‘iZombie’ recap: ‘Pour some sugar, zombie’

So who’s the real detective around here?

While members of Seattle’s finest aren’t too shabby, usually, at their jobs, and Liv Moore effectively channels her “psychic visions” into tangible clues, there’s an unsung crime solver among the “iZombie” cast.

Hello Ravi, investigator extraordinaire.

Not only does he keep gnawing on the whereabouts of the basset hound known as Minor – like a dog with a bone, if you will – he cracks Major’s safe and decodes everything inside within the space of one evening or thereabouts.

And his confrontation with Major is textbook police work. He hammers the perp with an overwhelming flood of evidence and doesn’t stop the interrogation until the guy breaks down. He doesn’t wait for Major to admit being the Chaos Killer because he already knows the truth, or thinks he does.

Lucky for him, Ravi has an industrial-strength sedative on hand because otherwise – look out! -- he’d be face to face with Major the Reconstituted Zombie.

All this is to say, holy moly, what an hour. This week’s episode of the dram-rom-zom-com is packed to the gills with vital information, pivotal plot twists and shocking revelations. And it has twerking! And sleazy TV weatherman Johnny Frost, references to Wet N’ Wild makeup, Ariana Grande, Ross and Rachel, trailer parks, Adele concerts and blackout drunks.

There’s no need to bury the lead(s) here, as we’re already in the home stretch of “iZombie’s” second season and showrunner Rob Thomas promised at the recent WonderCon that the end will be “huge” and “action-packed, dwarfing the explosive freshman season finale.

Here goes: Blaine DeBeers (David Anders) has either lost his memory or his mind after taking Ravi’s experimental “in case of emergency, break glass” zombie cure. The villain everyone loves to hate is human again, at least temporarily, and he’s suffered a great deal of trauma in his shifts back and forth between living and undead.

Now? He’s confused, to put it mildly, and he’s about to lose his methodically built drug-dealing empire to one of his greedy goons.

And if that’s not jaw-dropping enough, Liv (Rose McIver) finds out that her boyfriend Drake is actually one of the good guys. She’s suspected that he’s in deep as a lackey for Mr. Boss, but now she knows that he’s an undercover cop spying on the kingpin. But he’s missing, feared dead, and Liv is left to freak out about his welfare.

The murder of the week is significant, as is often the case, because it advances the broader story and gives us the chance to see Liv transform into an exotic dancer after eating a brains, lettuce and tomato sammie made from stripper noggin.

That’s where the episode gets its musical name – “Pour Some Sugar, Zombie” – and the setting for much of its action, in a “gentlemen’s club” called the Voulez-Vous.

A performer named Cassidy, who is about to spill insider info to Peyton about Mr. Boss and his valuable stash house, instead gets a tire iron to the skull.

Two witnesses, the goldfish in her clear acrylic shoes, are no help about the identity of the killer. But all signs point to her hard-drinking boyfriend, Nick the Stick, who happens to be a thug in the Mr. Boss organization.

Liv and Det. Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) think they have this sewn up quickly, but they don’t. As they dig deeper into Cassidy’s world, they find a connecting thread to another Boss cohort named Pablo, who’s guilty of being a slimy identity thief but, today at least, not a murderer.

So, who’s the culprit?

The women are doing the dirty work in this circle of lowlifes, and Cassidy’s fellow stripper Destiny is the one who, in the name of love and protecting her man, cracks Cassidy’s head like an overripe pumpkin. Her fingerprints are all over the weapon, and she doesn’t even try to deny it. In effect, she’s another sad suspect to add to the “iZombie” rogue’s gallery.

Speaking of desperate (but maybe not sad just yet), new zombie GildaRita breaks into Liv’s apartment and roots through the refrigerator for brains. A Max Rager fixer/security expert tranquilizes her and drags her out before Liv finds her chewing on some frozen food. OK, that is pathetic.

Will she eventually turn against her evil father, Vaughn Du Clark, and join Team Z? It’s still too early to tell, but the signs are pointing to some kind of alliance, uneasy though it would have to be.

But back to Liv and the stripper brain for a moment: not only does it mean that our undead heroine gets her sexy swagger on – lapdance for Peyton! – but she’s able to tip her best friend about Boss’s illicit goldmine. And these two are roomies again, so, go grrrl power!

Roommates who aren’t hanging out and watching “Friends” together? Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli) and Major Lilywhite (Robert Buckley). Ravi knew there was something rotten about Minor’s disappearance, and he kept asking questions. And with each new suspicious detail, he kept edging closer to Major’s secret.

Of course it’ll come out sooner rather than later that Major has been icing all those zombies, not ending them. But for now, Ravi believes his housemate is the infamous local serial killer.

And to the shippers out there, isn’t it heartening to know that Ravi still has a thing for Peyton Charles (Aly Michalka)? Amid the chaos, that just has to work out somehow. Hear me, “iZombie” staff?

There are three more episodes over the next two Tuesday nights, and they can’t hit the air fast enough.