#And the real husband was a paid actor?? And was blackmailing but may have gotten killed??

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

Look not to be "You younglings have it easy" but everyone of those people wanting the Nuanced™ and Sensical™ Plot™ in the 2nd episode of the show would not have survived 90's/00's/10's cartoons

[welcometoteamz]

I’ve ranted about what I didn’t like in iZombie S4 and what I would do differently, but tbh, I would go back and apply a lil bit in S3 tbh as well.Most of it involves my trash boi Blaine.

I had multiple verses set during the year long hiatus between S2 and S3 where I wrote Blaine’s amnesia as being legitimate. That said, I’ve made my peace with the fact it became a lie. It honestly makes more sense for him to try to turn his life around, but get caught in a lie and fuck it up for himself due to his own insecurities and fear of rejection. I’ll stand firm on that.

Which is why the reveal of having him be the one steal the cure irritates me.It’d honestly would have more tragic if he still tried to behave himself even after his lie was exposed, and it was the hit from Angus that dragged him back into his old life after he got his retribution.The fact he was with Peyton while lying is no doubt problematic and I’m mad at them for getting me on board with that and then pulling the rug out from under me... but in my mind?He was still going to try and start anew even if she chose Ravi. If Ravi hadn’t slept with Katty Kupps, and Pavi sailed in S3, and Blaine continued to be a lounge singer while working at Shady Plots…I think he would have been content.

Which goes into ways he could have gotten out of his lie, which someone as cunning as Blaine should have thought about.Like. Why not get out of the lie, with another lie? Say that Ravi’s memory serum works? That way Major is injected with both at the same time, and no one suspects anything is afoot when his memories came back? Then they do the same thing to all the other zombies when it is possible to mass produce the cure.Blaine gets his fresh start, a new job, and to be happy with Peyton.

Sure, he loses the brain business, but I think he’d give all that up for being actually truly content and happy. Let’s not forget, that was the same episode Angus took his inheritance back. Had that not happened, would that be something Blaine would have done? Knowing that even if he didn’t have the business, he had those millions to fall back on? I think so.Going back to his stealing the cure, though… and why that doesn’t entirely work for me…

Let’s be honest. There was a lot of inconsistency. At the end of episode six Blaine apparently is cooking up blue brain juice, and you may think ok, he is still thinking about the brain business. It may be possible he stole the cures after all.

The very next episode, though. He was in a depressed funk. He had caring about the business when he was in his depressed funk. Candy had to get on him about the orders. When Don E. and Dino show up at Shady Plots to tell him they’re taking his brain supply and customers, he’s visibly angry, but also looks defeated before Dino shoots him. Like he’s just so broken down at that point that he’s just accepted it. Would that guy even have bothered to steal the cures, if he didn’t care about the business?

Hell, if you hadn’t seen the prior episode, would you have thought that Blaine bothered to cook up blue brain juice before going to drunkenly sing at his lounge gig?It’s not until his sense of self preservation kicks in when he’s shot, that he has a sense of what to do with himself. First things first, that’s revenge.

Then he discovers Angus’ plan to team up with Fillmore-Graves (WHICH DOESN’T EVEN COME INTO PLAY AT ALL IN S4 WHEN FUCKFACE RETURNS. NO ONE CALLS HIM OUT ON HATING FILLMORE-GRAVES, REMINDING HIM OF HIS PLAN. HOW AWESOME WOULD IT HAVE BEEN IF THIS WAS EXPOSED TO HIS CHURCH AND THEY TORE HIM APART LIKE THE HYENAS DID SCAR IN THE LION KING) and that’s what reinvigorates him.

Now there are two tangents I could go into here. So I will.

The first is how Blaine’s storyline in the back half of S3 may have suffered due to Andrea Savage leaving the show for her own series, I’m Sorry. It’s possible we would have seen her and Blaine face off if she learned he presumably killed her husband Harrison.Which. Is an issue I have with S4 as well. Chase is Harrison’s brother. He works with Blaine.

Upon meeting him, he would be smart enough and would easily be able to figure out that Blaine was the OG brain supplier and would have been the one to kill his brother.Once he no longer needed Blaine, i.e. was done with his blackmail? He would have put him in the guillotine. I expected this, honestly. I expected Blaine to pull the same card he pulled on Liv in S1. That without him, they have a zombie apocalypse on their hands. There was a brain shortage prior to the outbreak when Blaine approached him in the S3 finale. In S4 it’s even worse than it was then. There’s even a plot about Major tracking down watered down brain tube dealers.

Chase is a proud man, he wouldn’t have gone back to Blaine automatically… but after the US Government cuts off the brain supply in the finale, Major enlists Blaine to increase his operations.You don’t think that in the middle of the brain shortage crisis, Chase would have bitten the bullet and remembered Blaine’s proposal? Ok, at this point, you’re probably asking yourself. “Mmhm, okay, so maybe that’s a better plot for Blaine… but then who did steal the cures?”

Osborn Oates.

Don’t remember him? Yeah, neither do any of the characters, apparently.He was the guy who was Natalie’s captor. Who apparently had the the influence to bribe Max Rager guards under Vaughn Du Clark’s nose. He was described by Ravi as being like a Bond villain.Natalie warns Major that wherever he goes, he’ll find her, but then… he doesn’t. She travels the world. He doesn’t track her down. Even when she herself would have been vulnerable and amnesiac.He doesn’t even try to track down Major and find out what he knows, or if he was responsible for her escape. We know he is aware of Major. Major and Ravi followed he and his body guard.His body guard even checked Ravi’s morgue ID, and would have known where the cures were kept had he known about the cures.

