Y: The Last Man - Table of Contents

Season One: 

The Day Before

Would the World Be Kind

Neil

Karen and Benji

Mann Hunt

Weird Al is Dead

My Mother Saw a Monkey

Ready. Aim. Fire

Peppers

Victoria

Y: The Last Man – You have no idea who you’re dealing with.

Y: The Last Man: 1x10 Victoria. 

We start the final episode of Y: The Last Man’s first and hopefully not last season with a dinner scene from hell that continues in flashbacks throughout Victoria, like an escalating framing device to tell a more complete story about the Brown siblings. For the first bits I didn’t even realise that Hero was at the table, because nobody else acknowledged her, so engrossed are they in Yorick’s story about his next show – a bit about Elvis’ brother, who died and left a whole world of questions about alternate realities behind. It’s maybe meant to be a story about Yorick in other worlds, with other circumstances, not those of a privileged white cis man with wealthy parents, one of whom is also a Congresswoman – although it is questionable if he realises that he is describing a piece about privilege as much as just one that is, as always, very much about himself, and accidentally leaving out the existence of a troubled and increasingly more inebriated sister. The dinner has everything – sniping from all directions, questions from the parents about Hero’s college plans, Hero’s probing her brother (questions that are, deep down, always about why their parents love him more), Hero noticing, repeatedly, her father texting someone, Yorick asking loudly about Hero’s new boyfriend, a provocation that she eventually takes up, revealing she is dating a married man with a baby on the way. Jennifer immediately attacks her for it, and neither Yorick nor her dad support her, which is why she then proceeds to point out to everyone at the table that he is having an affair with his TA, hence the texting (we know that Jennifer knew about it, but Yorick most definitely didn’t). It’s a horror show, the kind of dysfunctional family scene that leaves deep scars. Later, when Nora tells Hero that she was the one who vetted Jennifer when she was in the running for VP, she points out that Jennifer thought Hero was the liability – but after that scene, they might as well all have been, and it is a bit ironic that the one person at the table who stays out of it is Beth – and she’s the one who ended up with the anarchists who stormed the Pentagon. In any case, it’s a scene that ties together all the hints we have gotten about Hero’s reluctance to return to her mother, and Yorick’s profound self-involvedness that has made him such a difficult person to look after for Sarah. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but this one has created two siblings who are now on opposite trajectories in the apocalypse. 

Hero and the Amazons are speeding towards Marrisville, carried by the promise of revenge on another man, a group that Nora knows is volatile and dangerous, after the carnage she witnessed at the museum/art installation previously. They take over a swimming pool to plan their attack, mapping out the town with toys but running on wrong information – these women think they are about to have an easy win over a town of soccer moms, while we know fully well that the women of Marrisville will never give up their freedom without a fight. It’s sheer hubris, and it will cost them dearly. Before the night is over, two women who claim the pool as their own bud in, but are soon intimidated by all the guns and posturing, but don’t leave before sharing that the President has been shot dead – and the only person who knows what that means for Hero is Nora. They’ve bonded before over their shared mistrust of Roxanne, but their connection goes deeper here, with Nora trying to help Hero navigate a very complex grief. 

In Marrisville, Sarah is still sleepwalking but has recovered enough to decide that they are ready to leave. The town throws them a going away party that ends with Allison and Sarah sleeping together (not like that! But it’s very, very sweet, following an offer from Allison to act like a human sandbag to anchor Sarah and keep her from wandering off), and Yorick and Sonia sleeping together (like that) after Yorick reveals that he has only ever been with Beth. They’ve been dancing around each other for a while now, yearning, and Sonia explains to him that the only way to conceptualise time if you have done a horrible thing in your life that has sliced it apart is to see it as an ocean, not as a straight line – “If time was more like an ocean, then you can’t just pick one moment out. It’s all mixed together, the good and the bad.” She understands that Yorick still loves Beth, and won’t stop looking for her, but she also understands how lonely he is. I’ve already mentioned how Marrisville is the only place we’ve seen so far that appears to be habitable, and these gentle scenes drive it home even more – for once, there’s more than surviving happening, and it’s so necessary for these people to be able to have that before it all comes apart violently. 

