Distributor: Warner Home Video
Episodes: 19
Duration: 42 min (per episode)
iZombie: Season 2 (DVD) – Series Review
Only three months ago we saw the lovely Olivia “Liv” Moore transform into a crime solving zombie, by gaining the memories of the dead people whose brains she ate. Mostly murder victims pass by her in the morgue she works at, and while she had to give up on her love life, her family and her original career, she seems fairly content knowing she is helping to put evil people behind bars. Nonetheless, the previous season ended with her using the last cure against ‘zombie-ism’ on Major, who she had to zombify to save his life, and with her younger brother in the hospital due to an explosion at the Meat Cute, the place he was hired to work under Blaine, the villain of Season 1. We were craving for even more brainy content in this second season.
This season starts off with Liv’s (Rose McIver) brother in the hospital, in dire need of a blood transfusion. Olivia originally had the same blood type as her brother, but due to her zombie status, it would be impossible to provide proper blood to save his life, thus she refuses to donate blood, which causes her family to shun her, which makes it clear that she’s on her own from now on. Liv is already down in the dumps, because she gave the last cure to Major (Robert Buckley), who currently finds himself in a predicament of his own. Major, now back to his human state, can now detect who is a zombie, simply because he gets goosebumps when one is close by. Due to this, he gets noticed by the CEO of Max Rager, who played their part in making humans zombies, Vaughn Du Clark (Steven Weber), who wants Major to get rid of all the zombies, so they can’t track it back to Max Rager. To determine the targets, Major gets a list, and he has to find out who is a zombie and who isn’t, if he declines, Max Rager’s cronies will take out everyone on said list, and they will start with Liv.
Meanwhile Peyton (Aly Michalka) returns home and patches things up with Liv, who is currently living together with a new roommate Gilda (Leanne Lapp) who just happens to be the daughter of Vaughn Du Clark. Peyton is back in town to try and bust a criminal mastermind, who goes by the name of Stacey Boss (Eddie Jemison), and while she is on track to get him arrested, her only contact is Blaine (David Anders), who currently runs a funeral home, to keep providing the city’s zombies with brains, even though he has been turned into a human again at the end of season 1.
For some reason, the creators of the show decided to add another six episodes to this second season, thus standing on the 19 episodes mark, which was in our opinion a very poor choice. Compared to the first season, the flow is extremely slow, when looking at the main storyline that is. It takes nearly half a season to get things up to speed, and even then, the last few episodes truly set things in motion, allowing the series to properly progress. Nonetheless, if you love the separate cases where Liv and Clive (Malcolm Goodwin) solve crimes, then you’ll love this season a lot more, seeing there’s more of them. Overall things still go fast enough to prevent the series from getting boring, but the pacing felt just right in the first season, making it lose its balance during this season.
Even though the series still revolves around Rose McIver’s zombie persona, it feels as if the other characters have gotten their time in the spotlights in this season as well. Robert Buckley feels more important during this season, because of the bigger role his character, Major, is playing, and also because Liv and Major are once again growing closer after all what has happened during the first season. Other than that, side-characters from the first season, who are portrayed by Leanne Lap and Steven Weber also get significantly more screen time during the course of these 19 episodes, and truth be told, they easily equal the acting performances of the rest of the cast.
The special features on this DVD edition are somewhat of a letdown, as you’ll only get a 2015 Comic-Con panel and a reasonable amount of deleted scenes you can wade through. For us this felt like a missed opportunity to get to know the cast a little better, or simply by adding standard features it would have been a lot nicer. We missed the basic items such as a gag reel, a making of, or other simple featurettes.
Conclusion
iZombie: Season 2 is a pleasant continuation of the first series, with some extra depth concerning the main storyline, where it’s not all about Liv anymore. Nonetheless, it felt a bit like this season could have done better if they wrapped things up in 13 episodes, just like the first season. Those sentiments aside, this second season still offers the same quality, thus if you loved the first season, you’ll certainly like this one as well. We simply hope they won’t drag this one out too much, as it would lose its edge rather quick.
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