just rewatching tlmoe and noticed something on melissa’s note (2.02)
“from the desk of melissa chartres”
girl brought her own personalized stationary with her. i love this nerd
a) I love this detail b) I like to think she brought it along in order to prove to some of the more immature members of the group *cough*tandy*cough* that her name is not, in fact, spelled ‘shart’
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.
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.
“At the same time, we know comedies use “crazy” in a really irresponsible way. What happens when you’re laughing at a typical sitcom-crazy character is you’re willfully ignoring the reality of a heartbreaking illness.”
*thumbs up*
If the plan was always that Lewis died to show “death always wins” (sigh) I’m glad he ended up with a quick and painless death rather than the slow and horrible one Gail almost got. AM I actually glad? (he is after all still dead)….I guess?
