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‘iZombie’ recap: Pep talks, cold showers in ‘Love & Basketball’

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To all the hopeless romantics out there who are shipping hard on Liv and Major: knock it off. At least for now.

Liv Moore (Rose McIver), our “iZombie” heroine, is right, and Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley) is wrong. They can’t be together while she’s still a zombie. What if they have sex and she infects him? What if she slips on an icy sidewalk, scratches and infects him?

It’s all fine and good to say that their problems can be solved “with condoms and rock salt.” Thanks for that, Major, but you’re just not thinking clearly.

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A cynic, a.k.a. realist, like me would say that he’s randy, for starters, and he’s looking for a savior. He thinks comfortable, familiar, lovable Liv is his redemption. But as she wisely points out, even that makeout session they just had could’ve turned him from living to living dead.

And, come on, it’s complicated between the two of them. Too soon. Too soon!

As if our already burdened Liv needs any more drama right now. Get a hold of yourself, Major. And stand your ground, Liv, even though your resolve may put you right back into persona non grata territory.

This week’s episode of the dram-rom-zom-com, dubbed “Love & Basketball,” is more about the former and less about the latter, though it gets its name from the shooting death of a peewee coach. And Liv takes on his pep-rally-ready personality, complete with his devotion to the movie “Hoosiers” and disdain for the New York Knicks.

There are some crucial developments in this hour, specifically that there’s now a working relationship between Blaine DeBeers (David Anders) and Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), even if it’s punctuated by a near fistfight and some grappling around the morgue. (It’s actually a lot funnier than it sounds).

Also, Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) gets his first reward, after a figurative slap from his boss, in his insistent and unauthorized Meat Cute investigation. Not only does Lt. Suzuki’s widow tell Clive that Suzuki might have been suicidal, she also brings him a Tupperware bowl she found in her late husband’s beer fridge. It’s a chunk o’ brain!

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And FBI agent Dale Bozzio (Jessica Harmon) tells Clive that investigators have now found a hair belonging to missing astronaut Alan York in a drain at Meat Cute.

If Clive has seemed like a dog with a bone before, can you imagine how determined he’ll be going forward? He’s about to start putting some pieces together.

A quick word about Bozzio, who has great chemistry with Clive and knows how to pull off silly walking tricks: Is there something suspicious about her? Is it just because she’s so interested in Clive, and seemingly so much fun, that I think there must be a dark side? Can it possibly be true that she has no ulterior motive for sidling up to him? I may be paranoid, and I hope I’m wrong because I like her already. And Clive likes her too, yes?

I’ll deal with the murder du jour here, in the space and fashion I think it deserves. That is to say, it’ll be abbreviated because it doesn’t factor into the overarching story. I’ve created a new rule for recapping this show that states, roughly, that the procedural elements be kept to a minimum unless they’re exceptionally wacky/quirky/cool or have some important bearing on the bigger picture.

Sorry, Coach Mike Hayden, you do not rate.

But you seemed like a lovely (cliche-riddled) guy, who helped underprivileged kids play sports and snitched on abusive fathers. Your night job, working security at a high-rise office building, got you killed, with an autographed Pete Rose baseball bat, of all things. Some shady lawyer and his shadier fixer, trying to cover up gambling debts and another murder, were responsible.

Liv and Clive solve this puzzle after a significant red herring, as is the established “iZombie” pattern, with assists from Liv’s brain-omelet visions and Clive’s powers of deduction. (And yet, he has no earthly idea why Liv becomes a completely different person with each homicide case. Boy, will he feel dumb when he finally figures out the source of her “psychic” abilities).

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“Love & Basketball” highlights a couple of uneasy alliances. One is Blaine and Ravi; the other, Major and Gilda the Duplicitous (Leanne Lapp).

Because there is no more zombie cure, Ravi needs to re-create it. To do so, he has to have that stepped-on Utopium, or a reasonable facsimile of it, that caused Seattle’s outbreak in the first place. And there’s only one guy who can supply it: Blaine.

The fact that Blaine tortures his former protege Gabriel, now a Bible-toting preacher, and turns him into a zombie to get the recipe is small potatoes to the uber-villain. He has the concoction delivered to Ravi and waits impatiently for a medical miracle.

Ravi, meantime, wants to do this right, with months of exhaustive testing and research. That’s all just noise to Blaine, who shows up at the morgue intending to steal whatever formula Ravi has mixed up.

But it’s not the cure, it’s a form of the infection, as they all find out when Gabriel injects himself with it and dies instantly. So it’s not a zombie saver, it’s a zombie killer. Blaine makes a move for the serum, and he and Ravi tussle across autopsy tables and sterile floors. Blaine gets in his cardio for the day, and Ravi smashes the jar. Now it truly is back to the drawing board.

Major and Gilda may not sleep together anymore (though that’s yet to be seen), but she’s still pushing him to kill zombies based on Max Rager’s database of most-likely-to-be-undead. He’s balking, after the first few kidnap-murders continue to haunt him. He did get a sweet dog out of it, aptly named Minor by Ravi.

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Gilda needs some of that spilled zombie blood so that Max Rager’s current diabolical doctor can test it. Who knows what that lab-coated gal is cooking up, but it can’t be good for our A-team.

Gilda manages to skewer Liv in their shared kitchen, while “girlfriend” chatting about the one-and-the-same workplace Magic Mike and ex-fiance, and snags a drop of her blood. What will that mean for Liv, the cause and that chained-up zombie in Max Rager’s lab of doom?

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