Let’s Talk About Those Mugs
Wait, what does she mean “those”? There was only one mug, right? The UW Medicine Mug?
Oh, my sweet zoms… There was another mug.
You likely remember that in iZombie, season 1, episode 4, Liv becomes extremely focused on a coffee mug. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that she becomes very possessive of said coffee mug.
We first see the mug when Corrine comes downstairs drinking her coffee from it. Liv is surprised to find her there and it throws her off.
“Actually, it wasn’t that bad,” Liv tells Ravi.
“In the sense that it could have been much worse?” he asks.
“Right. I might have cried, for instance. Or thrown up. Or grabbed that mug, which happened to be my very favorite morning coffee mug when Major and I were together and shattered it in a million pieces like my heart.”
“And then forced her to walk barefoot across the shards,” Ravi adds sympathetically if mildly annoyed at the topic of her love life.
And maybe it’s Chehkov’s coffee mug because it appears at the beginning and comes into play later. Not in a way that’s plot-crucial… but it’s important to Liv.
At the end of the episode (and perfectly mirroring the discussion of the mug at the beginning–see my post on the elegant ring structure of the episode here) Liv is unpacking a box of Ravi’s kitchen supplies in the kitchen he now shares with Major.
She unwraps a coffee mug and puts it on the shelf next to her “very favorite morning coffee mug.”
She takes down the UW Medicine mug and stares longly at it before discretely dropping it into the trashcan.
She looks up to find Ravi watching her. She implores him to “Say nothing.”
Breaking the mug she used at Major’s is very symbolic of letting go of the past. And I’m sure it was cathartic for her. But that’s not what I really want to talk about here.
I want to talk about how she replaced that mug. Because the foreshadowing here is, as Mr. Boss might say, straight out of freshman English.
She replaced the mug that she held as symbolic of her time with Major with a mug from Ravi. And, hey, maybe I’m reading too much into this. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. But someone in the production department had to have those mugs made. That is not a UW Medicine mug that exists anywhere outside of iZombie. And that CDC mug? Yeah, that doesn’t exist anywhere else either.
She could have put anything in that cabinet and thrown away the UW mug. But she didn’t. She put in Ravi’s mug.
She could have put in any mug… one from the counter… a freshly washed one… a plain mug… but someone in production made a mug that could only be Ravi’s. A CDC mug. And that’s the mug she replaced it with.
So, I don’t know if it means anything. But it seems awfully deliberate to me.
And, in case anyone is wondering, this is the meta @deadbutdelicious5665 referenced in her post about the episode. Because she knows I’ve been going on about “mug theory” for ages.
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