TV Review: IZOMBIE: Season 2, Episode 18: Dead Beat [The CW]

The CW’s iZombie Dead Beat TV Show Review. iZombie: Season 2, Episode 18: Dead Beat kicked things off for the penultimate episode of the season with a huge revelation after Major’s (Robert Buckley) arrest as the Chaos Killer. The episode had a lot going for it with the stakes being raised for Major as he struggles to keep his zombie urges from kicking in. Liv (Rose McIver) also finds out the truth about Major through Ravi (Rahul Kohli), who found out beforehand that Major was behind the mysterious disappearances from the media.

Most of the episode had the team trying to get Major out of prison before he starts killing the prisoners. Liv and Ravi had different plans in getting Major out, but none of them worked. The dynamic duo head over to where Major kept the bodies, but they have all disappeared thanks to the people at Max Rager. Being desperate to help Major, Liv turns to the one person she hates, Blaine (David Anders) for brains since she can’t get some from the morgue. Blaine has completely changed from his bad boy image as he has totally forgot all the misdeeds he’s done to Liv and her friends. It’s nice to see a different side of Blaine we haven’t seen before.

Peyton (Aly Michalka) was more prominent in the episode as she pulled in some favors from her sleazy co-worker Brant Stone (Ken Marino) to help Major get out of jail. Luckily, he gets out on bail from Max Rager, but only for them to send Janko to finish him off. However, it wasn’t necessary as the cops arrested him again for his involvement in the Meat Cute murders. We start to see Major slowly turning into a full zombie as he struggles without feeding on brains. Peyton even tried to have Brant feed him some protein bars with brains in it, but having no idea that the brand he replaced it with aren’t the same, the plan didn’t work. Things took a bad turn from there, prompting Liv to make a difficult decision.

The biggest truth was revealed to Clive (Malcolm Goodwin) when Liv finally told him that she and Major were zombies. Having Liv tell Clive what she is felt natural since she had no choice in the matter and was desperate to get any help she can get to free Major from prison before he goes full zombie. The reaction from Clive was played out really well, but obviously the episode didn’t really go too deep into that as everyone was focused on getting Major out of jail. It would’ve been nice to have another scene added after Liv stabbed herself to get Clive to believe her story. The scene between them was the big highlight of the hour, as Clive finally learns the truth after so long and completely changes his perspective on what’s been going on around him. It also leaves a big question mark on his and Liv’s friendship since she did lie to him all this time.

After hearing what Liv had to say, Clive ends up dropping the case to release Major. It did come at a big cost for our detective as he risked losing his chance at getting into the FBI and his relationship with Dale Bozzio (Jessica Harmon). We feel bad for Clive since he worked so hard on the case, only to realize that he has to save Major from starting a citywide panic and not having to tell Dale why he did what he did. Hopefully, these two get back together as soon as the impending zombie apocalypse has been averted.

The other big development was with Ravi as he went through a big change towards the end of the episode. Ravi ended up trying to save Liv’s life after being drugged by Janko. The fight scene between him and Janko was tough to watch, especially after Ravi injected the drug into Janko, killing him in the process. Ravi has never killed someone before, so it will surely affect him going forward. He did it to protect Liv, but at the risk of changing him psychologically. They ended up using Janko’s brain in order to find out where Max Rager is keeping the rest of the survivors, including Drake (Greg Finley).

‘Dead Beat’ had some great stand out moments for most of our characters. Many secrets came to light during the penultimate hour, including Clive finally knowing the truth about zombies. We also had some major changes with characters like Major struggling to keep his humanity or having Ravi killing someone in self-defense gave us a reason why this show is great. This set of characters is what makes the show fun to watch.