The penultimate Season 1 episode of iZombie—“Dead Rat, Live Rat, Brown Rat, White Rat”—was directed by Mairzee Almas and written by show Co-executive Producer Diane Ruggiero-Wright. A rogue zombie of Liv’s own creation is causing some sloppy carnage, Blaine is on the warpath in pursuit of his purloined astronaut brains, and pretty much everyone gets themselves into some serious hot water.

The last time Liv saw Sebastian, he was sinking to the bottom of Puget Sound. In a shipboard fight, Sebastian tried to kill Liv on behalf of the shady Max Rager corporation, but Liv knocked him overboard with a swinging cinder block. The boat’s propellers finished the job. But the last time we saw him, he was crawling to shore as a zombie. As this episode opens, we see that Sebastian’s rough night is just beginning—almost as soon as he shambles to high ground he gets run over by a car full of teenagers. In classic horror film fashion, they decide to bury him in the woods. (He looks like hamburger and has no pulse, so he must be dead, right?) Being a hungry zombie, though, he just crawls right back out of his grave and eats one of the teens. Liv, Ravi and Babineaux join the fun two weeks later, when the girl’s scattered body parts are found near an empty grave.

Since Liv and Ravi are still keeping the zombie thing on the down-low, they don’t immediately point out that there are no signs that the girl, a cheerleader from Doc Maynard High (Liv’s alma mater) named Kimber Cooper, was ever in the hole in the ground and that her brains are missing. Liv points out that things are pretty completely out of control on the zombie front—Major has sworn to kill them all, and Liv still hasn’t told him the truth. She hopes to come up with a plan before Major puts himself in any more danger, but she is obviously deluding herself if she thinks that she can slow down Major’s single-minded quest while she tries to figure out how to kill Blaine and take down the Meat Cute brain market.

Back in the supply closet lab at the morgue, Ravi has “cured” his zombie rat, but later finds the rat dead. So the search for a cure has taken another step back. But he is able to make one more zombie rat to continue his work.

The other kids that were in the car are members of a band called the Asshats. But although Babineaux and Liv track them down in their rehearsal garage, they are unsurprisingly not forthcoming with information about the cheerleader they watched being murdered by the zombie they had just run over and buried. Then the three band kids start being killed themselves—and apparently not by zombies, as their brains remain intact. By the end of the episode, only Teresa, the drummer, is still alive, but just barely—we see her being attacked and trying to dial 911 to the soulful strains of James Blake’s “Retrograde.” This mysterious assault is reminiscent of the disappearance of a murder suspect back in Episode 5, “Flight of the Living Dead,” when we first met Liv’s recently murdered boyfriend Lowell, and got our first hints that Max Rager was a very sketchy company. Zombies aren’t the only supervillains in Seattle.

Major shows up at Meat Cute in the guise of a health inspector and eventually gets himself into all kinds of trouble as well. The Candyman figures out from Blaine’s description that this so-called inspector with great hair must be his nemesis, Poor Handsome Major, and captures him. While Major is all trussed up in the back room of the charcuterie, guess who comes in looking for a job? Evan Moore! And guess who he listed as his emergency contact on his job application? His sister, Olivia Moore! Bound and gagged Major hears it all, and Blaine is delighted that he’s now holding a pretty good hand. You’re two steps closer to finding your stolen astronaut brains, Blaine!

But Major and Evan are not the only associates of Liv’s in zombie peril this week. Sebastian, Liv’s self-created murderous zombie, finds his way to his killer’s house, where he knocks out Peyton and awaits Liv’s return—he’s pretty irritated with her for turning him into not just a regular murderer, but a brain-eating one. Liv comes home and another epic Sebastian-vs.-Liv battle ensues. Peyton wakes up in time to see a red-eyed Liv take out Sebastian with a kitchen knife that is not in her hand, but sticking straight through it. Liv is forced to finally tell someone the truth about her condition. Peyton does not take it well and disappears, failing to meet Ravi for their planned San Francisco weekend getaway.

So three or four more members of Seattle’s teen population are dead, Peyton’s gone, Ravi’s been stood up, Major is tied up in a brain warehouse, and Liv’s brother is walking into a viper’s den. We’re looking forward to an explosive season finale!

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