Why iZombie's big change of direction in season 4 is good for the hiển thị 

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It was consistently entertaining, offered a fresh take on the overpopulated zombie genre and had a cast of characters you genuinely engaged with, not to mention a hugely underrated lead turn from Rose McIver, who absolutely nailed every single personality she was asked to inhabit.

From superhero-brain to old-man-brain and many more in between, Liv\'s (McIver) various personalities after eating the brains of victims to solve their murders have been a large part of the show\'s quirky charm.

Yet you had the sense it was always building to a game-changing event – which came in the season-three finale as the existence of zombies was revealed to the world. Following a time jump, season four started with Seattle becoming the walled city of New Seattle as the US government contained the zombie outbreak, setting up a season-long conflict between zombies and humans that looks set to explode in the season four finale.

More importantly though, the season has upped the stakes for Liv, where she\'s not just a crime-solving zombie any more, meaning that the \'Brain of the Week\' structure has taken a bit of a backseat. It\'s a big change that is good for the show, especially now that it\'s been renewed for a fifth and final season by The CW.

This season has seen Liv become the underground leader Renegade after the previous leader was brutally executed, smuggling sick humans into New Seattle and scratching them to save them so they can start a new life as a zombie. It\'s put her in the sights of Fillmore-Graves, who are responsible for controlling the population in New Seattle, with the penultimate episode seeing her turn herself in to protect her boyfriend Levon (Daniel Bonjour).

Liv\'s arc has helped to keep the show fresh, immune to the problems of predictability that can affect long-running crime procedurals due to the repetitive structure. Instead we have a show whose morally complex central storyline has a genuine sense of peril – tricky when your main character is a zombie, even though we can\'t imagine Liv will be killed off in the season-four finale.

The big change hasn\'t been without its issues, though, as some overstuffed episodes in the second half of season four struggled to find the right balance between quirky and serious. However, when the show could easily have rested on its laurels, it decided to change things up. Surely it\'s better for an established show to rip up the status quo?

It\'s not like fans haven\'t had the \'Brain of the Week\' to enjoy, either, as Liv has savoured hopeless-romantic-brain, germaphobic-brain and pick-up-artist-brain among others, and the rest of the cast have got in on the act too (Major\'s wrestler-brain remains a highlight). The only difference is that these are now just the delicious sides to the meatier main course of the season.

And with co-creator Rob Thomas revealing before the show was renewed that he needed just one more season to get to the "end of our story",

\'s move into a more serialised storytelling can pay dividends in the final season as it\'s clear that it\'s all been building to a planned resolution.

That\'s likely to be the discovery of a workable zombie cure, and Ravi had a breakthrough in the penultimate episode – but

doesn\'t need to be cured. It\'s never felt more alive.

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