Poly-ish Movie Reviews - Episode 57: iZombie

Yet another cop drama with non-monogamous people involved in a murder?  Can Hollywood actually show ethical non-monogamy or is it just another excuse to punish "deviants"?  Joreth reviews the Netflix show, iZombie, to find out.

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That was a surprisingly hopeful episode.  Well, I mean, the whole series has a hopeful tone, given the subject matter and the impossible situations it spirals into.  But I was still surprised by this one.

iZombie is a quirky little show.  The premise is that a young, over-achieving doctor gets invited to a trendy boat party by a rival who is impressed with her doctoring skills.  At the party, a new designer drug is introduced, everyone but the doctor gets high, and then, inexplicably, a zombie outbreak happens.  The doctor, whose name is Liv, gets scratched as she runs to jump off the boat and wakes up in a body bag on the beach with all the other victims of the party.

This is just the opening credits.  Now the walking dead, Liv goes into a major depression (I mean, who wouldn't?) upon learning that she's dead and craving brains.  She breaks up with her fiance, quits her promising career as a heart surgeon, and goes to work in the cororner's office, where she can steal the brains from the dead patients when she closes them back up after their autopsies, before sending the bodies out to their final arrangements.

Now, here's the kicker ... after she eats someone's brain, she gets flashes of memories from that person's life and starts to take on some of their personality characteristics.  She accidentally has a flash of a murder victim's life while the investigating officer just happens to be in the morgue inquiring about the body.  Her boss (who has figured it all out within 10 minutes of the first episode) covers for her blurting out this data that she couldn't possibly know by claiming that Liv is a pyschic.  Because that's easier to swallow.

So now Liv eats the brains of murder victims that her boss looks the other way for, in exchange for studying her condition and trying to find a cure, and she runs around solving crimes as a psychic cororner sidekick to the rookie cop who believes her "visions".

I really like this show, but then I really like police procedural shows.  I always have, and I continue to love them even now with all the shit going on about real cops.  But that's not the point of this review.  In this second episode, we meet a couple in an open marriage.

Javier is a brilliant young artist married to Lola, who appears to adore him.  Javier is a stereotypical "male artist", meaning that he is all about passion - passion in his work, passion in life, and passion in bed.  When Liv gets a flash of Javier having sex with someone who is not Lola, the crime fighting duo think they have a break in the case with his affair.  As the cop says, "it's always the spouse".  But when they go to Javier's loft to speak with his wife, they find the mistress with her arms around Lola, comforting her.

Lola introduces her as "my favorite of Javier's lovers".  This is where we learn that they have an open marriage.  I like this scene because Lola defends her relationship with Javier without sounding defensive, as in "methinks she doth protest too much".

[insert audio clip of Lola introducing Tasha as "my favorite of my husband's lovers"]

Now, here is where I would normally get really irritated at how non-monogamy is portrayed in pop media.  In The Mentalist, the open marriage was a red herring, and I loved that about the episode.  The cops spend time and resources chasing down dead end leads because sex is so often a motive for murder, but their particular open marriage had nothing at all to do with the murder.  That's very rare, in my experience.  Usually these shows indicate who is the "bad guy" by making them kinky or non-monogamous or a casual drug user, because only deviants do those sorts of things, and deviants must also be criminals, obvs.

So usually I get pissed off about that.  But I didn't see the anger in this one, because I see the motive all the time in the poly community, so it's clearly a common experience.  The anger at being replaced, not murder, of course.  That's a very common fear, whether it's from couples who create a bunch of rules to protect their marriage or it's monogamous people who tell us without a shred of shame that they could "never do that" because "what if your partner finds someone they like better than you?"  As usual, in order to discuss the parts that are relevant to polyamory, I have to spoil the big reveal.

SPOILERS:

We eventually find out that Javier knocked up his manager's teenage daughter.  Which could have led to the manager being the murderer as either pissed off at Javier for "cheating" on Lola, whom the manager secretly loved and not-so-secretly thought Javier was a