Which it does the next morning, before Sarah, Yorick and Allison can leave. First Sarah finds a new tracker on the window sill, and then the Amazons ride into town guns blazing, with a clear idea of how things will go that very soon turns awry when the soccer moms they expected turn out to be heavily armed and very capable of defending themselves and the utopia they have built. The ensuing shoot-out is heart-breaking – people die needlessly while we see all the little things that made the town a home (a shared library, a whole infrastructure of mutual support and collective decisionmaking). I had a visceral feeling of grief in these scenes, of being on the verge of losing something valuable in the world of Y: The Last Man that has otherwise been so dark. Sarah sends Allison and Yorick off the hide in an empty silo and defends the town with the other women. On their way to the silo, Hero follows them on horseback, and Sonia almost kills her before Yorick recognises her – but their tearful reunion doesn’t last long, and Hero almost immediately tells her brother that their mother is dead, and that she has every intention to return to the Amazons to rebuild this world. Before she leaves, another Amazon shoots Sonia, and Hero kills her before she can do the same to her brother – but the siblings are doomed to remain on their own paths, because Hero’s too far gone to change it now. 

It doesn’t take long for Nora, bunked down with her daughter with an Amazon dying in their arms, to realise that they have dearly miscalculated and are hopelessly outnumbered. Nora surrenders, to Roxanne’s despair, who cannot admit defeat. The Amazons retreat back to their pool, Roxanne raging against Nora, calling her a coward and a traitor, until something snaps in Nora. She stands up to Roxanne, questioning how she strips down these women until they become people she can control, doing to them exactly what she has claimed men do to women. It’s a much more powerful narrative than Roxanne has ever offered – that these women do not have to make themselves strong by changing their names, themselves, but are already strong. Nora reclaims her old name – Victoria, an old-fashioned name her parents gave her that she changed as soon as she could, only to find that “The real you is a shadow, and it is always there.” Nora shoots Roxanne, and takes over with Hero’s support. 

Nora: We don’t have to reinvent ourselves. We don’t serve Roxanne. We don’t belong to anyone. The world will learn to fear us, because we will show them exactly who we are.

In the silo, reunited with Sarah, Yorick is grieving his mother and his sister (he immediately uses the word “brainwashed” to describe what happened to her, which is a good pick-up on his part). He feels guilt for the first time, because he knows that the Amazons were after him, that if he hadn’t survived, Sonia would still be alive. It’s the first time that Yorick takes responsibility for something, and reveals how much of a burden he feels now that the fate of the world lies on his shoulders. Sarah tells him a story about her childhood, about her grandmother who was a singer (like in the dream we saw) taking her to a gig when she was young, and her father’s anger that caused the car accident which killed everyone but her. “I should have died, but I didn’t. I survived. You will too.” – and somehow, from that connection, Yorick makes a decision, and says he wants to continue with their plan, but only if he is given agency in it, if he isn’t a liability, or a pawn, or “a Y chromosome with legs”. Sarah knows he needs to understand this before they can meaningfully continue, especially now that she believes Jennifer dead, now that there is nobody left to give her orders. 

Elsewhere, Jennifer and Beth spend a night in Jennifer’s old house, with Jennifer questioning Beth about her ideology, and Beth questioning Jennifer about whether she really thought she could rebuild something that was already broken before the Event. They seemed on even footing before, Jennifer genuinely liking Beth, but maybe never really seeing her as a person beyond her relationship with Yorick. Then, at night, just before the house is stormed, Sam appears! Sam, who tells them what has happened to Hero, and that they have to help her somehow, because he couldn’t by himself. Sam, who was there after the doomed catastrophe dinner, who held Hero after she messed up again. But then, they all get captured, and are driven away in a truck – and find themselves in a room, under observation, from none other than Agent 525 and Fran. It also appears as if the remains of the Culper Ring have left Sarah, Allison and Yorick a vehicle filled with the medical supplies that Allison will need for her research, and directions for a pick-up point. They were watching the whole time.  

