Their Importance: In season three of The Last Man on Earth Melissa is shown to have a mental illness that has re-asserted itself now that she can’t get medication for it. Mental illness doesn’t tend to get shown as a non-villainous thing in post-apocalypse shows, or as a non-funny thing in comedy shows, so I was glad when the show did this arc and treated it seriously. Although the writers never specified what mental illness Melissa has, they did do a bit of work with it –
ANDY BOBROW: When we first decided to do this thing with Melissa, like back in July or August, I called up my brother, who’s a psychiatrist (hi David!) and I asked for some help on it. The gist of it was, it’s definitely not Schizophrenia, but beyond that, it could be a few other things. Could be PTSD (which would really make sense for any of these characters), or it could be Manic-Depressive or Bi-Polar Disorder, or it could be just what they in the psych biz call a “transient psychosis.” [x]
Melissa’s storyline throughout season three involves her suffering more and more from psychosis until her boyfriend Todd locks her in a room for her own safety (which he’s devastated about), and then the gang spend a couple of episodes finding the right pills for her. It’s seen that Melissa has had her mental illness through all of her adult pre-apocalypse life, and took Clozapine as part of her daily routine. After the characters find out what pills Melissa needs, there’s a six-month time skip, and on the other end of it Melissa is back to how she was prior to her breakdown.
Issues: After the season finale aired, the showrunners did speculate on whether giving Melissa an arc about mental illness was the best thing for her character, or if it counted as a kind of temporary fridging:
ANDY BOBROW: So I’d say the lesson for me was that giving someone a trauma is not the same as giving them a story. I wouldn’t say I regret it, but the lesson for me was, like, when we decided to give Melissa a mental health issue, what we were really doing was giving Todd a story. Because Melissa necessarily kind of dropped out, and all the emotion of it was on Todd’s side of the equation.
But me personally, I think they did a good job with the arc and kept Melissa pretty relatable throughout.
