If you’re not already watching this cheesy-at-times, hilarious, lovable gang questing cross-country in search of a cure for the zombie virus, well, why not?! If you need a little convincing, here is a full alphabet of reasons to watch! (Be warned; contains minor spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 of Z Nation.)
A: Addison freakin Carver (Anastasia Baranova). Seldom seen without her Z Whacker, this redhead is pretty much unstoppable. Memorable moments: throwing a zombie with a grenade down the air shaft Doc was in (Full Metal Zombie), stabbing La Reina’s skull-staff wielding bodyguard in the balls with the Z Whacker (All Good Things Must Come to an End), and using an electric mixer to scramble a zombie’s face (Resurrection Z).
B: Babies. But not just any babies—zombabies. We’ve encountered two of them: the one that killed Mark Hammond (Harold Perrineau) in Puppies and Kittens, and Murphy’s daughter, Lucy.
C: Cults. From the cannibals in Philly Feast, to the “Extranauts” in RoZwell (who think that the aliens will come to take them away from the apocalypse), to the cult in Resurrection Z who believe that zombies were the fulfillment of the Biblical promise to raise the dead, there are a lot of people with a lot of crazy beliefs.
D: Steven “Doc” Beck (Russel Hodgkinson). Don’t let his name fool you; he’s not a real medical doctor. He just watched a lot of E.R. before the apocalypse. Greatest moments: getting a zombie high while stuck in an elevator shaft with it (Full Metal Zombie), killing a zombie using astral projection while high on peyote (We Were Nowhere Near the Grand Canyon), and feeding a nearly-dead patient Murphy’s blood to keep him alive and un-zombified (Corporate Retreat).
E: Escorpion (Emilio Rivera), the head of the Zero cartel. Like a bad penny, he keeps showing up, first among the mob hunting Murphy in The Murphy, then collecting a shipment of Z Weed in Batch 47, and then presiding over the trial of Sketchy, Skeezy and 10K in Down the Mississippi. He killed Vasquez’s wife and daughter in front of him, but after a close brush with death, became a (somewhat) changed man.
F: Fauna. All sorts of critters have been affected by the zombie virus, from the zom-bear kept by the Sisters of Mercy, to the zombie sheep at the Mennonite farm (Zombaby!), to the fox, skunk, and raccoon that Murphy and Lucy encounter in the woods (Zombie Baby Daddy).
G: Charles Garnett (Tom Everett Scott). Garnett and Warren served together in the Missouri National Guard before the apocalypse, and have stuck together ever since. Garnett is the Rick Grimes of the group, except he’s more sensible and less angsty. Top moment: single-handedly fighting off 10 zombies to save a baby.
H: HZ1, the zombie virus. Engineered by Dr. Kurian of the CDC.
I: Idiocy. From plowing down zombies with a gigantic cheese wheel (Zombaby!) to tossing Murphy’s newborn daughter around like a football (Zombie Baby Daddy), these survivors—and the audience—are no strangers to the weird, the wacky, and the straight-up ridiculous.
J: Journey. We started this quest in upstate New York, and have gotten into shenanigans all over the country with the group. From a zombified GRR Martin kept by a zombie memorabilia collector (The Collector) to the duo who created and transported zombies in a mobile dental truck (Down the Mississippi), we’ve pretty much seen it all.
K: Dr. Walter Kurian (Donald Corren), the creator of the zombie virus. After the CDC lab in Colorado blew up, Kurian finds himself in La Reina’s employ. He conspires with Murphy to create a fake vaccine that allows Murphy to control La Reina and all her Zeros. The vaccine doesn’t quite work as planned. Warren decapitates Kurian, and La Reina carries his sentient head around in a box to help her find Murphy.
L: Lucy, Murphy’s part-zombie baby. Her mother is Serena (Sarah Coates), from the Sisters of Mercy, who dies shortly after giving birth (Zombaby!). Born with Murphy’s blue skin and mottled eyes, and an affection for gnawing on fingers, Murphy leaves Lucy with a couple on a farm, where she’ll be safe. She grows up very quickly, as we see her having a tea party with her “parents” in All Good Things Must Come to an End.
