‘iZombie’ recap: New Hope and ‘Gumpy Old Liv’

Let’s take the temperature of our favorite dead(ish) heroine, Liv Moore, who ended the freshman season of “iZombie” alienated from her family, on the outs with her former fiancé and separated from her bestie.

Today? Check to all of the above.

Say, isn’t that where we found her in the beginning of this DC Comics-based series on the CW? Why, yes, it was, and Season 2 seems likely to keep hammering home the unfortunate point that there are consequences to being a zombie. Poor Liv!

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So when she admits she’s feeling sorry for herself in this premiere episode, dubbed “Grumpy Old Liv,” I feel sorry for her, too. But I’m so not sorry that this dram-zom-rom-com is back on the air after a four-month break. Hello, undead Seattle!

Liv (Rose McIver) still has her day job, as an assistant medical examiner with witty, bantering friend and confidant Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli) and her pseudo-moonlighting position as crime-fighting cohort to Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin). And she’ll still try to fix every other relationship and situation in her life — she’s a bit of a control freak that way — so there’s plenty to see here.

Let’s get right into it.

Ravi desperately needs to make more zombie cure, but he’s fresh out of the ingredients, courtesy of Liv’s on-the-fly decision to give the only existing doses of the potion to nemesis Blaine DeBeers (David Anders) and former lover Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley).

Arguably, that turned out to be a decent call in both cases, since Blaine can’t make any more zombies and Major isn’t one. But what if there are side effects that haven’t yet shown themselves. Will the guys stay human, or will they revert?

Ravi would rather be armed before the other shoe drops, not to mention he’d like to start trying to rid the town of its closeted zombies before they further multiply and go mainstream.

There’s only one place Liv can turn to find the tainted Utopium they need: rotten-to-the-core Blaine. The former drug dealer turned serial entrepreneur had been responsible, after all, for the initial batch of stepped-on Utopium that caused the infamous booze cruise zombie rampage where he attacked and turned Liv.

But will he help? He’ll have to because Liv tells him he might die otherwise. And Blaine likes to live, preferably large.

Blaine, a.k.a. John Deaux (!), is now running a funeral home — steady supply of fresh brains! — so he can peddle gray matter to the local zombie population. He wouldn’t mind being a zombie again himself because it was such a King of the World power position, but he’s still wrapping himself in the undead outer shell any time he wants to intimidate people. (He just spikes his platinum hair and applies guyliner and no one knows the difference.)

He agrees to track down the Utopium for Ravi’s experiments. And yet he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth, as usual, because he intends to move coffin loads of Utopium that he calls “pure.” How does he know the illicit drug isn’t a contributing factor in any form? He doesn’t care, really. It’s all about the benjamins.

In the meantime, there is one side effect that has emerged from the cure. Blaine and Major can sense when a zombie is near. The hair of the back of their necks stands on end and their hearts race, making them the only known reliable zombie detectors

It’s that newfound “skill” that lands Major in a bind with Vaughn Du Clark, ethically bereft CEO of Max Rager, whose heavy users tend to go berserk and turn murderous.

Du Clark (a smarmy, delicious Steven Weber) recruits Major to hunt and kill all the local zombies. It’s an attempt to clean up the company’s mess — to the tune of some 300 suspected nightwalkers — and keep its hands (relatively) clean in the process.

The exec is less worried about the body count, of course, and more concerned about his stock price. He’s also readying a new product launch, Super Max, which won’t be your average caffeinated beverage. It might better be described as a beverageceutical.

And Du Clark doesn’t ask so much as blackmail Major into the job, since his high-tech surveillance tells him that Major has been a bad Charles Bronsonish boy. Babineaux suspects that Major was involved in the Meat Cute massacre (during last season’s finale), and he’s right. Du Clark threatens to confirm his suspicions of five murders if Major doesn’t play along.

So much for Major being unemployable.

He makes his first kill, and it’s not Liv, even though that thought did cross Du Clark’s mind.

Liv has some fences to mend with her family, but she can’t will them to forgive her. She refused to give blood to her critically wounded brother, Evan, in last season’s fiery finale. And she couldn’t explain why.

Here’s my confusion about this plot point: a) there was no other source of type O-negative blood in that entire hospital? And b) as a medical professional, Liv couldn’t have tossed out a believable lie? End of rant.

Anyway, she’s figuratively dead to her mom and brother, which is a downer. And there’s still no sign of her BFF Peyton Charles (Aly Michalka), though there’s been some online chatter about that character’s return this season. In her absence, Liv has a new roomie, who professes to be a government bureaucrat but already looks like trouble.

The murder of the week, a conceit that makes up the show’s procedural element, revolves around a mean old bigot who’s crushed while working on his car. No one grieves for Wendell Gale.

Liv eats his brains so she can try to solve his murder — that car jack didn’t fall by itself — and turns into a cranky, insult-spouting jerk. Writers and producers have taken some heat about this element of the series, since the traits she inherits are sometimes pronounced, sometimes inconsistent. “Grumpy Old Liv” gives us some Archie Bunker-style zingers, hilarious coming out of Liv’s mouth but equally entertaining for Clive’s horrified reactions.

But it’s not the crime du jour that keeps me coming back. I’d venture to guess that’s true for most fans. Even so, it’s fun to watch Liv and Babineaux go a-sleuthing, and in this case, they zero in on a neighbor who thought Gale killed his pet.

In a fit of rage, the young neighbor confronts Grumpy Old Dude, who’s tinkering under his car, and kicks the jack. Splat, goes the victim. And then the guy finds his dognapped spaniel in Gale’s basement. Oops. Off to jail he goes.

Actions. Consequences. Right, Liv?

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