Random notes: 

Ben Schnetzer has been great all season but his performance in this episode is outstanding. I hope we get to see this evolved version of Yorick. 

Same goes for Marin Ireland, showing the transformation of Nora here, who is too fed up to try and contain Roxanne and decides to take the reins – a much more dangerous version of the Amazons, under the leadership of someone who calculates and plans a whole lot better. 

Hero's second killing was not an accident. It was to protect her brother, but it was also without hesitation, and I wonder how that will play out in the next season. 

Before she dramatically leaves the table at the dinner, Jennifer whispers something in Hero’s ear – and these are, presumably, her last words to her daughter, and from Hero’s perspective now, believing her mother to be dead, the last words she will ever hear from her.  It’s also heartbreaking how in the scene it seems as if the only concern is how Hero’s behaviour will reflect on Jennifer, they are in public after all, and there is no attempt made to acknowledge Hero’s genuine pain, or any of the valid points she makes about her family’s dysfunction. 

Allison’s “I could tie you to the bed”. We know she knows how to tie a good knot. 

Also Yorick's kind-of-realisation when he calls Sarah a "super spy version" of his mum - which is maybe why he's so into her?! But then, who could blame him. 

Nora: I’ve spent my entire life making assholes seem reasonable.

Also in a small scene we see Kimberly’s freaky dream about leaking milk and then having sex with Yorick, from which she awakes in a barn with Christine (obviously biblical) – proclaiming she has had a vision about the future of humanity, and it very much involves them finding Yorick (and also, very much, all those things that Yorick hated – being a pawn with no agency in his own future). 

Y: The Last Man – I’ve done terrible things too.

 Y: The Last Man: 1x09 Peppers.

In the beginning of the episode, Yorick, Sarah and Allison discover that the community of Marrisville has a celebration every Tuesday to make up for the lost anniversaries and birthdays in prison:  with cake, with music, with booze. This community has food and water, it has electricity during a few hours of the day, but more than that, it has a cohesion built on something other than a common enemy and violence. It could be a home – or so Yorick thinks – but Sarah deeply mistrusts the peace and quiet. At one stage, Yorick advocates for their hosts, pointing out that the prison industrial complex and systemic racism mean that many of these people very likely were unjustly imprisoned and innocent (valid points, though also the kind of points someone who was never part of a justice movement would make after listening to like one podcast). He then makes a logical leap to argue that statistically, women are less likely to start shit – a hilarious statement that Peppers then continues to dismantle thoroughly. 

How utterly wrong Yorick is with his statement becomes obvious when we see the Amazons on the move. They’ve identified a target, a museum/art installation in which women try to remember the men in their lives. It’s beautiful, in a way – the voices of recorded voice messages echoing through an industrial silo (“Hear them speak again”, “1,000,000 Man Hours”), clothes and accessories, a spoken word performance of memories – it’s a way of turning something casual, incidental, into something profound, and a very effective way to capture a collective grief. It also absolutely enrages Roxanne, whose ideology is now boiled down to hating men for wronging her, and wanting to stamp out any reminders of men. Nora has always been the more pragmatic, she did after all work for a President who allied with Regina Oliver (later, someone will mock her by pointing out she has questions about fluoride), and sees the raid as an opportunity to gather resources. Instead, the horde mindlessly destroys, spills water and food, rips tents apart. It’s a monster that Nora realises she can’t control, a monster driven solely by Roxanne’s crazy preaching (and Hero is right amongst them). If Nora is to wield this somehow to her own advantage, she has to find a way in, and she begins to make progress when the other women reveal to Hero that Roxanne has told them about her confession – which she surely thought Roxanne would keep to herself. Nora sees an opportunity, and makes up a story on the spot that is based on one of the recordings in the silo, the frustration of having done it all, children, career, husband, and yet wanting more. She then advises Hero to never tell Roxanne her secrets, because she doesn’t deserve them – but knowing Nora, it’s not a true connection being forged, it’s an attempt to drive a wedge between Roxanne and her disciples, to find a way for her to lead these women in a way that she thinks is more productive. The outcome of the raid is that Roxanne vows to track down each of these men who have allegedly been sighted, but then Nora speaks to one of the women who turns out to be the sister of someone that Sarah shot at the markets – someone who got a good look at Yorick, and managed to follow him all the way to Marrisville. When the woman reveals that Marrisville has electricity, is a habitable community that has everything the Amazons would need to settle down again, Nora’s ears prick up, and I guess we’re heading towards an ideological showdown in the final episode. 

