Where We Left Off With Joel & Sheila In Santa Clarita Diet Season 2

Are you someone who likes television shows about buying and selling homes? Are you someone who likes television shows about zombies? If you’re wondering where those two overlap in the television venn diagram — because yes, they do — it’s with Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet.

The undead sitcom is back for Season 3 with Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant once again returning to their lives as Sheila and Joel Hammond. She’s a zombie, he’s trying his best to love and support his wife’s new fetish for flesh, and together they’re just a regular modern day couple. And season 2 of Santa Clarita Diet made their lives a bit more complicated.

The show isn’t just about them trying to make their relationship work day in and day out. They’ve also got a feisty teenager daughter, Abby (Liv Hewson) who’s oddly okay with her mom’s new lifestyle. There’s also their next door neighbor, Eric (Skyler Gisondo), who’s in on everything, because Sheila ate his step-dad. And while the family seems to be keeping everything together, they’re starting to break at the seams because a few people in their circle are starting to piece together the bloody clues they’re accidentally leaving behind. Also, there’s a case of bad Serbian clams, some Nazis, and now Shiela might be a deity.

If you’re looking to jump right into Season 3 when it drops on Netflix, here’s everything that happened at the end of Santa Clarita Diet Season 2.

Putting on his sleuthing cap, Joe traces the bad clams (the ones that are infecting everyone) to a woman named Ruby (Sarah Baker) who’s trying to get into the seafood business with her very own Ruby’s Clams. He tries to bargain with Ruby to buy literally all her clams — all 5,000 of them — but she’s already set up shipments for them all over California. Thankfully, this problem is solved for Joel, when Paul and Marsha (Zachary Knighton and Jee Young Han) show up and blow up Ruby’s place.

Sheila has been spending more and more time with Anne (Natalie Morales), Lisa’s (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) new girlfriend now that Dan is gone. However, since Anne’s a sheriff’s deputy, she can’t help but shake all the weird things that have recently happened. Sheila's concerned, but not that concerned, since she’s still going to go and live her life and buy new things, like bangle bracelets.

Thanks to Gary’s voicemail (more on that later), and then the information that maybe they messed up making Gary’s voicemail, it’s decided that the Hammond family will run. Joel makes Sheila promise that if they get caught, he’ll take the fall for everything. Spoiler alert: When the time comes, Shiela does not let Joel take the blame, noting that it was always going to be her.

These two teenagers aren’t actually that concerned with the impending zombie apocalypse, and instead have decided to take on a nearby fracking sight. They find some C-4 hidden in Dan’s old closet, and decide to use that on the fracking site. Much of their fight against the fracking site takes place off-screen during the season finale, but, the two do manage to set off a huge explosion off in the distance, which is visible to Sheila and Joel (and Anne).

In Season 2, we’re introduced to the idea that maybe this zombie thing is way bigger than anyone even realized. Abby and Eric accidentally come across Paul and Marsha, two members of the Knights of Serbia, who are on a mission to end the zombie breakout. They manage to blow up Ruby’s Clams and drive away without being caught. It’s unclear of these two will return for Season 3 of the show, but at one point during the trailer for the new season Joel finds a note on the front door reading, “Beware! The knights are coming!” So if it’s not Paul and Marsha who are back again, we’re at least going to meet some other members of the Knights of Serbia.

Gary (Nathan Fillion... until he's recast season 3) the Severed Head has decided he doesn’t want to live like this anymore, and asks Joel if he could kill him (Joel is upset about this, because the two have just recently started rewatching The Wire). But, killing him is the least Joel and Sheila can do. First, they need Gary to do something for them, which is leave a voicemail suggesting that he and Dave are both alive, so everyone stops looking into their disappearances.

At the end of the season, Joel can’t go through with killing Gary. Gary and his wisecracks will live to see another day.

Thanks to Gary’s voicemail on Dan’s phone, Anne gives up her investigation into their disappearance. That is, until she realizes that she heard Sheila's bracelets, the same bracelets that she now has, on the phone call. Anne realizes that Sheila is somehow involved in this, and tracks her and Joel (and Gary) to the middle of nowhere via their phones.

Anne confronts Sheila and Joel, and then Anne shoots Sheila twice in the chest. Sheila barely flinches. The two start frantically trying to explain what’s going on (and leave out key terms like “zombie” and “flesh eating”) and Anne suddenly now sees Sheila as having “[risen] from the dead to do god’s work by ridding the world of evildoers.”

Asking for a sign from god to prove that Sheila is a chosen one, way off in the distance Abby and Eric’s fracking site explodes. Anne falls to her knees in worship, praising Sheila. Joel jokes that she had wanted to get more into religion anyway.

“I know, but I didn’t want to start one,” Sheila relies, and that’s where Season 2 ends. In the words of Gary, this just got weird.