Police
Lieutenant Suzuki
- Anti-Villain: He doesn't want to be a zombie or a Corrupt Cop, but he's blackmailed by his need for brains. When given the chance, he covers up Lowell's death in a way to remove Liv as a murder suspect. He also covers up the attack on the Meat Cute, and sacrifices himself to both escape the brain-craving and make it look like he was responsible, while implicating Blaine.
- Blackmail: How Blaine controls him; Suzuki clearly doesn't want to work for him, but has no other alternative to keep his need for brains in check.
- Corrupt Cop: Well, even if he doesn't want to be, he is still covering up Blaine's murders.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Blaine did not kill the people in the Meat Cute, but Suzuki makes sure the police get Blaine, by writing his name with blood on the wall. Too bad the second name was unreadable, due to the explosion he caused.
- Heroic Sacrifice: The Season 1 finale, him covering up Major's attack on Blaine's men and giving his life to implicate him instead, but not until after trying to identify Blaine as the ring-leader.
- Pet the Dog: Two points in particular.
- As well as generally just being nicer to Liv than he is to Clive or his other detectives, when Blaine kills Lowell and orders him to cover it up, and the police seem to think Liv was involved, rather than let Liv take the blame, he instead pushes to have it labelled a suicide and personally tells her she's free to go.
- Secondly, as mentioned above, after Major leads a one-man attack on the Meat Cute, Suzuki covers up the attack and blows the place up, with himself still inside, to make it look like he was the one responsible.
- Thanatos Gambit: His aforementioned Heroic Sacrifice.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He didn't realize that Liv's brother Evan was standing outside the deli at the same time that he was trying to blow it up, and his last act unknowingly sent Evan to the hospital with severe injuries.
Lieutenant Devore
- Black Boss Lady: She's black, and she's in charge of the homicide department.
- Out of Focus: While Suzuki was a fully developed character in his own right, Devore is virtually a cypher.
Detective Cavanaugh
- Jurisdiction Friction: Is very protective of his cases, even getting mad when he learns Clive is investigating one of them behind his back.
Detective Lou Benedetto
- Back for the Dead: After a few appearances in Season 2, Clive reports him to Internal Affairs and he vanishes for some time. However, he shows up again as a Victim of the Week in the back half of Season 4.
- Cowboy Cop: He enlists a bunch of local teenagers in his war on drugs by forcing them to become confidential informants for him. This falls apart when one of his informants continues to deal drugs, then kills another informant who finds out about it. He also proves willing to inflict pain on suspects to get them to talk.
- Dirty Cop: He tries to steal the loot of some thieves that he's chasing.
- Victim of the Week: Becomes one.
Detective Pratt
- Divorce Assets Conflict: His motivation for attacking several prostitutes is that he knows one of them stole his wedding ring and he needs to get it back before his wife finds out, divorces him, and takes half his paycheck.
- Starter Villain: The first Villain of the Week.
Officer Matthew Voss
A police officer who is seen when one of his stalkers is murdered.
- Fair Cop: He was a suspect in his first major appearance because the victim, a serial stalker, had been attracted to him and slept with him.
Jimmy Hahn
- All Love Is Unrequited: Jimmy goes from resenting Liv to being infatuated with her. She doesn't reciprocate.
- Butt-Monkey: Is called in whenever Liv is on a particularly eccentric brain, the first time being when Liv ate the brain of a pretentious artist and she gives Jimmy abstract descriptions rather than actual concrete facial features for him to draw. Or who can forget Liv on dominatrix brain and she bullies him relentlessly.
- Embarrassing Slide: Has a sketch of Liv dressed provocatively in his notebook.
Steve
- Goth: Very much so, even dressing all in black and speaking in low, portentous tones. He was originally a blond and only got into goth and vampire fiction because a girl in his Dungeons & Dragons group was into the same thing.
- Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Steve is a Tall, Dark, and Handsome type with hair that's almost shoulder length.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: For an IT guy, he speaks with flowery and ominous language.
Seattle government
Mayor Gwen Davis
The mayor of Seattle at the start of the series.
- Benevolent Boss: She is very supportive of Peyton, even encouraging her to continue the prosecution of the Boss crime ring after Peyton offers her resignation.
Mayor Floyd Baracus
- Corrupt Politician: He succumbs to Blaine's blackmail, but demands that Blaine himself pay him to pursue to case against Boss so that he can bribe a number of cops and judges. This trope is also teased and subverted in season three, when Peyton is led to believe Baracus is behind the murder of a dominatrix and the related cover-up. This is also generally subverted since Fillmore Graves takes him in and he no longer needs Blaine's brains.
