Dr. Zomboss

*For other uses, see Zombot.*
*For the version in the Garden Warfare series, see Dr. Zomboss (PvZ: GW).*

Dr. Zomboss rules them all.

Edgar George Zomboss achieved his Doctorate in Thanatology in only two years. Quickly mastering thanatological technology, he built his fearsome Zombot and set about establishing absolute dominance of his local subdivision.

**Dr. Edgar George Zomboss** (known as **Dr. Zomboss** or **Dr. Edgar Zomboss**) is a zombie, the main antagonist and the leader of the zombie horde in the *Plants vs. Zombies* series. He is battled on the Night Roof during Level 5-10 as the final boss in *Plants vs. Zombies* and appears multiple times as a themed boss for each world in *Plants vs. Zombies 2*.

## Origins

The name *Zomboss* is a portmanteau of the words "Zombie" and "Boss", meaning "Zombie Boss", while *Zombot* is the portmanteau of the words "Zombie" and "Robot", meaning "Zombie Robot". According to an interview with George Fan, Dr. Zomboss' middle name "George" was not intended to be named after him, and was only accepted since "it sounded like a great middle name for a zombie overlord boss character."

## Personality

Dr. Zomboss is an intelligent and evil being, able to construct several powerful machines and to deploy a mass array of zombies in order to thwart Crazy Dave, the players, and their botanical arsenal. He is destructive and ruthless, as depicted in *Plants vs. Zombies*, where he will send a giant fireball or an iceball against anything in his way. This was heightened in *Plants vs. Zombies 2,* in which his creations destroy his own minions; however, he does not seem to feel any regret for these actions.

Dr. Zomboss also shows no concern or remorse toward his enemies per *Plants vs. Zombies 2*. He sends down many of his henchmen even on lanes where absences of lawn mowers are imminent. He is also arrogant, mocking Crazy Dave most of the time and using profane or vulgar words whenever conversing with him.

Dr. Zomboss is also a smart strategist. He holds a lot of backup plans to fill in should one of his machines malfunction and should the Gargantuars that he stationed to protect the world keys fall.

He has also shown to be deceitful per *Plants vs. Zombies 2*, able to plague Penny's thoughts when Dr. Zomboss remarked that Crazy Dave constructed Penny from decommissioned parts of Dr. Zomboss' past creations in Pirate Seas - Day 25. Some time later on Wild West - Day 25, he deceived the player and Crazy Dave, by saying that the zombies are just helping out as normal residences of the west. Furthermore, he also remarked that the zombie apocalypse is just a mere illusion. He also used deception on Far Future - Day 25 to persuade the player that they are being misled by Crazy Dave, only to be followed by a hypnosis. This only ended on Dark Ages - Night 20 when he said that Plant Food is made from zombies. Some time after the battle, he was foiled out by Penny, revealing that there are no zombies or any other evil substances circulating within Plant Food's nutrition facts.

Overall, his main goal is to persuade Crazy Dave to quit his journey in search for taco, to submit to his will, and to let his and the player's brains be consumed.

## Battles

### *Plants vs. Zombies*

The battles with Dr. Zomboss are set in the Night Roof level, probably so that Coffee Beans would not need to come in order to wake up the Ice-shrooms (which could be troublesome for dealing with the fire). He is the second-to-last zombie encountered in Adventure Mode.

He sends out other zombies to attack. The only Zombies he does not send are Flag Zombies (there are no waves in this battle, as it does not end until the Zombot is destroyed), Dancing Zombies, Backup Dancers, Digger Zombies (all of these three either appear underground or summon other enemies from underground), Balloon Zombies (Cacti do not appear on the conveyor, as they are straight-shooting plants), aquatic zombies (there is no water on the roof), Zombie Yetis (simply due to their exclusivity) and the Zombie Bobsled Team (despite ice trails from Zombonis. However, they probably do not appear because the Zombot can only place one zombie at a time, and the Bobsled Team consists of four at a time). The Zombot also has its own attacks, most importantly fireballs and iceballs which are released from its mouth when it bends down which is the only time when it can be damaged. They both deal lane damage and even crush Roof Cleaners. The Zombot also drops Bungee Zombies (to do single tile damage), and campers, and also stomps at plants near it (which inspired the Zombot Stomp from Plants vs. Zombies Heroes). The boss battle itself is a conveyor-belt level, so seed packets come on the conveyor belt at the top (or left) of the screen. The only seed packets that can appear are Flower Pot, Cabbage-pult, Kernel-pult, Melon-pult, Jalapeno, and Ice-shroom. Jalapenos and Ice-shrooms are the most effective. The Jalapeno can be used to cut-off the effect of the iceball and ice trail from Zomboni, while the Ice-shroom is effective against the fireball, aside from their regular uses against zombies.