M: Murphy (Keith Allan), aka Zombie Jesus, aka the whole reason the human race has a chance to survive the apocalypse. Murphy was imprisoned for postal fraud pre-apocalypse, then injected with an experimental drug after the outbreak that left him immune to the zombie virus. He’s also discovered that he can telepathically control zombies, and that his bite kills humans, but leaves them un-turned and under his control. Delta Xray Delta (our group of survivors) is tasked with taking him to a lab in California, where his blood can be turned into an antidote for the zombie virus. Memorable shenanigans include: accidentally attracting a zombie by farting (Going Nuclear), playing golf while surrounded by zombies (Murphy’s Law), and making a zombie pole dance (The Murphy).
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N: The NSA, whom Citizen Z (DJ Qualls) used to work for. Citizen Z is stationed at Camp Northern Light on the North Pole, and keeps track of the group escorting Murphy to California using satellites and radios. He helps them avoid bad situations along the way, and does a little DJ-ing on the side. Greatest moments include: playing golf with his hallucination of a Russian man named Yuri (Zunami), hunting down a zombie dog in his abandoned base at the North Pole (Fracking Zombies), and blowing a hole in a zombie with a rocket launcher (We Were Nowhere Near the Grand Canyon).
O: Overwhelming odds. Delta Xray Delta has somehow managed to make it all the way from upstate New York to California, and while we’ve lost some beloved faces, most of them are still alive, against all odds.
P: Pup. Who doesn’t love a pup who survives a zombie apocalypse? This husky provides Citizen Z with some much-needed interaction, keeping him (mostly) sane.
Q: The Queen of the Dead, La Reina (Gina Gerson). Head of the Zero cartel, which distributes Z Weed all over the country. She has a vision to create a new world using her Zeros and the zombie vaccine that Doctor Kurian makes with Murphy, but that vision collapses when Kurian and Murphy turn her into a half-zombie hybrid.
R: Roberta Warren (Kellita Smith). A former lieutenant in the National Guard, she is the leader of Delta Xray Delta, the group tasked with escorting Murphy to California. Best moments include: staking a zombie’s hand to a counter and using him as a punching bag (Welcome to the Fu-Bar), and getting into a full-on bar brawl with La Reina (All Good Things Must Come to an End).
S: Sunshine, aka Cassandra (Pisay Pao). She was called Sunshine by the cannibal cult she was forced into, but her real name is Cassandra. When an infected wound nearly takes her life, Murphy bites her, turning her into a zombie-human hybrid, completely compliant to his orders. Greatest moments include: pretending to have trailer-rocking sex with Doc as part of a rescue attempt (Philly Feast), continually finding zombie fingers and ears in her hair (Puppies and Kittens, Full Metal Zombie), and getting a makeover from Murphy (The Murphy).
T: Tommy, aka 10K (Nat Zang). He calls himself 10K because he plans on killing 10 thousand zombies. After that, he says, he’ll change it to Jeff. Top moments: sticking a fire extinguisher hose in a zombie and exploding it (The Murphy), shooting a crater through a zombie’s head as his introduction to the group (Puppies and Kittens), and knocking himself out on a tree while running away from zombies on the first day of the outbreak (Day One).
U: Unusual weather, including, but not limited to, z-nados and zunamis.
V: Javier Vasquez (Matt Cedeño). A DEA agent pre-apocalypse, whose wife and daughter were killed in front of him by Escorpion. Memorable moment: setting his need for vengeance aside and forgiving Escorpion.
W: Weed. Z Weed, to be specific. It’s grown in Minneapolis using zombie corpses as compost. Batch 47 seemed to have anti-zombie properties, however, human trials proved unsuccessful.
X: Delta Xray Delta, the name of the team of survivors transporting Murphy to wherever Citizen Z tells them he needs to go.
Y: Yuck. Odds are, you’ll be grossed out at least a few times, what with the splattering brains and the zombies that end up wound around outboard motors or in wheel wells.
Z: Zombies, of course! But the survivors of this apocalypse don’t have just one kind of zombie to worry about. In addition to your standard, shambling type (think The Walking Dead), we’ve encountered radioactive zombies in Going Nuclear, Blasters in Zombie Road (super-fast zombies killed by a nuclear blast, that only eat brains), Phyto-zombies in Batch 47 (the half-plant, half-zombie hybrids that guarded Batch 47 of the Z Weed), anthrax zombies in Zombaby! (pretty much what they sound like—zombies infected with anthrax, whose heads released clouds of anthrax upon being bashed), and the human-zombie hybrids that Murphy creates.
What are you most looking forward to in Season 3 of Z Nation? The season kicks off with a two-hour special event on Friday, September 16th at 8/7c. See you then!
[HUGE thanks to my brilliant friend Sarah (tumblr) for helping with this!]