- Crusading Lawyer: He appears to be this in leading the charge against Boss, but he's just being blackmailed by Blaine and doesn't actually want to pursue the case.
- Everyone Has Standards: He largely just rolls along with whatever Fillmore Graves decrees, yet when they forcefully shut down a local newspaper and shot up place over a single critical editorial about Renegade's execution, he acknowledges this was needlessly extreme and directly vocalized this to Chase himself.
- Good Parents: His main worry at all times is his kid. When he nearly gets kidnapped, his worry is that he will never be able to see his kid again if it gets revealed that he has killed three man, even if it is in self-defense.
- Killed Off for Real: He's eventually shot in the heart by Blaine; when he dies, it serves as proof that Blaine's zombie-cure works (since if he'd still been a zombie he would have been unaffected by the bullet.)
- Papa Wolf: When a bullet aimed at him almost hits his own son, he goes into full-on zombie mode and almost loses it, weren't for Liv there to calm him down and Carey to secure his child.
- Taking the Bullet: Shields his son Buck with his body during an apparent assassination attempt. His popularity skyrockets after this incident.
Mort
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: He and Zed need to approve things in order for the city to function, but he can't agree with Zed on much, so very little gets done.
Zed
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: He and Mort need to approve things in order for the city to function, but he can't agree with Mort on much, so very little gets done.
Media
Johnny Frost
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Cutting in line in front of worried residents made him one of the first people to receive a dose of the tainted Aleutian Flu vaccine and thus one of the first to realize some of the zombie symptoms. Liv finds him and makes him reveal the existence of zombies on live television as a result.
- Comic Relief: Until "Looking for Mr. Goodbrain, Part 2", in which, he becomes a zombie, and is forced to reveal on live TV that zombies are real and to stop the people from taking the Aleutian Flu vaccine.
- Running Gag: Whenever a female sex worker of some kind is killed he is almost guaranteed to be in the episode.
- Shoo Out the Clowns: Flipped. Although Frost was a comical character in all previous encounters, the finale of season 3 has his becoming a zombie played entirely seriously, and he is the one to announce to the world that zombies are real.
Rachel Greenblatt
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She was presented as a cool and down-to-earth alternative to the Zombie Hunters, claiming all she wants is to be the first one to photograph a zombie. She is a reporter that goes behind Ravi's back to publish her story.
- Intrepid Reporter: Goes to great lengths to break the zombie story, including forming a relationship with Ravi and witnessing the Johns brothers' attempts to torture and kill Don E.
- The Reveal: She wasn't among the Zombie Hunters, she was a reporter going undercover for the news regarding them and possible zombies.
- The Vamp: While she's not evil or villainous per se, there's some immorality there with her charming Ravi and getting him to spill the beans on the big zombie secret.
Chuck Burd
- Conspiracy Theorist: He believes the stories of zombies living in Seattle, based on nothing more than a security guard saying he saw zombies at the Max Rager facility.
- Shock Jock: Describes his program.
Jeremy Chu
- Asshole Victim: He's unquestionably a victim of Blaine's schemes, but he's also a horrible person. He's one of the 'clients' who rapes Natalie, the prostitute that Blaine zombified and forced to accept his clients as her own in exchange for the brains she needs to survive.
- Bullying a Dragon: When Natalie goes missing, Jeremy calls up Blaine and threatens to harm his interests unless Blaine finds him another zombie prostitute. Blaine, in response, just has Major knock Jeremy out and stick him in a freezer.
Alice "Al" Bronson
- Gender-Blender Name: Blaine expects her to be male, as he heard her nickname and thought it was her full name.
Lawyers
Brandt Stone
- Amoral Attorney: Doesn't care that Major may well be guilty of killing dozens of people. He's been paid to defend Major, and defend him he will.
- Casanova Wannabe: He's been flirting with Peyton for ages, to no success.
Donald Thorne
- Amoral Attorney: He is loyal to his employers, not his client. He manipulates James Weckler into taking a bad plea deal rather than turn over evidence in exchange for a better deal, as the people paying for him would be implicated in the evidence Weckler has.
Renegade's organization and wards
Mama Leone, also known as "Renegade"
- Good Feels Good: Mama Leone enjoys saving lives and reuniting families.
- I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Leone's husband was killed in the past to punish her for trying to rat Blaine out.
- Losing Your Head: Her head is pulverized by Chase's guillotine.
