I remember seeing the promo for this show while waiting to watch Avengers a few weeks back and thought it was really a cool idea in the twist of solving a crime by entering the mind of the deceased. It’s not exactly a new idea but it’s novel in the way that it’s carried out on iZombie.   I was hoping for something worthwhile in this show but after the June 2^nd premier, I may give it a pass.

The plot revolves around Kirsten Clarke (Emma Ishta) who is a Ph.D. student at Cal Tech who is caught cheating off of her roomate’s work, in the midst of her being put on academic suspension, she also find out her father is dead apparently by either a suicide or homicide. Coupled with this, she has ‘temporal dysplasia’ a (made up for the show) condition in which she has no idea how much time has passed unless she observes things happening and it also makes her very emotionless. Basically, she is Sheldon Cooper times three.

While her life is falling apart around her, along comes a shadowy government agency run by Maggie (played by the still oh so foine Salli Richardson-Whitfield) who has a machine that can hack into the deceased memories and…there is a bomb. Oh yeah, the only way that bomb can be disarmed is by the builder who yes …is recently dead.

On paper and in the preview it seemed like such a great concept but after watching this, iZombie executes the idea of solving crimes from the point of view of the deceased so much better. I will get to the stereotypical characters in a moment but one of the biggest shortcomings of the show is the science fiction aspect. I felt like this show spent a little too much time trying to sell the viewers on Kirsten, who really is an almost unlikeable character, that by the time she does make her first ‘stitch’, you are really wondering why the government agents in this project didn’t bother to do the psych eval which caused the last person to vacate this project.

The one thing that stood out like a sore thumb is that if she was supposed to be hopping into people’s memories, why is she not viewing it from a first person POV?   Why is she an observer?   Let’s think back at what made Quantum Leap so clever all those years ago is that the audience watched from a 3^rd person POV what Scott Bakula did in a first person POV. One of the things that makes iZombie so cool and chilling, is that Liv gains the persona of the brains she ingests.

Then of course there is the parade of stereotypical pretty people that come along for this ride. There’s Camille (Allison Scagliotti) who plays the roommate and collegue she was cheating from, that somehow still plays along with Kirsten in ‘saving the world’, Cameron (Kyle Harris) the ‘cool’ geek / maybe love interest/ ???? that runs the machines, Linus (Ritesh Rijan) the stereotypical East Indian genius whose function I am still trying to guess for this show, and Quincy Fisher (Damon Dayoub) the cop who knows something bigger is going on but for now, in the dark.

It also really didn’t help that the writers of this show tried so hard to appeal to pop culture lovers by forcing trivia clichés wherever they saw fit (Name every Doctor Who, Dr. since 1963??? Really??)

This show could be a likeable show if the characters were likeable and with the way it started, Stitchers has an identity crisis that needs to be fixed quickly if ABC Family wants to have its own brand of geek culture for this network.   It’s not a must watch show but a good filler for something to watch if nothing else is on right now, so either wait and binge watch it on a lazy day or skip it.

2 Dead Brain Cells out of 5

 

By Aitch Cee