The hanging thread from last week’s episode doesn’t waste a minute in rearing its head and I was quite relieved to see that Carol immediately opens up to Tandy about what’s going on. Tandy and Carol have been on such a roll that her keeping a (tremendous) secret behind his back is not what these two have earned for the final stretch of the season. Besides, the two of them broaching this uncomfortable topic head-on allows for some much more interesting storytelling to take place.

The series is consistently finding new ways to intertwine these remaining people with this one being a worthy addition that deflates any campiness by the maturity that it’s shown. It ends up becoming yet another reflection of how strong their relationship is and how much Tandy trusts her. It’s also just too good to see Tandy pacing back and forth on the issue, going through the motions, with this bizarre two-face appearance highlighting this binary to a comical degree. I’m so happy to see the mileage that the show is getting out of this look. Never thought it’d be possible to top the beard but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get comfortable with Tandy’s current look.

Of course, with Tandy being Tandy his degrees of trust and comfort are going to become in flux on the topic of someone else porking his wife. Especially when that wife isn’t even his wife anymore. In what’s some appreciated continuity, Carol requires Todd to first marry her in order to have sex and impregnate her (although I won’t think too hard on the sinful out-of-wedlock sex she had with Phil 2…). Like a lot of Last Man on Earth’s best episodes, “Falling Slowly” forces itself to jump through a number of hoops to achieve the moments that it’s going after. So it’s not long before a full wedding is in swing in order to facilitate this arrangement.

It’s hard not to feel bad for Melissa and Gail as they are put through this flashy gauntlet on top of everything else that they’re going through. I can understand that that these people have a lot of free time on their hands, but I’m sure they’d rather be doing anything else in that moment. Todd says that he’s doing all of this for the good of the family and yet you can’t help but be a little suspect. Tandy’s natural Tandy-ness gets the better of him and he soon pulls the plug on this operation, instead deciding that his brother should be the one that gets to do the deed, a decision that somehow makes a lot more sense in this twisted scenario.

I was actually a little worried that Todd having sex with Carol would push Gail even further into the bottle, so it’s probably for the best that Tandy manages to defuse things since she’s still hitting it pretty hard. She’s beginning to show signs of perhaps not being as comfortable with all of this as she thought she was, especially now with everyone else’s virility wagging in her face. At one point in this episode Gail says, “I don’t know that I like living here anymore,” and it just hangs there with sorrow. It’s a heavy line and a real reflection of where the show has moved in some ways.