- Running the Blockade: She leads a crew that does this so that she can get people into and out of New Seattle
Baron, Stan, and Suki
- Bad "Bad Acting": They're not terribly good actors when preparing for the raid on the secured port area.
Curtis
- Running the Blockade: His job.
Isobel Bloom
- Black Comedy: She's fond of pretending to be dead or making jokes about her imminent death.
- The Danza: Her name is almost identical to the first name of her actress.
- Face Death with Dignity: She's made her peace with her upcoming demise.
- Faking the Dead: She does this a lot as a joke.
- Living MacGuffin: Isobel's immunity to zombification makes her brain a cure, although her terminal illness means the "living" part is temporary.
- The Immune: Seems to be this. Liv was unable to infect her with the zombie virus.
- Killed Off for Real: Her illness eventually killed her.
Oliver, Annie, and Pippi
- Orphanage of Fear: They say that their foster home is so horrible that they'd rather sneak into a city run by zombies.
- Happily Adopted: In the epilogue, Liv and Major adopt them and bring them into Zombie Island with them.
Michael Gladwell and Jalen Gladwell
- Bully Hunter: Michael flips out and attacks a kid that was bullying him.
- Happily Adopted: In the epilogue, Liv and Major adopt them along with Oliver, Annie, and Pippi, bringing them into Zombie Island with them.
Other victims of Blaine
Jackie
- Bad Liar: Her efforts to explain to Blaine what happened to her delivery immediately arouse his suspicions, and her story falls apart the moment Blaine shows up and begins to question it.
Jerome
- Human Resources: Blaine killed him and sold his brain to Jackie.
Gabriel
The drug dealer who cut the utopium Blaine provided for the boat party with an unknown substance that, in combination with the Max Rager energy drink, made zombies of those who took it. Blaine later tracked him down only to find that Gabriel had abandoned drug dealing and become devoutly religious. As Gabriel refused to discuss any details from his drug-dealing days, Blaine turned him into a zombie to make him more tractable.
- Butt-Monkey: Blaine repeatedly humiliates and torments him. He has Gabriel beaten, turns him into a zombie, and interrupts his sermon with dumb jokes.
- The Soulsaver: Becomes this after he converts to Christianity.
Marcy Khan
- Friendly Rivalry: Was developing this with Liv before the boat party. Then she became a zombie.
- Mercy Kill: Liv bashed her brains in to protect Ravi and put her out of her misery.
Alan York
An astronaut and national hero. Blaine kills him in order to sell his brain to rich zombies who want to have visions of being in outer space.
- The Ghost: Never actually appears (except for bits of his brain).
- Human Resources: Killed so his brain can be eaten by zombies.
Anthony
A talkative man who was scratched by Renegade in order to cure his Parkinson's. He was later killed by Blaine, who ate his brain in the hope of seeing visions which could reveal Renegade's location.
- Cannot Keep a Secret: After Blaine and Don eat his brain and become influenced by it, they find themselves incapable of keeping any kind of secret. Anthony himself was shockingly open about his own life as well, easily admitting that he'd had a venereal disease.
Other victims of Carey
Wally Tuttle-Reid
- Plot-Triggering Death: His death, as well as the deaths of his family, kicked off Clive's investigation into the zombie truther movement and ultimately into Carey's conspiracy.
Anna Reid
- Domestic Abuse: A victim of this. She became friends with Clive after Clive arrested her abusive husband.
Roxanne Green, also known as "Sweet Lady Pain"
A dominatrix who secretly recorded her sessions. She was murdered to get the recording, which could have incriminated Baracus—a key ally that Carey didn't want jeopardized.
- Dominatrix: Her profession.
Other
Sloane Mills
- Hard-Drinking Party Girl: She references having been out all night partying before her abduction, and she almost dies after overdosing on utopium.
- Ms. Fanservice: Sloane is wearing tight leather pants and a midriff-exposing shirt in her first appearance and a shirt with cleavage in her second.
- My Fist Forgives You: After her kidnapper Don E. undoes her wrist cuffs, Sloane punches him in the face but doesn't otherwise try to escape or resist.
Principal Mosely
- Van Helsing Hate Crimes: He discriminates against zombies.
Yasmine
- Bad "Bad Acting": When she's using Jimmy's script, she's terrible.
Ty Griss
- Wealthy Philanthropist: What he's known as.
Darcy Bennett
- Human Resources: Her brain can be used to cure a zombie.
Laila
Dr. Collier's twin sister.
- Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: She is the foolish one.