At the Pentagon, things are coming to a head as well. Regina and Kim have forged an alliance, and with the shocking story of Jennifer hiding the survival of her son and maybe ordering Sarah to kill the pilots (she didn’t, but that’s beside the point), they have managed to get the military leadership on their side, with plans of a coup on their way. At the same time, Beth’s group is planning to storm the Pentagon, using the information she has gathered during her visit as valuable intel. The timing of the two plans coincides perfectly: Just as the War Room gathers to confront Jennifer, and Jennifer is forced to reveal the rumours as true, a bomb goes off and everyone scrambles to get to a safe bunker, with the lines of responsibility blurred. Is Jennifer still President? Has this coup succeeded, and is Regina Oliver now responsible? Nobody is sure, and once the attackers overwhelm the secret service agents and have guns aimed at everyone, the situation descends into chaos precisely because there is no clear idea about who is President. Jennifer wants to take responsibility, because it is in her nature to do so – Regina wants to, because she is hungry for this power, because she thinks that the people at the barricades are on her side, are only after Jennifer’s head. It’s a terrible miscalculation, because Regina doesn’t realise that these attackers don’t fall into how she understands resistance. They are deeply disillusioned and likely were even before the Event, and Beth has fallen in with them after seeing her mother abandoned and dead, the victim of a health care system that was already broken before the apocalypse. These people don’t want a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe in science to be the President – they want to topple the entire system, and begin with a tabula rasa. One of them says explicitly – “This system has always been broken. We need to tear it down. Let the grass grow”. But Regina doesn’t have the capacity to analyse the situation for what it is, and pushes too hard, and one of the women shoots her point-blank. 

And then everything descends into chaos. The military is storming the Pentagon, the protesters outside are coming through the barricades, shots are fired indiscriminately, while folders burn. It’s the end, and Jennifer realises that early on, that this is a point of no return. Beth cuts her restraints, and they are now stuck with each other, a woman who cannot show her face and another who has just found out that her boyfriend is still alive – and all of that, as the US government ends. 

Random notes: 

Sarah’s flashbacks as she grapples with whether to hold on to the tracking device are beginning to add up to the first half of Nikita/the first episode of La Femme Nikita: Her version of Michael began training her from childhood, culminating in a final proof of trust (we know that this would have been a killing) that profoundly traumatised her. Her concussion has triggered these traumatic memories, and she ends the episode by smashing the tracking device that would have led her to the woman who did this to her. 

The emerging Sarah/Allison/Yorick triangle is very, very interesting. In this episode, Yorick and Sarah dance to TLC’s No Scrubs, with Allison looking on jealously – Sonia teases Sarah about liking Yorick (or maybe is trying to figure out if Sarah is going to claim him for herself, since she’s interested –  “He trusts you for some reason so don’t fuck that up.” she advises), and Allison makes a thinly veiled attempt at making Sarah jealous by going after one of the community members, which results in a very flirty (and obviously weird – this is Allison after all) scene in which they choose an outfit together. 

Sonia’s retelling of how the community came to be is impactful. How the male guards died, and then the female guards locked them up, forgetting they were people – she hints at what happened once they managed to break free, why they are now living in the same houses that those guards likely inhabited, before. Let’s hope Marrisville is ready to face the Amazons. 

Nora’s “don’t touch the fucking Corn Pops” made me LOL. There is a parallel here between Jennifer’s experience with Regina, and Nora’s with Roxanne – they both feel like they are “surrounded by children” incapable of realising what is at stake. 

