iZombie 3×01 Review: Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother

Hallelujah, a good zombie show is back on TV! iZombie returned tonight with its season three premiere “Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother”.

And what a premiere it was. “Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother” packed quite a few punches, even if the usual focus on what type of zombie brains Liv was on was relegated to a very minor part of the plot. Of course, the time they would have normally spent developing the brain portion of the story was instead spent wrapping up some of the season two finale’s loose ends while also finding time to introduce an arc for season three.

I meant to make time to re-watch some of last season before this one aired, but unfortunately wasn’t able to do so. Thankfully, the writers did a great job of inserting little reminders about what happened leading up to “Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother” without those reminders being heavy-handed.

And of course we got more information about Vivian and her zombie soldiers, and all of it was surprisingly…well, positive? Vivian’s story about how she became a zombie was actually really sweet, and of course the fact that it was obviously Blaine who made her husband a zombie in the first place really brought everything full circle. That said, the continuation of that story being that her employees were then part of a sort of biological weapon attack and she ‘saved’ them by turning all of them – even their children – into zombies…well, I’ll admit that was a bit much.

Still, at first it seemed like they all had things well in hand – even Clive, who by the way was amazing in this episode (especially considering that he was literally just thrown into his knowledge of the whole zombie thing and then also had to deal with hearing about Peyton and Blaine on top of that). Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for things to start falling apart. Despite his name being cleared, most people still see Major as the Chaos Killer…which means his only choice was to join Vivian’s zombie soldiers.

And then there was the surprising (but not unwelcome!) return of Aaron Douglas as Chuck Burd! Because as it turned out, Billy the security guard from the Max Rager party lived to tell his tale…and that tale featured him watching party goers get brutally attacked and torn apart before having their brains eaten. (So much for Vivian and her people thinking of everything.) Clive and Liv didn’t get to Chuck’s studio in time to stop Billy from telling all, and to top it all off, Billy then recognized Clive as the cop who was at the party – so it was pretty much a double oops.

But that’s not all – Peyton has something going on with Twitter (essentially, people saying awful things to/about her), Scott woke up Blaine’s father, and then at the very end of “Heaven Just Got a Little Bit Smoother” the worst of the worst happened – a family of zombies was murdered, and one of them was a little boy named Wally…the same little boy who Clive ran into when he, Liv, and Major met with Vivian and heard her story, a little boy who had once been his neighbor. And now Clive is out for answers…and, it appears, probably some revenge, too.

So a lot happened in the iZombie season three premiere (too much for me to cover all of it, honestly), but overall I was really happy with the episode and can’t wait to see where this season takes us. Because in case you can’t tell, I’m pretty darn giddy that this show is finally back on the air!

Author: Tara Lynne

Tara Lynne is an author, fandom and geek culture expert, and public speaker. She founded Ice & Fire Con, the first ever Game of Thrones convention in the US, and now runs its parent company Saga Event Planning.

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