floor so he’d fall and probably fracture a few bones just for daring to have a higher body fat content than other people. We also get our first zombie vision of Chad doing a keg stand and having one of the frat brothers run up and say he ruined his life. Seems that our prankster had the kid, as a pledge, jog naked in front of an elementary school, so now he has to register as a sex offender.

This was a quick red herring, as it was mostly to establish that Clive is one of the best detectives on TV. Really. I feared most of this episode would be them figuring out Caesar was stabbed by wacky costume and Liv would have to zombie vision it, but nope, Clive just flicks through naked jogger’s Instagram photos and figures it out himself. Sometimes I think he just keeps Liv around because Clive’s a masochist.

As they’re leaving the house, after Liv’s practically high fived all the dude bros, he says to her: “You’re like that box of chocolates in Forrest Gump. I never know what I’m gonna get.”

While Liv’s dude bro brain is doodling all over Ravi and spackling him in glitter makeup she must have stolen from a little girl, as well as setting up the anatomy skeletons to be getting spanked (which was funny), Clive’s doing real detective work again. Apparently the costume is a character from a Swedish kid’s show called Captain Wazzle. This is Seattle so, sure, one costume shop would have that. How has the Northwest coast not drown under its own weird tweeness yet?

But we need another zombie vision, and this time it’s our oh so hilarious Chad getting reamed out by the Dean and another student over something. There’s threats of suspension instead of expulsion. Because colleges just LOVE working with law enforcement, the Dean refuses to give them anything, but says Clive can talk to the other student who, it turns out, has the exact same name as our dead Caesar.

Do parents hate their offspring? That’s the only explanation I have for so many Chads existing.

Chad v 2.0 tells Liv and Clive that he and dead Chad used to get their mail mixed up all the time. And as part of what I hope was some probation, Chad 2.0 was supposed to go to a high school and tell kids that drinking and driving is terrible. Even if you kill someone while driving drunk when you’re fifteen, you’ll be out and back in college in under three years like nothing happened. AMERICA! At least Chad 2.0 seemed remorseful about it, though I wonder if he got out under the same affluenza clause. It’s sad when real life is more painful than TV’s looming zombie apocalypse.

Anyway, the reason 2.0 was pissed at dead Chad is because Chad thought it’d be Hi-lar-i-ous if he got smashed and showed up at the high school to talk about the horrors of drunk driving while drunk. Chad 2.0 doesn’t really have an alibi for the night of the murder, as he was in his room studying, but stick a pin in that red herring. We’ll be back to it later.

Major, poor Major, is getting a check up from Ravi, who’s taking some vitals and following up on the cure. I’m not really sure why a morgue needs a blood pressure cuff. “Yup, that guy with his intestines spread out across my table still doesn’t have a heartbeat. Great job, everyone!” But who cares about logic?

Anyone else love just how great Ravi and Major’s friendship is? I know, Major’s in deep and after a year of gaslighting isn’t about to trust a soul with his new assassin job, but he’s still leaning on Ravi a bit. Testing the waters. And after spotting the glitter left in Ravi’s beard from Bro-Liv, Major has to comment: “So, you know I’m referring to your beard as princess sparkles from now on, right?”

Ravi takes it in stride, but then begs Major to come with him to “the club” so Ravi can try some utopium. He thinks that his taking it will help in a breakthrough because Ravi missed science ethics 101 – you don’t bloody experiment on yourself. Major tells him it’s a bad idea, but agrees because those two are fast becoming BFFs. I expect matching lockets soon.

Liv’s new evil roomie – who finally got the name Gilda – catches her slamming beer and speaking in the bro code. Bro-glyphics? One of Chad’s (the dead one’s) frat brothers got Liv’s number from Ravi (who was probably punishing her for the glitter) and invites her to the memorial. For reasons that only make sense to young guys with burgeoning cirrhosis of the liver, they decide Chad’s memorial should be nude…except everyone’s wearing garbage. Our Brody bro has pizza boxes hiding his little paddle, evil Gilda’s donned a trashbag, and Liv got very crafty with caution tape.

I predict a lot of girls wearing this come Halloween:

Liv slips into super bro and plays beer pong as her poor, evil roomie has to watch while trying to keep from touching anything. She better be getting hazard pay from Von. (Is it bad that I already feel more pathos for Gilda than I ever did for Peyton?)

While Liv’s testing the limits of her undead liver, Ravi and Major are at the club trying to score utopium. It’s not going well as Ravi swirls a glass of wine looking like he wandered out of a surprise poetry session that I assume Seattle is crammed with.

“You bought a grenade out of a trunk in a car,” Ravi accuses Major after he failed to score any drugs in the bathroom. “That’s a different skill set. If you want a bazooka I can get you one in fifteen minutes.”

Finally, they find a blond guy willing to deal them after Ravi feels upset for not being asked if he’s a cop. Our scientist decides he needs two so he can take one in a lab environment. Why he didn’t just do that the first time while, say, Liv took down notes is because — hey look, over there! While Ravi’s floating eight miles high, Major’s bored as shit and decides to take the second pill. During the rave/drugged out scenes, I kept flashing back to Tyres from Spaced. Poor Major’s not doing so good on utopium because Major doesn’t have anything go well ever. It’s in his contract with God or something. This all feels like a set up to pull him back into Blaine’s circle where there’s even less chance of his survival, but who knows.

