Uh-Oh, iZombie Boss Just Revealed Some Major Season 2 Plans That Are Equal Parts Hilarious and Horrifying

Still reeling after that epic season one finale? Rob Thomas is dishing details on season two!

By Sydney Bucksbaum Jun 10, 2015 2:00 AMTags
iZombie, Season FinaleCW

For a show about zombies eating brains, iZombie sure likes to rip out our hearts as well, huh?

That season one finale really put us through the ringer tonight (raise your hand if you need a hug, because we sure do). From Liv (Rose McIver) having to turn Major (Robert Buckley) into a zombie to save his life, only to give him the last batch of the cure to turn him back when it became clear he would never forgive her, only to then find out her younger brother was in critical condition in the hospital and needs her blood to survive his injuries, meaning she just saved her relationship at the expense of her brother's life...man, iZombie was not playing around!

And we haven't even mentioned that epic, jaw-dropping action scene in which Major finally got his revenge on Blaine (David Anders) and Meat Cute...and Liv finished the job, giving Blaine the only other dose of the zombie cure, turning him back into a human! So. Freakin'. Amazing.

It's going to be one long summer while we oh-so-impatiently wait for iZombie season two, so we got executive producer Rob Thomas to spill all he could about what's coming up when the CW show returns this fall!

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E! News: Blaine and Major have both been cured—are there going to be any complications with becoming human again?
Rob Thomas: Yeah, there will be. Ravi would not have wanted to put that cure on the market yet, and for good reason. There will be side effects. There will be fallout from that. It won't be as easy as boom, you're human again, go enjoy the rest of your life. Blaine will have to try to maintain his zombie world while being human so we're going to have some fun in season two with him trying to pass as a zombie. Imagine him trying to put on white face to convince his clients that he's still a badass who they should be afraid of.

Liv's brother is in critical condition by the end of the finale—how is this going to shake up their family dynamic especially since Liv can't give her blood to save him?
It will have real repercussions next year. We know that the season two opening scene is going to be a really rough scene with her family. They do not understand the decision she made and it's kind of impossible for her to tell them. 

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So there won't be a time jump in between seasons one and two?
No, there will be a time jump. There's a few months between the end of season one and season two, but we will not be seeing her first attempt to patch things up with her family. We'll be seeing like the eighth attempt to get back into their good graces.  

Over the course of season one, was there anything you discovered that wasn't working that you're going to abandon going into season two or anything that you found worked that you're going to play up more going forward?
A couple things, actually. Robert Buckley is so good at comedy. He's so charming. He and Rahul [Kohli], who plays Ravi, we discovered how fun and funny they are together. But we wrote a storyline in which in the middle of the season, we took away his fastball. There was a lot in the middle of the season where Major was looking sad or dour. I want to find ways to let Rob Buckley be engaging and fun and active and I think the show got much better when we gave him back those things we had taken away from him. But it was just hard for him to discover the kids who he worked with at the shelter were being murdered, and then play romantic comedy!

CW

True!
The other thing, we're trying to achieve the right balance between our murder case-of-the-week and the rest of the zombie mythology stuff. As the season progressed, we found that we kept wanting to get to the zombie mythology stuff. There was a shift. The earlier episodes were about 60 percent murder-of-the-week, 40 percent zombie stuff. Those reversed by the end of the year. The show might be better for that and yet, the tricky thing is the A stories suffer a bit when you take eight pages of them and give them to the other stories. We're still trying to find the right balance. We also approach the case-of-the-week stories differently than most shows. We start with: what brain do we want to see Liv eat this week? What will be the most fun thing we can imagine Rose McIver playing next week? And then we'll fill in the murder case around that.

What are you most excited for fans to see from season two?
Blaine and Liv will have a common enemy in Max Rager next year. As Max Rager states in the finale that their quest is to eliminate all zombies so it will make strange bedfellows out of Liv and Blaine. I'm really excited about getting to play the two of them on the same side next year. I'm not saying everything is going to be peaches and cream between the two of them but they will be forced to work together.

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I can't even imagine what that would look like after everything Blaine has done to her.
Yeah! It's going to be really fun.

I do have a bone to pick with you, though. While I've absolutely loved the first season, I'm hoping for a little bit less of Robert Buckley getting his face punched every single episode in season two. That seemed to happen quite a lot this season!
[Laughs] I know! He's too pretty to punch in the face! Again, dumb move by the writers to keep messing up that face!

To be fair, he can pull off a black eye very well.
You do not have to convince me of that one. Trust me, we were all laughing about how we kept beating him up. It was tough on makeup and we were taking our leading man and messing up his face! Stupid, stupid, stupid.