### *Plants vs. Zombies 2*

Dr. Zomboss returns in *Plants vs. Zombies 2* as the final boss and midway boss (if you have the most updated version) of each world. Although the original Zombot does not return, he has plenty of other zombots to wreak havoc in the game. Each Zombot has its own exclusive attack, but all of them have both a lane clearing attack and a single tile attack (The Zombot Sphinx-inator, Zombot Plank Walker, Zombot War Wagon, and Zombot Tomorrow-tron charge through lanes and shoot missiles, the Zombot Dark Dragon breaths lane-clearing fire and shoots fireballs and Imp Dragon Zombies, the Zombot Sharktronic Sub sucks up a whole lane of plants and summons sharks, the Zombot Tuskmaster 10,000 BC blasts chilling winds and flings ice, the Zombot Aerostatic Gondola drops bags of sand on flame trap tiles and summons Lost Pilot Zombies, the Zombot Multi-stage Masher drops speakers that blast shockwaves and the Zombot Dinotronic Mechasaur shoots missiles and lane-clearing lasers).

#### Frostbite Caves

*Main article: Zombot Tuskmaster 10,000 BC*
#### Lost City

*Main article: Zombot Aerostatic Gondola*
#### Neon Mixtape Tour

*Main article: Zombot Multi-stage Masher*
#### Jurassic Marsh

*Main article: Zombot Dinotronic Mechasaur*

## Overview

When playing Adventure Mode for the first time, Dr. Zomboss approximately absorbs 40000 damage per shot and his appearance changes upon absorbing 8000 damage per shot and at 20000 damage per shot. Dr. Zomboss suffers an explosion at 36000 damage per shot before surrendering at 40000 damage per shot.

Every other playthrough of Adventure Mode, and in Dr. Zomboss's Revenge, Dr. Zomboss has 150% his health, and absorbs 60000 damage per shot, and his appearance changes upon absorbing 12000 damage per shot and at 30000 damage per shot. Dr. Zomboss suffers an explosion at 54000 damage per shot before surrendering at 60000 damage per shot.

## Attacks

Dr. Zomboss will randomly do one of the following actions:

* Summons zombies by dropping them down with the Zombot's hand. In all versions, Dr. Zomboss will usually neglect lanes with Roof Cleaners destroyed by zombies, but not iceballs or fireballs.
* When the Zombot lowers its head and opens its mouth, its eyes will glow either blue or red.
	+ If its eyes glow red, it will launch a fireball. Use an Ice-shroom to put it out.
	+ If its eyes glow blue, it will launch an iceball. Use a Jalapeno to defrost it. Make sure the Jalapeno is in the correct lane or the iceball will not be affected.
	+ Both the fireball and the iceball can crush Roof Cleaners without triggering it.
* If a plant is on the flat part of the roof, the Zombot may step on it and crush it.
* The Zombot will occasionally summon down three Bungee Zombies from its hand. The best ways to deal with them are to either freeze them with an Ice-shroom, giving you time to attack them, or to burn them with a Jalapeno.
* The Zombot sometimes drops a camper van, crushing all plants in a 2x3 area (two tiles tall by three tiles wide). Warning: There is no way to defend or prepare for the van attack. It is done instantaneously with no sign beforehand. However, you can recover from it by having multiple catapult plants still on the conveyor (e.g. you have six catapult plants or more, and you have six Flower Pots, so you should plant them on the area the previous catapult plants were destroyed/crushed), so that the defeated plants can quickly be replaced.

