Letâs Talk About Those Mugs
Wait, what does she mean âthoseâ? There was only one mug, right? The UW Medicine Mug?
Oh, my sweet zomsâŠÂ 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.
âActually, it wasnât that bad,â Liv tells Ravi.
âIn the sense that it could have been much worse?â he asks.
âRight. 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.â
âAnd then forced her to walk barefoot across the shards,â Ravi adds sympathetically if mildly annoyed at the topic of her love life.
And maybe itâs Chehkovâs coffee mug because it appears at the beginning and comes into play later. Not in a way thatâs plot-crucial⊠but itâs important to Liv.
At the end of the episode (and perfectly mirroring the discussion of the mug at the beginningâsee my post on the elegant ring structure of the episode here) Liv is unpacking a box of Raviâs kitchen supplies in the kitchen he now shares with Major.
She unwraps a coffee mug and puts it on the shelf next to her âvery favorite morning coffee mug.â
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 âSay nothing.â
Breaking the mug she used at Majorâs is very symbolic of letting go of the past. And Iâm sure it was cathartic for her. But thatâs 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 Iâm reading too much into this. Maybe it doesnât 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 doesnât exist anywhere else either. Â
She could have put anything in that cabinet and thrown away the UW mug. But she didnât. She put in Raviâs mug.
She could have put in any mugâŠÂ one from the counter⊠a freshly washed one⊠a plain mug⊠but someone in production made a mug that could only be Raviâs. A CDC mug. And thatâs the mug she replaced it with.
So, I donât 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 Iâve been going on about âmug theoryâ for ages.
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