Which… I think, Natalie might have told him about, in an effort to barter her freedom.Remember when we first met her? She said that since she was paid in brains by Blaine, who had become her pimp after turning her, that she ran through her savings and was broke.Yet… when she returns in S3, she tells Major that she traveled the world and had a place in Italy that she got thanks to her savings earned as sex worker.So… what is the truth?

I don’t want to speculate about a villainous lying Natalie. I actually liked her character, and she was certainly victimized and I don’t want to take away from that at all. Given her desperate situation though, might she have made some choices out of self preservation? Her own best interest?I think there was more to the Natalie situation than we got. I think it suffered because they went from 19 episodes in season 2 back to a 13 episode order. I don’t know if her exit had more to do with propelling Major’s character’s decisions, or if because Natalie’s actress Brooke Lyons had gotten work as a series regular on the show Life Sentence. Maybe a bit of both?

Maybe they did plan to kill her at the end of the arc, but the arc happened sooner than anticipated due to the shortened season? Knowing that they’d be losing her, they couldn’t carry that thread over to S4? So instead they just dropped Osborn Oates, and over the summer Rob Thomas decided to change it to Blaine in S4 because no one would question it?

Sorry Rob, I question it. You said in post S3 interviews that you planned to reveal who stole the cures in the finale, but there was no time so you’d get to it in S4.Really? That’s why? No time? If you had the time, how would it have come into play? The way it did come into play was Blaine seeking out Mama Leone, because Chase was blackmailing him. Are you telling me Chase would have done so in the S3 finale? That you would have seeded Renegade as a plotline even then?

I’m calling bullshit.I think it’s far more likely that your plans fell through, and you needed the time over the hiatus to do a rewrite.Even if Natalie had nothing to do with the cures being stolen, if it was planned to be Blaine all along…

You kill her off, and she doesn’t even get to confront Blaine? They never have a scene together? He’s responsible for her being a zombie, which led to her being kidnapped, and then held hostage.Yet he helped Major find her when he could have pleaded ignorance. He gave him Oates’ address and let him know when he was back in town.

He didn’t have to do that. He could have said that it’s not the address on record, said “I guess Oates is thorough and has someone else handle his pickups” and Major wouldn’t have questioned him.

He could have elected not to tip Major off that he was back in town. To stay out of it. Had he done so? Major wouldn’t have been able to find Natalie and give her the cure when he did.I’m not saying this excuses Blaine of what he did to her at all, or that the two would have been “even” or made peace. Not at all. There is no retribution for what he did to her.It does however, go back to my belief he was legit trying to change.

As for why Chase never mentions or figures out Blaine killed his brother? Why wasn’t that a thing? Why didn’t we get more time to know Chase and see his conflict, rather than having it rushed to him buckling under the pressure of the job?

In hindsight, knowing what we do about the actor who played Blaine’s father… I kind of wish Chase had gotten that series regular promotion instead. What did the Angus stuff really add to the season, at the end of the day? Blaine would have taken Major’s deal regardless, whether or not he was in debt. He would have done it just if it meant he wouldn’t be put in prison, and because he’d get a kick out of having Major at his mercy.

Which… he shouldn’t be in debt right now either... because now Angus is dead for real and he should have those millions. Or did he spend those millions, when he came back, to feed his flock? I imagine someone else took over his business, but he still had all his personal accounts.

At the end of the day, all the Brother Love stuff was just a bunch of filler. You know what would have been interesting? If Brother Love used Enzo to reach out to those remaining dissenting Fillmore-Graves employees that Carey Gold told us existed but we never saw in S4. We saw corruption in S4 with Russ Roche, but the only real zombie supremacist within the organization was Enzo himself.

Speaking of which, what happened to Enzo? Did he die along with Angus’ flock? It seemed like they were building to a big finale that was going to be Angus’ church throwing a revolution against Fillmore-Graves, with Liv and her Renegade folks stuck in the middle.By the filming of the last episode, did they just decide they didn’t want to give Angus’ actor any more screentime than it would take to organically write him out? Cause his exit was anticlimactic. I mean, the actor didn’t deserve any more screentime. I wouldn’t want to see him on my screen, but...

It happened in a news report.Thing is though, I don’t know if that was why. I mean, they made Angus a regular, and he only interacted with each series regular save Blaine once. He interacted with Peyton in 3x03, before he was even a regular. His only conscious interaction with Major was when he and his squad checked out the church. He interacted with Liv when she and Levon went there seeing if he could help them get more brains. Another thing which is never touched upon after that episode.His only interaction with Ravi and Clive took place at the same time in the interrogation room

.Yet we had that whole subplot of that kid Tucker who was a zombie hater who became a Brother Love devotee after being kicked out of the Romero’s basement by Blaine? Okay, what happened to that kid? Did he die with the flock as well? We never saw him. We spent all that time with him, and why? Just so he could kill someone and Enzo could let him go, and pass word on to Angus?

…Enzo couldn’t have just approached Angus himself, after attending his sermon? Or did he feel like he needed to prove himself, considering Angus’ distrust of Fillmore-Graves? Ok, but then...

Again, Angus himself wanted to partner up with them in S3. Inconsistent. Yes, you could say he changed his mind after seeing their regime and how Chase led them. That he lost his mind in the well, which he did.…but in hindsight… given what they did with him, and the fact he was played by a man accused of multiple accounts of sexual assault?

I wish we hadn’t seen him come back at all. He should have been left in the well to turn into a Romero. Blaine should have just not fed him. All that extra screentime, we could have gotten Blaine vs Chase (in the wake of Vivian) with Liv caught in the middle and just trying to help people. Instead we got… a mess…

In my personal opinion.