‘iZombie’ Boss on Major’s Moral Compass and the Female Big Bad

Meredith Jacobs May 9, 2019, 9:00 pm

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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 5, Episode 2 of iZombie, “Dead Lift.”]

It’s too bad Major (Robert Buckley) can’t fill out and approve his own application to leave New Seattle, because he could really use a vacation.

Life doesn’t get any easier for him in Thursday’s episode of iZombie. Some of the Filmore Graves soldiers disagree with Major’s policies. They felt safer before the curfew was eliminated and they had to wear body cameras. They also feel like engaging in community outreach conflict resolution courses is a waste of time. But Major wants them to hold themselves to “higher standards.”

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“There are half a million humans in Seattle and 10,000 of us,” he says. “If they decide that we only have zombie interests at heart, the city will collapse.”

After Filmore Graves soldiers come under attack again, this time resulting in Jordan’s (Jade Payton) death, the soldiers again voice their concerns. Major overhears and confronts them. He points out Jordan saved her fellow zombie. What about them? “I’m asking you to be smart,” he says. “Yeah, some of us are going to die so that all of us don’t die.”

(Michael Courtney/The CW)

“What we wanted to do is force Major to do the thing he believes in when it’s hard,” creator Rob Thomas told TV Insider. “A few Filmore Graves soldiers die, and it weighs on him that he’s going to keep doing what he thinks is the right way to handle the city — not having a curfew, outreach programs, midnight basketball, all the things that he can do to try and bond the city together where his soldiers want revenge.”

However, it’s not as easy for him to make that same decision after Jordan’s death. “When he has to make those decisions after, when somebody we know he cares about, someone he brought into Filmore Graves, dies, can he retain his moral compass?” Thomas asks. “He does, and he will retain that moral compass throughout the season, but that doesn’t mean that that’s going to work out well for him or for Filmore Graves.”

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Meanwhile, the investigation into the zombie-on-human violence caught on video in the Season 5 premiere continues, but Liv (Rose McIver) and Clive (Malcolm Goodwin) come up empty identifying the victim — because there wasn’t one. The attack was faked, but the public won’t believe it without proof.

(Michael Courtney/The CW)

Therefore, they have to fight fake news with fake news. They get humans to confess to the hoax and then smuggle them out of the city. They release the names of those behind a shooting at a human bar and make a big show of the guillotine being back in use in a news report.

But the ones really behind the fake video, led by Dolly (Jennifer Irwin), know it’s a lie. Dolly even stirs up even more zombie hate by spreading the lie that four people died in the bar shooting when it was really one.

(Robert Falconer/The CW)

That storyline was partly inspired by groups like the Irish Republican Army, Thomas explained. “There would be the reasonable face, the face you put out to the public, the one who goes on TV and makes the reasoned arguments for why this should happen,” he said. “I was interested in doing that in Seattle, to have a conservative mom be the public face of the anti-zombie/pro-human group and then to find out that actually she’s running the whole show.”

“Our Big Bads have been male in all these seasons, and so I was interested in having a female Big Bad,” he added.