on bisexual tandy, brent junkins the football player, and mike
So I’ve been going over previous TLMOE episodes with a fine tooth comb, and it turns out that there was quite a huge thing that I completely missed when it came to Tandy and the football player he had a crush on:
Mike: So then, once I
got to Tucson, I went straight to Phil’s apartment and it actually
smelled pretty good, so I knew this guy hadn’t been there in a while.
But I knew that if Phil was going to stay in Tucson, he probably would
have moved to Bonita Estates.See, he had a real boner for this Arena Football League player.
You remember that? What was his name?
He used to live there…?
Tandy: Brent Junkins.
Mike: Brent Junkins, that’s right.
Yeah, oh man, he was obsessed.
He used to spy on him from across the canyon using those fancy binoculars and wearing that crazy outfit.
Tandy liked this guy so much that, on finding himself all alone in the world, he moved into his estate. Is the house we see him claim in the pilot episode actually Brent Junkins’s house?! I have no idea. I’m not sure if that’s a touching thing, exactly, since we have no evidence this crush wasn’t completely one-sided. (And, you know, the stalking.) But it is interesting. And then there’s this bit:
TANDY: Hey, this first one goes out to all the survivors out there. It’s a little homage to my favorite BJ of all time.
MIKE: Brent Junkins?
TANDY: Oh, Mike, very funny. No, an even better BJ than that, Billy Joel.
Tandy thinks of Brent Junkins fondly, it seems, even after all this time. And – as much as I don’t like to think of Mike aiming that low, considering that “BJ” is slang for something else, uh – this little exchange could very much be read as Mike heavily implying that Brent Junkins and Tandy did actually do the do, or at least that Tandy himself wishes they had done.
Honestly? I never bought that Mike and Tandy fell out over a girl. The girl in question is mentioned like twice and never again. Oh, I think that Tandy told himself that was the reason – but the real reason was because Tandy liked a guy, and his brother wrote it off as something funny rather than something important. And that continues right into their post-apocalypse interactions, and makes things so much worse. Tandy’s bisexual, but he never really got a chance to explore it, hence why he’s so confused now.