Warning: This post contains spoilers, undead and otherwise, for the iZombie season three premiere. Go find some brains to eat elsewhere if you haven’t watched the episode yet!

The season two finale of iZombie was, as they say, a game-changer. The Max Rager rager ended in a supremely bloody horror movie fashion and brought to light information that alters the landscape. We met Vivian Stoll, the leader of a company/friendly neighborhood zombie horde planning on making Seattle the capital of the zombie homeland. (Yeah, sounds a teensy bit ominous.) The season three premiere, “Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother,” delves into Vivian’s grandiose plans. Here’s how iZombie’s world and mythology expanded:

Fillmore Graves

Liv and Clive tried to ask Vivian directly what making Seattle the capital of the zombie homeland meant, and they didn’t get a direct answer. As the CEO of Fillmore Graves (oh, how I love iZombie’s puns for business names) and now Max Rager, Vivian employs pretty much all zombies. They’re preparing for the inevitable day when humans find out their neighbors and co-workers have a brain-filled diet—and said day might be closer than anyone thinks. They don’t anticipate the coming out going well, and though I admire Liv’s optimism about how the human race will react, I side with Vivian. Humans tend to freak out about what they don’t understand or relate to.

That said, Vivian wants to go extreme. Her company is hard at work making a private island they’ve purchased into Zombie Island. Seriously. It might sound like an amusement park geared towards scares, but the idea is for all the zombies to move there and keep to themselves. I don’t know how they’d get brains for everyone, but I have no doubt Vivian has a solution. She’s formidable and savvy.

So, to summarize: the zombie population is much larger than we realized, they’re nervous about human awareness, and they’re preparing to self-segregate. It’s a lot for viewers to process and even more for Liv to wrap her head around. Luckily, she ate a soldier brain; it kept her focused and from falling apart. Maybe her next brain will help her practice avoidance, but how does she go back to her day-to-day existence knowing what she knows?

And by the by, Major ended up joining Fillmore Grave’s ranks—because of course he did.

Undead Children

This is tied into the Fillmore Graves business, but I wanted to call out the presence of zombie children. They have a safe haven at Fillmore Graves; they can attend school and not have to worry about raging out and infecting classmates. They also learn tips on staying incognito, like tanning and dyeing. It was a surprise to learn undead kids exist and it was jarring as hell to see so many of them. How did they contract the zombie virus?

Their presence makes protecting the zombie secret that much more important.

Cure Possibilities

Ravi has had mixed luck with figuring out the cure to the zombie virus. Obviously, he can’t make a fully functional cure because it would mean the end of the series. So, they’ve come up with some creative and detrimental side effects to Ravi’s work so far—as we’ve seen with Blaine, the latest version of the cure causes a bit of amnesia.

However, there is hope. Ravi’s cooking up something to address the memory issues. I wonder if Fillmore will begin to view Ravi as a threat. I also wonder what his former boss from the CDC is going to think when she pieces together the truth about the undead.

Zombie Targets

Liv already has a lot of change on her plate, but why not add another threat to the mix? Someone is targeting zombies. The killer is, well, killing—not taking Major’s gentler, non-lethal approach. Thank goodness Clive is now in the loop because his detective skills are going to be necessary to figure this out. (Side note: how sweet was he to Liv? He took the zombie news much better than I thought he would!)

And finally: this doesn’t have to do with how the iZombie status quo is transforming, but I laughed out loud so damn hard at the Rob Thomas nod. The “in memory of” tweet from Carlos Santana was basically the best.

What do you think the consequences of the zombie world expanding will be? Tell me your opinions and theories in the comments.

Images: The CW