## Strategies

* Always have an Ice-shroom and a Jalapeno starting for the Zombot's iceball and fireball attacks, and to freeze Dr. Zomboss to defeat him quicker.
* Do not plant Melon-pults on the first column. Instead, plant Cabbage-pults there. This will prevent you from losing the Melon-pults to the Catapult Zombie's basketballs.
* Conserve your plants, especially Melon-pults and Kernel-pults. Try not to keep all your Melon-pults and Kernel-pults next to each other/put them in a square position; doing this helps keep plants from the camper dropped by the boss. You will risk losing a last line of defense if this happens. Don't panic planting Cabbage-pults next to each other, as they get defeated and appear a little too often.
* Only when Dr. Zomboss reaches down to attack you with a fireball should you use the Ice-shroom to freeze Dr. Zomboss and put out the fireball, so that your Ice-shroom is not wasted.
* You should not use a Jalapeno while the Zombot is frozen. This will unfreeze him and let him complicate matters.
	+ It is also possible to keep re-freezing him with multiple Ice-shrooms before he drops providing an opening for your plants. On top of this, it is possible to time the Ice-Shroom's freezing so that right before the Zombot thaws, you can use a Jalapeno, and then freeze him immediately after. Do this repeatedly and you can deal a lot of damage.
	+ Butter cannot paralyze the Zombot despite it is an open-cab machine, meaning that Zomboss would be hit by butter directly.
* If you freeze Dr. Zomboss while he sends out his iceball attack, you will have to deal with the snowball with a Jalapeno, thus unfreezing Dr. Zomboss, so either use the Ice-Shroom after exterminating the ice ball, or don't use it at all.
* Leave a column of empty Flower Pots on the first slanted column of the roof as a buffer endless zone and to plant Jalapenos and Ice-shrooms in and keep your plants behind them, but do not plant them farther up the roof or Dr. Zomboss may destroy them.
* Plant the Flower Pots on the flat part of the roof when you plant Jalapenos or Ice-shrooms.
* If possible, when tough zombies such as Gargantuars, Zombonis, or Catapult Zombies appear, try to wait until they get as close to your most frontal plant before planting a Jalapeno to finish them all. This makes good use of Jalapenos in case Dr. Zomboss wants to put more zombies on the same row.
* Dr. Zomboss has a set pattern that he follows at the beginning of the fight. He always places four regular Zombies, four or five Conehead Zombies, then lowers down to breath out a snow/fire ball, then he comes back and places four or five Buckethead Zombies (sometimes he places one Conehead Zombie), then lowers down his head again. After that, the Zombies he places are completely random, except he will not send Normal Zombies again. After his head lowers the third time, he will then release his Bungee Zombies, then after the fourth, he will drop the RV; after that, his attacks are all completely random. However, they do appear to observe patterns that vary with each fight - sometimes may include more or less of a particular zombie or attack than usual, or placed in different lanes.
* The first few plants you get on the conveyor belt are Cabbage-pults, followed by Melon-pults. Try to save your Melon-pults for the Conehead Zombies.
	+ The first four plants on the conveyor-belt come out in the following order: Cabbage-pult, Jalapeno, Cabbage-pult, Ice-shroom. The order of plants coming in afterward is completely random.
* If you have only one Roof Cleaner left, he will put almost all of the zombies in the row with the last Roof Cleaner left. This makes it easy to destroy zombies and Jalapeno becomes absurdly powerful.

## Trivia

### General

* Dr. Zomboss is the only zombie that uses proper grammar.
* Dr. Zomboss has a degree in thanatology; the study of death and the emotions surrounding it. This further shows his intelligence as opposed to other zombies.
* In the comic *Plants vs. Zombies: Bully For You*, it is revealed that Dr. Zomboss has a pet goldfish bowl named "Ziggy". This is because that his pet goldfish kept running away so he now just has a pet goldfish bowl. According to him, it is simpler.
	+ In the comics, he is shown to also have a pet hedgehog named Mr. Stubbins.
		- However, Mr. Stubbins' original owner is one of Dr. Zomboss' rivals of Bully for You, though this changed at the end of the comic.
* Some of the descriptions in *Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare* and its sequel reveal some part of Zomboss's personal life.
	+ He once lost a battle against a tennis ball machine according to Tennis Star's Stickerbook description.
	+ When the player talks to Grumpy Stumpy, he reveals that Zomboss is a good cook.
	+ He owns a company named Zomboss Inc. However, it is unknown what this company does.
* In *Plants vs. Zombies Heroes,* when unlocking Professor Brainstorm, a comic strip shows that he was once a judge in a science fair.
* According to some Wiz Factz signs in the Seeds of Time map, Dr. Zomboss was born in the Year of The Naked Mole Rat.
* He is one of the few zombies that smile, the others being Imp, Jack-in-the-Box Zombie and Money Bag Zombie. However, these are all manic smiles.
* When you defeat Dr. Zomboss in the original game, he makes the same death sound as Gargantuar.
* In *Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare*, the original Zombot makes a cameo. In one of the stages, the player can see the Zombot's head lying on the ground.
* Dr. Zomboss keeps a swear jar, as seen in the Garden Warfare comics.
* According to the comic Boom Boom Mushroom, Zomboss is allergic to 74.000 different plants, including Chompers, Peashooters, Cacti and Wall-nuts.

