”You can now get electrocuted in your own home!”
By Eric Goldman
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
The Last Man on Earth wasn’t the only Sunday night series to reveal a character was pregnant this week, but I have to say this one was more effective as far as a well-timed, “Whoa!” surprise.
I like that the show isn’t backing away from the tension between Phil and Tandy. Tandy may have made amends with Carol and Todd and may be hovering at a certain level of indifference with the others, but by the end of Season 1, it was Phil who outright physically removed him and was clearly 100% done with him. So it shouldn’t be simple to fix and it sure wasn’t here.
Phil actually hitting Tandy (repeatedly!) and refusing to accept any punishment was an interesting moment for the show – even within the confines of a comedy, the question of rules and order are here, because yeah, how does anyone enforce anything in this situation?
Boris Kodjoe was curiously the only Season 1 cast member to not be elevated to series regular status in Season 2, and is still technically a guest star. So when Phil decided to leave, I thought, oh, okay, so Phil will be gone (at least for awhile), which makes sense given Kodjoe’s status… but then Erica threw in that curveball, so who knows what happens next. Well done, Last Man on Earth.
Beforehand, Carol’s attempts to get the other women to want to have children included a lot of funny material, including the discovery that Gail has a mannequin made up to look like Gordon – and how she covered it by going along with Carol’s assumption she was masturbating (“I just didn’t know you were masturbating in here all the time!”).
I also loved Carol’s list of cons to having a baby, which included “No doctors. No laws. Scarcity of cheese. No Sesame Street. Sex with old people.”
Tandy and Todd’s battle with the solar-powered cord was quite amusing as a symbol of their ineptitude without Phil – but I do have to say my favorite Tandy/tech moment was at the start of the episode, where he drank unfinished waffle and syrup out of the waffle iron. It wasn’t a “Tandy eats the cheese” moment in terms of hysterical/gross eating, but it was still strong. Oh, and Tandy 100% committing to his “The Heat is On” impromptu parody song? Highly approved.
It was notable that Phil made some good points at the end of this episode, as he went over all the horrible things Tandy has done that make him incredulous that Carol would choose him – he basically went down the list of all the things people were criticizing Tandy (and the show) for in Season 1. But at the same time, yeah, he physically assaulted Tandy (and didn’t look like he was going to let up), which managed to make for quite an intriguing, tense situation, while still retaining the humor throughout. At the same time, it’s good to see the show directly deal with the question of having babies and the significance of children in this situation.
