Abra Cadaver: Review for iZombie 207 By A. Zombie


Let me be blunt; this episode bored me to tears. There’s little to no overall plot progress. The brain Liv eats makes her weirder than the old lady down the street who dresses her cats like the Avengers and she’s a thousand times more annoying than usual neurotic Liv.

Meet our newest corpse, Syd Wicked. It’s a stage name, of course. Syd is a magician, in town for an industry convention. His body is found in his hotel room, a metal-edged playing card embedded in his jugular. The only person seen entering the room on security camera footage is the maid who found the body and the three security guards who answered her distress call. After Liv takes her lunch break, she decides to hold a not-really-real séance in the morgue where she communes with Syd’s body and is generally, stupidly goth-weird. It’s so stereotypical, my eyes rolled across my cell on their own. 

iZ 207 Liv Seance

Blaine interrupts the tête-à-tête. Thank goodness. Maybe. Seeing as Blaine doesn’t shamble amongst the half-dead anymore, he comes to Liv for a little zombie mojo to help figure out who’s kidnapping the rich zombies in town before Agent Bozzio puts the insane puzzle pieces together herself and exposes not only Liv, but Blaine and his business. That’s if she has everything she needs to track them down. Only one way to find out. That evening, Liv and Blaine stake out Bozzio’s house. They wait for Clive to take Bozzio to the movies. The couple have other plans for a randy night in. Drat. Gotta come back the next day. This time they successfully make it inside Bozzio’s house. Wouldn’t you know it; the files are all organized on the dining room table. Convenient. Liv suggests they divide and conquer the files. Mistake. Blaine flips past a picture of Miner, the one clue which would have solved the case. It’s a cheap misdirection; kinda like the worm in Labryinth leading Sara away from the path directly to the castle beyond the Goblin City. The only productive part of the break-in is when they intercept the report on the mystery brain from Suzuki’s fridge. Liv takes the report, doctors it to say the brain is bovine, and returns it to Bozzio’s house.

iZ 207 Liv Blaine Stakeout

Back on the magical murder, Clive has an army of potential suspects to weed through. Turns out, Syd was kind of an a-hole. Anytime a fellow magician snubbed him, Syd took to Youtube and exposed their signature tricks. Two notable names are Houdina and The Magnificent Magnus. Houdina was on stage during the murder. Magnus, well, the old guy still has gas in his tank and had a lovely red-headed companion occupying his time—though he cannot remember her name. Houdina raises their interest later in the episode when Liv has a vision starring Houdina, wearing a wedding dress and throwing a diamond ring at Syd. Then they learn she may not have been on stage when they thought, according to Mr. Smoak of magic duo Smoak and Meers. Houdina exposes the secret ending to her show—she uses a disguise to vanish in plain sight, posing as a clueless waitress after pulling a vanishing act.


Liv’s observational skills do not fail her, for once, and she spots eerily familiar handwriting on a message board in the maid’s break area at the hotel. Meers, a mute performer, uses a specific ampersand when he writes. The now-missing maid who found Syd’s body used the same ampersand to note missing items on the message board.

iZ 207 Smoak and Meers

With lackluster flair, Liv exposes Meers’ real identity and her partner’s involvement in ensuring the other suspects in the case didn’t have an alibi. Ta-da! Yawn. The only intriguing part of the episode is a mysterious woman at Bozzio’s door. She hesitates for a while before dropping a package on the welcome mat and leaving, obviously torn over whatever is in the envelope.

This is a poor mid-season episode. There’s not even humor to keep it going. Liv isn’t just annoying with her death-obsessed brain, she’s stuck on the notion that she and Major cannot have sex. Like it’s the end of the world if they can’t do it all day, every day. She harps on the idea so much, if I hear the word sex from her or Major one more time this season, I’ll swallow razors. Can we request her next working lunch be from an a-sexual person?