### *Plants vs. Zombies*

* In the online Almanac, he is just referred to as Zomboss.
* His tagline "to rule them all" might be a reference to the One Ring in *Lord of the Rings*.
* In the "reanim" folder, Dr. Zomboss is referred to as *Zombie Boss*.
* Dr. Zomboss's signature theme is called Braniac Maniac.
* In the Xbox 360, PS3, and PS Vita versions, the Utility Pole that marks where the zombies appear is removed to allow the player to see more of the roof and the Zombot's details, unlike other Roof stages where the other parts are blocked.
* Dr. Zomboss is seen doing experiments on a single Zombie in the Nintendo DS trailer, trying to shrink it and having unlucky results. When this happens, a censored beep can be heard, hinting profanity.
* In Dr. Zomboss's Revenge, when Dr. Zomboss has lost 45%–49% of his health (in other words, is at first degrade), a very serious glitch may occur in which he may throw multiple campers towards the player's defenses, send a huge wave of zombies toward players, and finally end the ambush with Bungee Zombies.
* On the DS version, Dr. Zomboss is shown in the Zombot on the top screen, with the progress bar on the bottom portion of the screen and will be pulling levers when performing attacks. The only two times he will not be there are right before the level begins and when he gets defeated (where he will fall off the edge of the screen).
	+ The progress bar on the DS version will only increase when he receives a specific small percentage of damage (the progress bar is instead shown on the bottom right corner of the touch screen on Air Raid, but Zomboss will still be on the top screen).
* Every time the Zombot stomps on plants, the biting sound of other zombies is heard, similar to how Gargantuars/Zombinis/Catapult Zombies do.
* On the mobile version, if the mobile device has a vibration feature while battling Dr. Zomboss, there will be three occurrences when the vibration is triggered: at the start of the level when he steps on the roof (once per leg), throwing a camper, and the final explosion once Dr. Zomboss is defeated.
* If Dr. Zomboss has so low health that can be defeated in one shot, and an Ice-Shroom is planted, his Zombot starts to disintegrate even before the plant disappears, despite that the damage should be dealt after the explosion.
* If Dr. Zomboss is defeated and there are zombies remaining, they will disappear.
	+ However, when there is a Zomboni and the above situation happens, he will also disappear but the ice trail will remain.

* In the code, Spikeweeds and Spikerocks can survive the iceball or fireball, despite not being sent on the conveyor. This implies that the boss battle was possibly supposed to take place on the ground.

### *Plants vs. Zombies 2*

* He, Basic Zombie, Shield Zombie, Knight Zombie, Wizard Zombie, Snorkel Zombie, Octo Zombie, Troglobite, Lost Pilot Zombie, Relic Hunter Zombie, Boombox Zombie, and Jurassic Zombie have represented the game icon.
* Starting at Lost City, the podium for the Zomboss level in each world was majorly dumbed down, instead of a gigantic platform.
	+ However, Modern Day made the podiums slightly bigger, mainly due to being 3 levels long.
	+ Due to an update, all the podiums from every world except Lost City and Modern Day were given new designs to match the new style of the Zomboss podiums.
		- Modern Day's podium only shrunk and had lost its animation in the update.
* Above each last level in each world, the icon is a hologram of his head. His holographic head has three forms: one for before the initial playthrough, a defeated form once the level has been completed, and a special animation only playing if the player waits too long.
	+ The special animation that can sometimes occur starts with Dr. Zomboss looking to the right of the screen while he's brushing his teeth. Then when he looks forward, he remembers he is on camera, the hologram then reverts to normal. In this animation, he also has a towel wrapped around his head like he's just come out of the shower.
	+ He can also be heard and seen laughing hysterically.
* As of Dark Ages and the further worlds, Dr. Zomboss now tends to pretend that he is part of the timeline he is in (For example, in Dark Ages, Dr. Zomboss uses the Old English language, which uses extra words like thy, or thine). In Big Wave Beach, he speaks in "surfer lingo". In Frostbite Caves, Dr. Zomboss speaks in a prehistoric style and in Neon Mixtape Tour he often makes references to popular music at the time, including the popular Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up", better known on the internet as the "Rickroll". In Modern Day, he talks normally.
	+ However, in Lost City he just talks normally, possibly hinting that the world is at modern times or very close to modern times. He also talks normally in Jurassic Marsh, probably because human language did not exist at that time.
* If the player attempts to plant a plant after Dr. Zomboss is defeated, the message about seeds needing time to refresh before being able to plant them again will appear, despite there being no seed refresh time, as all Zombot levels are Special Delivery levels. This also applies for other Special Delivery levels.
* Before the 3.3 update, the player was allowed to plant on the eighth and nine columns in the first four fights while the Dark Dragon and Sharktronic Sub fights allowed the player to plant on the seventh column (trying to plant on the columns where the Zombot is in these fights will display the messages "You can't plant on a scorched tiles" and "You can't plant on a school of sharks" respectively).
* Dr. Zomboss appears to be shorter in this game than he was in the first.
* Any zombies remaining will turn into ashes or play their death animation (in case of some objects like the barrel will disappear) once one of his creations is defeated.

ru:Доктор Зомбосс
pl:Dr. Zomboss