After a brief hiatus, The Last Man on Earth came back this week with an episode exploring the scary and the worrisome. As the group finds a new place to live together, each couple in the show had to face their own challenges. Let's review.
"La Abuela" owes its title to the former owner of the mansion Tandy (Will Forte) and co. move into. The episode opens up with a violent shooting in the mansion, and as it progresses we found out this was once the home of a cartel whose powerful leader was an elderly woman. She appeared to be ruthless and feared, and seemed to place the fate of her enemies between her fingers, literally through the use of a special Rubik's Cube. If the flashbacks to her life seem at first to be unnecessary fluff, it quickly turns out that la Abuela (Alma Martinez) had many people trying to kill her and that her house is in fact not has safe for our group as it seems.
As soon as they move in, Carol (
Kristen Schaal) begins a tireless quest to baby proof the mansion. She sees potential baby death in every corner and wants the house to be a total danger-free zone. She even has Tandy fill up the staircase with polystyrene, which actually gives us one of the funniest scenes of the episode. Meanwhile, Jasper (
Keith L. Williams) is exploring the surroundings and finds a pinata that was destined to la Abuela and that the viewer expects to be full of explosives, based on one of the flashbacks. But the danger happens to be somewhere else and while we spend most of the episode fearing that Jasper will blow up himself with the pinata, it turns out the explosives are in the Rubik's Cube that Tandy is now trying to solve.
Speaking of fear, it appears to be the central theme of this episode. Everyone fears something here, or worries about something. If
Carol is going overboard with the baby proofing, it's because she is scared that her baby might catch the virus, so she wants to do everything in her power to protect her child from all other potential threats. Melissa (
January Jones) is getting on Todd's (
Mel Rodriguez) nerves because she is overprotective since his heart attack, but Todd soon finds out that it is because she is terrified it might happen again and that she'd lose him. The viewers themselves fear that Jasper might be in great danger in this episode, and as everyone who has lived a safe life before is experiencing fear in this post-apocalyptic world, one character seems to thrive off of it.
Gail (
Mary Steenburgen) and Erica (
Cleopatra Coleman) are going nuts because Dawn won't stop crying. As they take the baby for a drive in hopes to calm her down, they almost hit a car that was parked in the middle of the road. At that moment, as Gail and Erica scream in fear, Dawn stops crying. They call her an adrenaline junkie, but if we stop and think about it for a second, Dawn is growing up in a world of fear. Ever since she was born she has been with these people who are constantly in scary situations, so for her, adrenaline is the norm, fear is the norm. When things are hectic, Dawn is comfortable. When things are quiet, she cries. It's interesting to see that, in the world of
The Last Man on Earth, danger is what the new generation is accustomed to, and it will be interesting to see if this theory works with Tandy and Carol's baby too.
All in all, "La Abuela" was a good episode of
The Last Man on Earth, but that's my take, what did you think of this episode?
