The revelation that zombies exist at the end of iZOMBIE last season means that we’re going to see a brand new reality for Seattle when the show returns for its fourth season. In order to stop the spread of the virus, Seattle has been walled off from the rest of the country and there’s a lot of tension between zombies and the remaining humans. During a visit to the set of iZOMBIE in the fall, the cast spoke to journalists about the new reality for the show in season 4.
New Seattle. “It’s so crazy now that Seattle’s now this walled city,” Malcolm Goodwin (Clive Babineaux). “It’s knocked down the walls of all the other characters. Reading every script, I’m blown away by how much the world of iZOMBIE has expanded. There’s no way you watch season one and think that it becomes this. There’s no way. But, yeah, there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot going on and I think Rob Thomas and Diane [Ruggiero-Wright] and the writers they approach it in a honest way in terms of if there’s a zombie virus, everyone knows about it, there’s good and there’s also bad…. I know Clive thinks the city is gonna be nuked. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. We may get nuked. But he stays. Liv’s stays. Everyone at this term is trying to figure this thing out and some would rather die for the cause. In the meantime, still trying to maintain a sense of normalcy. And that’s the challenging and interesting part. There’s no more secrets. Everyone knows the big secret in Seattle is that there are zombies, so there’s no more secrets after that. So [the season is about] how everyone has to deal with everything just being out there in the open.”
“It’s different in all the right ways for a season four to change, I think,” Rose McIver (Liv Moore) said. “We still get lots of cases a week and we still get the humor and the relationship stuff and the drama, but certainly there’s a lot of context now that the zombie apocalypse has happened, that everybody’s out there, so it’s pretty new for us. It’s really cool because I get to work with a lot more people.”
For a lot of the cast, much of the season 4 storyline mirrors a lot of what’s happening in the world today. “There’s so much volatility because there’s zombies having to coexist with humans and so, yes, so much of [season 4’s storylines] you’re like ‘wow, this is not far off from what I read on Twitter every 3 hours’, you know? Which is fun. Anything where you can kind of tie it back to the real world is great, but [it] also helps you sort of identify with this totally unbelievable world that these characters are living in.”
Strange Bedfellows. According to Goodwin, the police station has changed as a result of the zombie virus: “Every detective is paired with a zombie now. There’s new rules because Fillmore-Graves…they have their [own] detectives. They work on zombie crimes, [specifically] zombie-on-zombie crimes. And we work on human-on-human crimes. And so you do have those scenarios when it crosses paths where a zombie may kill a human and human may kill a zombie. And who handles those cases?”
The Rights of Zombies. “Peyton is handling a lot of cases that have to do with discrimination against zombies, specifically, “Aly Michalka (Peyton Charles) said. “She’s getting a lot of complaints with people that are obviously working with zombies and have to kind of treat them as a regular citizen, which they should be treated as, and she has a really hard time having to convince these people that, ‘look, I know this isn’t ideal, I know this isn’t normal, but now it is the new normal and these things are changed in our city forever, and there’s really no going back’. Both parties are equal and deserve the same rights as the other, and I think a lot of people are having trouble coming to terms with that, because when we pick up on the season, we’re only a few months into the wall having gone up, and this new society happening within Seattle. And again, this is on a national level where people know that this is happening, but it’s really only contained within Seattle. So they’re really the only state that’s actually dealing with this. But it could easily change and spread to more states if they’re not careful.”
Zombie Famine? With Seattle now a walled city and the rise in the number of zombies, the issue of acces to brains could become a problem. Liv won’t be feeling the effects of hunger, but Rahul Kohli (Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti) says that others won’t be so lucky. “She’s not gonna go through periods of hunger, but other people are. That is a real issue, and that also motivates some of the crimes that we have. Some of the storylines do come from that. It’s also become a currency, in terms of brains. That still has a massive impact in the storylines.” Although, David Anders (Blaine DeBeers) hinted that Blaine might be stepping in to take advantage of the situation: “[Blaine] gets his mitts involved with that. Every racket there is, he gets his mitts in. ”
The Rise of Fillmore-Graves. Fillmore-Graves has risen to a position of unimaginable power in New Seattle as a result of their knowledge and resources regarding zombies. But not everyone is happy with this new arrangement. In fact, Goodwin described it as ” dictatorship. Clive doesn’t like it because they pretty much govern the entire city…..He wishes there was more of a partnership between the precinct and Fillmore-Graves, but there is a divide. Fillmore-Graves [also has] another agenda which I can’t go into, which is also why they’re keeping the detectives on the outskirts, and also abusing their power sometimes. But there’s nothing that Clive can really do about it but try to work around it. So it does make solving the cases and trying to find the cure a little bit more challenging.”
There Is Hope. While a lot of the season may seem bleak given the circumstances in New Seattle, Michalka says that there is a chance things might get better: “I think that is a huge part of this new season, all [of our] characters realizing that, ‘okay, we actually can do something’. We actually do have a voice, and if we stick together we can actually get work done. And that’s a huge part of Liv’s story line specifically this season. Not that she hasn’t been kind of doing that from the start — trying to help people obviously solving their cases — but now it goes far beyond just solving murders. It all starts to involve these people who are trying to get into Seattle, trying to be cured basically from terminal illnesses.”
Don’t miss the season 4 premiere of iZOMBIE on Monday, February 26 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
