WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Zombie Land Saga Revenge Episode 1, "Good Morning Returns SAGA," now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The first season of Zombie Land Saga always knew how to surprise viewers. The first few minutes of the second season, Zombie Land Saga Revenge, continues this tradition by jumping ahead in time to a point where the zombie girls have quit idol-dom and have entered the workforce. While this set-up leads to a somewhat predictable arc of things ultimately returning to the status quo with Franchouchou getting back on stage, the path there is filled with hilarious twists.
The Season 2 premiere first reintroduces Ai, who's now working at the Kojima Food Factory (another real-life Saga business). She still finds time to sing, but now she sings absurd corporate songs about squid-fishing. The other zombie girls' new jobs are also revealed: Sakura's on a cattle farm, Saki's a construction worker, Junko paints dolls, Lily delivers milk, Yugiri bartends and Tae is... Tae.
The zombie girls are still living together, but it's been a while since they last performed together as Franchouchou. Their last performance, it turns out, was a total disaster, booked for a 30,000 seat stadium but only selling 500 tickets. They've taken regular jobs in order to pay off the immense debt, but Sakura in particular still longs to perform again. Their manager, Kotaro Tatsumi, is now absent from their lives, so the girls have to do their human makeup by themselves.
Kotaro did not take Franchouchou's costly failure well at all. He's become an alcoholic and has grown his hair out in a style reminiscent of another troubled MAPPA anti-hero, Eren Yeager from Attack on Titan. His dramatic declarations that there's a "hard deadline" to "save Saga" could be foreshadowing doom just as easily as they could be total nonsense. Yugiri's attempts to convince him to get back in the game don't appear to be convincing him at all.
Without Kotaro's help, Franchouchou plans a comeback at a metal show, where they will finish the encore performance they never got to do at their last concert. Though their two most dedicated fans are there to cheer them on, the rest of the crowd is annoyed that these cutesy idols are taking up time that could go to an actual metal group. It's as if the zombie girls are just repeating their past failure...until Kotaro finally decides to show up and demands an encore.
Soon the two fanboys are also cheering for an encore, which upsets the rest of the audience and the whole scene breaks out into a full-on brawl. The zombie girls use the chaos to their advantage, taking the time to sing their encore song about refusing to give up and coming back in the face of failure. Kotaro returns to being the manager of Franchouchou, and things are back to normal -- well, as "normal" as anything in Zombie Land Saga ever is. Even with the status quo restored, there's no telling where Zombie Land Saga Revenge will go from here.
New episodes of Zombie Land Saga Revenge premiere Thursdays on Crunchyroll.
