After the dust of the Battle For Seattle settled in the final third of last night’s iZombie series finale, executive producers Rob Thomas, Diane Ruggiero, and Dan Etheridge brought in one last guest star from Veronica Mars to round out the series. Thomas, Ruggiero, and Etheridge, who worked on the original Veronica Mars and were developing the show’s controversial fourth season during the production of iZombie‘s final season, had a habit of reusing Veronica Mars actors in parts on iZombie, from Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni to Francis Capra and, finally, Chris Lowell. Lowell, who played Stosh “Piz” Piznarski in the third season of Veronica Mars and reprised his role for the 2014 feature film based on the cult TV series, was the last character with speaking lines to appear alongside the surviving series regulars at the end of iZombie.
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Lowell appeared in the role of Byron Deceasey, host of a virtual-reality interview show called America The Virtual. Spoilers ahead for “All’s Well That Ends Well,” the series finale of iZombie. In a flash-forward sequence that wrapped up dangling plot threads and gave most of our heroes a pretty unambiguously happy ending, Deceasey — we’re just going with the IMDb spelling of his name, since it makes sense with iZombie‘s running theme of pun names, but the Vudu subtitles call him “DeCeCe” — interviews Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), and Peyton Charles (Aly Michalka), asking them questions about their time in Seattle’s zombie culture and trying to get them to opine on whether or not Liv Moore (Rose McIver) and Major Lillywhite (Robert Buckley) might secretly still be alive after all these years.
The sequence ends, unsurprisingly, with Lowell’s character apologizing to Team Z for pushing so hard on the rumors, but saying that’s what the audience really wants to know. He leaves the virtual chat, and is almost immediately replaced by Liv and Major, revealing that they are indeed still alive, and living in seclusion on a private island owned by Fillmore-Graves.
“I’ve always known that where we’re landing was going to be where we landed,” Rob Thomas told ComicBook.com. “Which is not to say that I knew every detail on how we were going to get there, but I did know that Liv and Major would eventually get together. That was always part of the plan and I’ve written enough noir in my life that I thought, ‘Well, with iZombie, let’s go ahead and give it the full big happy ending.’ You know, our main characters survive and they seem to go on to do great things in their lives.”
Given that the series is based (albeit loosely) on a DC Comics property from writer Chris Roberson and artist Michael Allred, it seems striking the similarities between this interview segment with Team Z and the interview with Lois Lane, conducted by a reporter who still appears not-quite-convinced that Superman is dead in the classic Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons story “Whatever Happened to the man of Tomorrow?”.
Were you surprised to see “Piz” himself make an appearance in iZombie as it wrapped up its final moments? Chime in below or hit me up at @russburlingame on Twitter. If you missed the episode, iZombie will be on Netflix in about two weeks, or you can buy the finale on demand from various digital services starting today.
