jasper

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Exclusive Clip from ‘The Last Man on Earth’ Season Finale Addresses the Jasper Problem

I think this was probably the best way to write Jasper out, to be honest. He’s not dead, he’s not incapacitated in any way, he just… doesn’t really want to be around them, and giving him a self-driving car which will take him right to them if he wants to come is a better alternative than dragging him kicking and screaming.

But I do hope we see him again. I still really want there to be another time-jump where we see an adult Jasper… played by Craig Robinson.

 

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I really, really love the Melissa-Jasper sub-plot which TLMOE’s been doing. Arguably, those two are affected the worst by the trauma around them, because Melissa has a mental illness and Jasper is literally a child. So Melissa gives him space, and speaks to him gently, and doesn’t pressurize him to talk when he goes non-verbal. I don’t think it’s a case of Melissa mothering him, because she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to be a mother, but she’s doing so well treating Jasper like a person when everyone else treats him like a baby or a generic symbol of their hopes for the future.

It’s not the sort of relationship you see often on TV, I’m really glad they’ve gone this way with it.

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ya know I think the thing with the way the TLMOE writers are writing Erica is that they keep making stuff happen to her but they never really let her react to it properly, except on a couple of occasions. Like, she should ABSOLUTELY have had a scene somewhere around The Open-Ended Nature of Unwitnessed Death where she came to terms with what happened to Mike, and she never did, and while her speech at Lewis’s funeral is good it only really scratched the surface of what she’d been through. So I really hope the introduction of Jasper does what it promised and gives us the audience a chance to really find out what makes her tick I guess? I’d really like an arc where she gets terribly overprotective of him or something, afraid that he’s going to die as well, before coming round to him obviously being a capable kid and learning to accept that she isn’t “cursed”.

I just want more of her and her smile and her fabulous boho dresses.

How The Last Man on Earth Explores Mental Illness

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How The Last Man on Earth Explores Mental Illness

tlmoedaily:

This is really fascinating! Some favourite snippets:

On Melissa:

We knew from episode 104 that she was a real estate
agent, and we knew she had been married and cheated on. That was about
it. The college major and the charity work, that stuff we filled in for
this episode. We had filled in a lot more that didn’t make it past the
outline phase. There was a lot about her ex-husband being her partner in
the real estate company, and how she had a bitter breakup with him but
they had to keep working together. And there was this detail about her
moving in with her brother after the divorce, and then having to take
care of him when he got sick. And the stress of all that stuff leading
to a psychotic break, which explained the pills. But so far that’s all
just head canon.

On Erica:

At this point, Erica is the last person who still has
some high-ground on Tandy. Everyone else has kind of sunk to his level,
or fallen off a cliff at some point (or died). Erica is the last judge
we’ve got.  

On Jasper:

There was an idea for a kid to appear in season one.
We actually had a whole episode written where Tandy met Jasper in Las
Vegas. That was when we were planning on Carol getting pregnant in
season one. When that element went away, so did Jasper. Jasper was
always intended as kind of parenting practice for Tandy, once he knew he
was gonna be a father.  It also always felt interesting to see what a
kid would be like in this world—assuming they were living on their own
from around age four.

On Melissa’s mental illness:

Our guiding principle was let’s not solve this using
magic or some dumb TV cure, like “You’ve got to make peace with your dad
by talking to this puppet.” To be baldly honest about this, we knew
there would be a pill, and when we found one called Clozapine, we
figured, well, that’s the right part of this situation to make fun of.
The name of the pill, rather than the illness itself.

 

I love this little interview, but I really really wish they’d left the bit about Melissa having a brother in, because it suddenly adds a huge extra dimension to her part in what happened to Mike.

 

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