Spoilers ahead for the Season 5 premiere of iZombie, called "Thug Death."
The fifth and final season of iZombie has finally kicked off on The CW, and the premiere revealed just how the humans and zombies of Seattle managed to carry on after the Season 4 cliffhanger. Peyton is the acting mayor, Major is commander of Fillmore-Graves, Liv wants to help people get into Seattle, Major has to stop people trying to get out of Seattle, Dale in pregnant, Ravi is working on a cure, and Clive is just trying to do the right thing. Oh, and Seattleites still love their coffee.
The atmosphere within Seattle required a delicate balance to keep the peace, and that wasn't really working out. The zombie-hating Dead Enders showed their willingness to get violent, and starving zombies attacked and killed a woman to munch on her brain. This was unfortunately caught on camera, and it turned some human brain smugglers against their agreement to help Blaine with his brain biz. A lot of people could die if something isn't done, and it's difficult to imagine a solution at this point.
Although Ravi's cure is one way that the zombie/human conflict could come to an end, would that really be a good fix? Changing the zombies wouldn't change the nature of the people who wanted to hurt them, but it would mean the brain trade could come to an end, and starving zombies might not get violent.
iZombie leading lady Rose McIver spoke to CinemaBlend and other press outlets at a set visit last fall, and she weighed in on whether she'd like to see Liv cured of her zombism at the end of the series. Here are her feelings about the matter:
I feel similar about humans eating meat... You know how they're trying to make fake meat? [That] would be a really good thing, I feel like, for zombies, so you don't have to denounce who you've become and who you are, because I think Liv is so much more interesting and empathetic based on her experience, so I don't her to feel like she has to reverse... It also doesn't serve all of our metaphors. It's been sort of minorities or people who've felt marginalized. So I think that it's great for the zombies still to be able to exist. I just think clearly there is something that has to be addressed so that they can live together. So my instinct isn't just to heal her and to make her a human again. But I don't know the ending, I don't know how they've written it. That's what I would like. A fake brain compound to be made.
Liv has suffered a great deal over the course of the series due to her status as a zombie, as have plenty of other characters. That said, Liv wouldn't be who she is today if not for her experiences as a zombie. According to Rose McIver, Liv doesn't need to be healed or changed back to who she was before. Liv is somebody new now.
Besides, as Rose McIver said, iZombie's message of marginalization might be undersold if the show just went ahead and changed her back to "normal" at the end. iZombie's has been Liv's struggle for acceptance and safety as much as it has been a fight for brains and survival.
Would it really be a satisfying conclusion if iZombie simply took away the zombie threat, instead of requiring the people to work together and be better? Humans and zombies living together could deliver the kind of closure fans want after five seasons of Liv finding herself and helping others do the same.
None of this is to say that all the zombies of iZombie would feel the same about being a zombie, and Ravi is still working on finding a cure. He discovered in Season 4 that zombies could be cured if they were to eat the brain of a person with Freylich Syndrome.
While that was great news for Dale and Clive last season when Liv gave up her shot at a cure so that Dale and Clive could start a family, it's not a safe long-term solution, as Ravi made clear in the Season 5 premiere. Freylich Syndrome is a rare disease that generally kills the people who suffer from it in their teens.
This means that brains with Freylich Syndrome are hard to come by, and Ravi is afraid that widespread knowledge of Freylich Syndrome brains as a source of a zombie cure will result in teenagers with the disease being hunted down.
The secret is safe for the time being, but two scientists have already figured out the Freylich Syndrome solution already. Perhaps Ravi won't be able to keep the solution a secret forever. Only time will tell.
New episodes of iZombie's fifth and final season air on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. It's only one of several great shows ending in 2019, so be sure to tune in before it's done for good. If you need a refresher on all things iZombie, you can find the first four seasons streaming on Netflix.