Liv gets called in to rescue Major, whose new best friend is the toilet. While she’s sobered up at lightning speed, she spots Ravi dancing on the stage with his shirt unbuttoned. I expect ten gifs of that on my desk by Monday, tumblr. Chop chop! While Liv’s gotten her two only sort of friends into a taxi, Major grabs her phone and throws it out the window. He says something about how they’re always listening which sounds like paranoid drug talk, except he’s right. Max Rager did somehow bug her phone. Not sure why he didn’t say something before, but Major’s not been in a good place since, oh, six months before this show even started.

After Liv drops Major off, and probably chained Ravi to a wall or something, Major asks her to stay. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, as she’s the one on dude-bro brains but has to act the most responsible. A glimmer of humanity from our dead Chad or just Liv shining through? It’s hard to say, which can be a bit of problem with iZombie. A lot of the character development from Liv can be explained away as brains, which sort of sets her up to be a continual blank slate if not careful. Clive’s not the only one uncertain what he’s going to get.

Major promises that he “won’t let anything happen to you.” Liv, of course, is all smiles and sunshine thinking things are better because she doesn’t know about the assassin jobs. While rubbing Major’s hair, she promises, “And I won’t shave your eyebrows.” Which is about the only real promise Liv can make anymore. She already accidentally got him killed through her lying once. Her word means very little anymore.

After sobering up, Ravi’s learning why experimenting on yourself is what mad scientists in creepy castles do. His notes are just gibberish, because of course they are. Come on princess sparkles, think! A never before seen cop rolls in one of four corpses and tries to prepare Ravi for the horrors in the body bag. I don’t know why, we’ve seen far worse on the show. But it’s all for the dramatic tension of the corpse being the dealer they just bought from last night.

Seems Mr. Boss has been bumping off Blaine’s guys one by one. He gets a call from Speed E (the Es are the Duggers of Seattle) and promises to look after him before smashing his phone. Speed E’s an acceptable loss for our zombie godfather.

We finally get an explanation for the long island makeup artist flitting around Blaine. Seems that she was hired to make him look more zombie-ish while Blaine does brain business. His first stop over is to see a guy named Floyd Barracus who will probably grow in importance. No idea who he is now aside from a guy in an office with some connection to law enforcement. Maybe he delivers the k-cups?

Blaine’s been scheming in his deliciously Lex Luthor way by setting up Mr. Boss. All those dealers Boss had chopped up were adorable white kids from rich parents – aka, people the public will actually give a shit about. Floyd says that if Blaine can get him the money for some palm greasing, they might be able to take Boss down. To really seal the deal, Blaine’s dangling the possibility of Mayorship over Floyd’s head. If it goes about as well as the one in Starling City, I’d say no, guy.

And why is Blaine doing all this? Aside from money, and power, and because he can? Seems that Blaine wasn’t lying when he said he had daddy issues. His father’s a heartless CEO (named Angus. From now on he’s CowDaddy) and Blaine’s the screw up kid that…yeah, we’ve all seen this before. Don’t get me wrong. They do come up with some great banter between the two, but eesh, did we have to humanize Blaine this much? I love that he made his father a zombie and got him over a brain barrel. That’s great, and explains why random street thug was able to get a restaurant, stooges, and Mrs. Lovett so quickly. But…maybe it’s me, but I kind of preferred when Blaine’s main motivation was money, not stealing his Daddy’s company because he didn’t hug him enough.

I suppose we’ll have to see how it plays out. I never thought I’d like Major either.

Anyway, we have a brain to figure out. After putting the screws to the costume shop’s owner who must be ex-CIA or something, Clive finally figures out who rented the costume and brings in a twee hipster couple. Did they have a name? Doesn’t matter. They’re the hipsteriest. During the murder the two claim they were at home getting freaky in the costume because why not introduce furries for shits and giggles…(I’ve always wondered if there are fury furries, fuzzy people in costume that condemn ancient Greeks for crimes. Not enough to Google it or anything. DON’T GOOGLE IT FOR ME!)

Except it was a quick red herring. Seems our little hipster kid had no connection to dead Caesar, but he does have one to another Chad Wilcolfe who ran over his father in a drunk driving accident. This guy killed the wrong emperor. Don’t you hate when that happens? First there was bike guy last week, and now the twee couple. Anyone else getting the impression all the murders are going to be done by hipsters this season? If there isn’t a head smashed in by a typewriter, I’ll be very disappointed.

To wrap things up, Liv swings up Major’s and Ravi’s place for her replacement phone. She wants to see Major, and Ravi gives her the look that says “That’s a bad idea.” But because Liv’s as observational as a brick most days, she shoves past him to knock on Major’s door. He tells her the same, that things aren’t good with them and probably never will be after she lied to him for a freaking year. It ends on Major kickstarting his drug habit, so we can end on another massive shoot out in a mortuary this time. Right?

Right?

Eh, I’ll put you down for one and get a mess of stuffed owls you can smother a brain of the week with later.