The zombie apocalypse never looked as good as it does on iZombie. The CW’s “zom-com-rom-dram” keeps getting better and better with each brain that Liv (Rose McIver) eats, each cure that Ravi (Rahul Kohli) tries to create, each nefarious plot that Blaine (David Anders) tries to put into action. And in season three, things are only getting bigger as Liv and the rest of Team Z find out there are a lot more zombies walking among them than they originally thought.
“Season three has a much different feel than seasons one and two,” executive producer Rob Thomas said at the 2017 Winter Television Critics Association panel. “Both of seasons one and two, there were big bads who were pretty clearly doing awful things and both seasons ended up, season one had a very cool showdown like a gunfight at the O.K. Corral and then season two topped that with a full-on traditional zombie movie at the end where they’re trying to escape from zombies. This season we wanted to do something very different.”
So how do you top a literal zombie horde attack? Instead of going bigger, you go smaller and more mysterious.
“In this season, you do not have such a clearly defined antagonist at the center of the show,” Thomas said. “In fact, the big mystery of season three for the audience is trying to figure out whose side are we on? The zombies at this military outfit Fillmore Graves just want to survive. Some of them are willing to go further than Liv might think necessary but who is in the right in this situation? That’s a big part of the question. No one needs to be nefarious in a blatant way. There’s much more figuring out who’s got the best plan for zombies moving forward.”
Now that the zombie population is growing exponentially, with an entire military community gearing up for the day that they are outted, Thomas revealed that the world might get clued in to Team Z sooner than you think.
“We were really building to a season four where that will be a big issue,” Thomas said. “It does become more front and center in season three. We say at the end of season two, ‘Look, Liv and gang, there are not just 30 zombies in town. There’s an entire zombie military outfit bent on making the world safe for zombies if the day comes when they are found out.’ There are a lot more zombies walking around in the world and the issue is, is it better to be a zombie? Are you a higher functioning creature? Is this the next step in evolution? Those issues come up this year and hopefully they will come up even more in a season four.”
One of the highlights of The CW’s zombie series is watching Liv take on the personalities of the brains she eats, each one more hilarious and wacky than the next. But there is one brain that McIver refused to have Liv eat.
“They were like, ‘We’ve got a list of 35 brains and you’re allowed to veto one,'” McIver said. “Just everything you could imagine, terrifying, all sorts of adventurous, scary things. Cat lady is what I vetoed. I’m a dog person. They thought it would be a great prank to play on me to pretend there was this brain I had to eat where I was interacting with like seven cats. That was the one where I was like, ‘Absolutely not.'”
And Robert Buckley got a taste of what McIver does on a weekly basis now that newly-zombified Major has to eat brains to survive. He really gets his chance to shine in episode two of the new season when Liv and Major eat the brains of a teenage girl and her father. But Major, not Liv, eats the brain of the daughter.
“They had told me in the off-season, ‘We have a great episode for you. It’s perfect for you,'” Buckley said. “As an actor, that’s exciting, like is he going to be a cage fighter or a lothario? They were like, ‘No, for you, a 14-year-old bitchy teenage girl.’ It wasn’t a stretch at all. That’s just who I am. But then to try and balance Major who is quite a dude bro, he’s a man, with a 14-year-old girl, like be super hot but also freezing cold at the same time, it’s very challenging. It’s not easy at all.”
You’ll never look at Major the same way after that episode; that’s a guarantee.
Images: The CW
iZombie season three premieres Tuesday, April 4 at 9 p.m. on The CW.
