iZombie Season 4 Episode 12 Review: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Liv Away”

“You’ve Got to Hide Your Liv Away” is the penultimate episode of iZombie Season 4, and while most of the installment is filled with fun, goofy gags, by the end of the hour, things quickly get intense, reminding viewers that there’s only one episode left in Season 4 and that this season will most likely not end well for all of our major characters. Right now, the two characters in the most danger are Liv and Levon, who both turn themselves in as Renegade to Chase Graves in order to save Curtis from execution. Although Liv proves to Chase that she’s the real Renegade so that he’ll release Levon, everyone’s favorite documentary filmmaker has other plans. Levon grabs Chase’s gun, holds him hostage, and shoots one of the Fillmore Graves soldiers in the head, but before he can even leave the office, Chase Graves disarms Levon and throws him to the ground, promising that he’ll now be executed for his crimes alongside Liv.

As I mentioned above, this is a terrifying situation that Liv and Levon find themselves in. Chase Graves is behaving more erratically than ever before, shooting recruits and suspecting that everyone around him is going to betray him, and he’s out to prove to a point in the most deadly way possible. If you go against him, whether you’re a human or a zombie, you’re going to be punished without mercy because, in his mind, he has sole control of New Seattle.

But we know that’s not true because of the looming threat of Angus and his congregation, which sits like a powder keg ready to go off at any second throughout “You’ve Got to Hide Your Liv Away.” Every time Blaine shares a scene with his father during the episode, he encourages him to rally his followers to escape the city’s borders and go turn half the world into zombies, leaving the other human half of the world to be their food supply. Blaine believes this is the only way to guarantee that they stay alive, given that the U.S. government has already evacuated people within 30 miles of New Seattle and is still very much considering dropping a nuke on the city. When Angus shies away from Blaine’s ideas, saying God hasn’t spoken to him about that yet, Blaine has Don E. create “brain snow” to trick Angus into believing it’s a sign from God, a sign that it’s time for zombies to step up as the superior race and create a new world order. This uprising presents a major threat to Chase Graves’s leadership; unlike Liv’s relatively small group of coyotes, Angus’s congregation is overflowing with zombies, some of whom are still pretending to be loyal to Chase, such as the Fillmore Graves Inspector. Unfortunately for Chase, though, he’s been so wrapped up in stopping the brain selling on the black market and Renegade’s coyote operations that he’s barely had time to focus on Brother Love’s church, and whatever Angus and Blaine end up deciding to do together could be what finally takes Chase down in the finale, more so than any rescue plan Major, Ravi, or the rest of the coyotes come up with to save Liv and Levon.

Plus, Major’s rescue/kidnapping plan in this week’s iZombie doesn’t exactly go as well as he hopes so he might not be the best person to lead the charge on a new one next week. While Ravi and Levon implore Liv not to turn herself to save Curtis and believe that their asking her to do so will be enough, Major knows better. He knows that, no matter what Liv promises anyone, she’s going to sacrifice herself in order to protect those who are innocent because she’s Liv Moore. Even though Major tried to make his remark about her being a hero a couple of weeks ago snide and sarcastic, there was truth to it, and Liv’s desire to be that hero, that savior of Seattle, is one of the things that he loves most about her, even though it also wildly frustrates him. But that heroic purpose has always been what’s defined Liv’s character since the start of iZombie, since her very first case with Clive when she began to realize that she could make a difference in the world again, even as a zombie. It’s why I’ve said so many times before that iZombie is, in many ways, a show about the struggles of depression, about rediscovering who you are and how and why you matter even when everything and everyone around you feels almost alien.

Over the past four years, we’ve seen Liv deal with those challenges as she tries to cement her new identity, and with each season, that role shifts slightly but it’s never changed more than in Season 4 in which she’s gone from finding justice for the dead to creating new lives for the sick but still living. Liv’s determination to be something greater than herself and to help the world, even if it’s just people within her city’s borders, in any small way that she can is why she makes such a fantastic protagonist. Her altruism shines through no matter what brain she’s on, which is why she breaks free of the married couple brain she and Major eat and turns the tables on him before the hour is over. Sure, part of the reason is that, because she ate the wife’s brain, Liv was predisposed to be annoyed by Major’s behavior, but more importantly, as she explains to him when she lock him up with the Romero couple in the basement after saving him from Russ Roche, these types of selfless, dangerous actions are what make Liv who she is. If she let someone else die for her, she would no longer be her true self, and Major should not and cannot ask her to give that up. However, Liv is asking Major to give her up, to let her go, and if their romantic, fantasy getaway in this week’s episode shows us anything, it’s that Major certainly isn’t ready to say goodbye to Liv and will be doing just about anything, including potentially sacrificing his own life, to save her in next week’s finale.

Other thoughts:

• Speaking of couples who can’t let each other go, when Clive learns from Cavanagh that Bozzio lied to him in last week’s episode in order to set him free so he could have a normal life with kids, he confronts Dale and delivers quite possibly the most romantic speech we’ve ever seen on iZombie. “You are the non-negotiable,” Clive tells her. “There’s no version of life without you that I want.” Clive mentions that he’s willing to become a zombie for Dale, a huge turn for his character, which I hope gets explored more in next week’s finale, and then he proposes and Bozzio says yes! As I mentioned above, it’s sweeping and romantic, and as I said on Twitter last night, this scene had me cheering more loudly than almost any other scene on TV this year.
• Another development that had me almost as excited, though: Ravi may have found the real cure! After studying Isobel’s brain and the brain of White Girl, who had been cured of the zombie virus before her murder, Ravi tests the chemicals that Isobel’s brain produced on the rats in the lab and discovers that her brain may in fact be the cure that Liv, Bozzio, and so many other zombies have been looking for. So maybe, just maybe, Clive won’t have to become a zombie after all.
• But if Clive’s not a zombie, then we won’t get to see him take on a hilarious personality like Liv has done so many times before and like Ravi does in this week’s episode after he eats White Girl’s brain to help Clive with his case. Ultimately, Tucker, one of Angus’s followers, admits that he murdered White Girl, but this week’s case is less about who committed the crime and more about Rahul Kohli getting to be big and weird and crazy funny throughout most of the hour, as Ravi leaves open his button-down shirts, takes hundreds of photos for Instagram, and asks if they have coconut water at The Scratching Post. It almost reaches the heights of Major on teenage girl brain.
• I have to almost laugh at how easily Liv dispatches Russ Roche in this week’s episode after so much of this season has focused on Russ being this dangerous, loose-cannon criminal. It takes Liv all of five seconds to stab him in the head and kill him, saving Major in the process.
• Best comic-book title card of the week: “Beard Science.”
• “I’m going to ask you one more time to button that shirt.” “I’m proud of my body, and if I want to show it, I’m going to. No one is making you look.”
• “Okay, I don’t like him, but I am digging the cape.”

What did everyone else think about the penultimate episode of iZombie Season 4? What are you hoping to see from the season finale next week? Comment below and let me know.

[Photo credit: Katie Yu/The CW]