The Last Man on Earth: Season 1, Episodes 5-6: Dunk the Skunk/Some Friggin’ Fat Guy

     While still very funny, this show lost a little of its freshness in these two episodes. I’ll get to that in a moment though. For now let’s start with the good parts:

Phil is a good character. The people around him affect his decisions and attitude, but his heart is usually in the right place, even when his mind and body are not. He’s been put in a very difficult situation as the last man on the planet. He has already married Carol, but he wants Melissa so bad.

In “Dunk the Skunk” he has finally come up with a successful plan. He uses pretty sound logic to make a very good argument for having sex with Melissa. He has Carol centimeters away from agreeing, but of course he oversells it in what is coming to be seen a typical Phil Miller fashion. Just one sentence kills the entire argument when he should’ve just quit while he was ahead.

He kills his chances, but he gets extremely lucky that the ladies are very sensible people who talk to each other. They agree to let him also repopulate with Melissa and come up with a few ground rules. They all agree and the next thing you know, he is on his way to the night he has been wishing for since he first saw her.

She wants to get into it, but again he oversells it. He takes far too much time showboating and trying to make the night special with fireworks and electric guitar. In the process he ends up signaling what turns out to be another man, killing everything about his argument. Now Carol doesn’t have to share him and Melissa has someone else.

This is where the show gets a little bland. In the “Some Friggin’ Fat Guy” episode Carol does her best to get Melissa and Todd together while Phil does everything in his fairly meager power to stop it. Of course everything backfires and all he does is bring them closer together. He finds even more of a sting in the simple fact that Todd is overweight. He doesn’t realize the fact that Todd and Melissa are both good people overrides that shallow feature.

Of course in the end, Phil morality comes out and he sticks with Carol. He tries one more time to take a shot at Melissa, but realizes she just prefers Todd.

These two weren’t terrible, but I feel like the appearance of Todd kind of breaks the promise of this being a show about the last man on Earth. I think in trying to find a way to keep the show fresh, they have kind of pushed the audiences expectations away a little bit. The story is still pretty good, but I think they could at least try to keep true to the show’s title.

Jonathan Jones

Jonathan Thomas Jones is a speculative fiction author and founder of geekhavenreviews.com. He has been passionate about all things geek for his entire life. See more about him at jonathanthomasjones.com and follow him on twitter @jtgloryjones.