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Kim, but she has a lot of great moments in this episode: her sheer fury and grief over her mother which she of course channels right back into the conspiracy she’s been working on, her protectiveness of Christine that is mostly about the baby, the fact that she sees Yorick as the future of humanity, and is more angry than anything at Jennifer for putting a future with men in jeopardy. Also, she kills for the first time in this episode protecting Christine, and the two seem stuck with each other for now after the chaos of the Pentagon. 

Y: The Last Man – This isn’t us.

Y: The Last Man: 1x08 Ready. Aim. Fire. 

One of the questions of this new world is beyond the political reality of managing resources and re-establishing something that resembles civilisation – it’s a very personal, intimate investigation into what a good, meaningful life would look like in this post-Y-world. Everyone has lost people close to them, some more than they can bear. Beyond the privileges of the Pentagon, there isn’t enough food, water, medicine. There are many, many guns, and a clear divide between those willing and able to use them and those who aren’t. It’s a moral divide as well, between those who opportunistically see this is as a chance to fully run with their libertarian fantasies of overcoming and dominating the weak, and those who find such a world unbearable, and seek a way to exist in a truly communal and equitable way. 

It’s fitting that the previous episode has introduced us to a community that does the latter, and that it was primarily made up of people who had escaped from a prison. Marrisville is as close as Y: The Last Man has come to a utopia – a small town in which decisions are made democratically, resources allocated according to need, and violence is not used to terrorise others. Ready. Aim. Fire. takes us to the opposite of that. It’s Roxanne’s story, how she became who she is now – someone who leads without consultation, who freely uses deadly violence to keep the women under her control in check when sheer psychological tactics aren’t enough. To destroy any notion we may have had that she does this out of a misguided sense of responsibility, her first act in this episode is to shoot someone who is attempting to leave – in the back, crying after, but without hesitation regardless. 

In case this wasn’t sufficient to establish how dangerous she is, her constant aggression towards Sam continues. She is trying to isolate him from Hero, undermining their friendship at every turn, at one stage mocking him for the fact that he used to work in theatre, and that he is unwilling to wield a gun. The conflict about the future of the world, these two approaches to what a good life looks like, are personified in Roxanne and Sam. Roxanne believes this is a dog-eat-dog world in which your own survival depends on exploiting the weakness in others; Sam believes, strongly, that there must be a way to exist in a meaningful, collective way that is not based on hurting others. The tragic outcome of this conflict is that Sam goes into it thinking that Hero, his only family, the woman he has promised to accompany in this new world even though he had an option to go with his friends, would agree with him, and disagree with Roxanne. 

What he hasn’t taken into account is how tempting this cult is for Hero, how their normal position on the outside, regarding and debating, would fall apart so quickly. To him, nothing has changed. Roxanne’s attempts to interrogate every one of her group’s relationships with men, twisting their words to make it seem as if their experiences match her ideology, seem unhinged, and clearly aim to isolate and indoctrinate. Hero used to see that, and now she doesn’t, or she conveniently overlooks it because of the comfort of food and shelter, and her unwillingness to go the obvious route, back to her mother, where someone else will hold her accountable for her actions. Hero’s ultimate goal here is to start over without the burdens of her past, and Sam is becoming the person that anchors her in that past that she is trying to escape. Because she is selfish, she overlooks how obviously in danger Sam is, how Roxanne’s behaviours towards him are escalating, becoming more violent. Sam suggests to Hero that they should leave and find people like them: artists, “not so many guns”. Their conversation turns into a fight that mainly seems to be driven by Sam’s revelation that Kelsey is into him, and Hero’s resulting jealousy. She wants Sam to herself but she doesn’t want to give up the safety of Roxanne’s compound, but she has also very conveniently spent a significant period of her life profiting from the fact that Sam loves her. I think at that point it doesn’t even matter so much anymore if she loves him back, because the amount of things that Hero has to deal with in her own head to come close to being able to being in a relationship are enormous (this is ironic, in a way, because it matches up with advice Olivia Thirlby’s character gives to someone who kind of resembles Hero in some ways in The L Word). 

Sam: You are my family. You are all I have. So just come with me, please. Just come. […] If you loved me the way I love you, you would keep a single fucking promise, but you can’t. 

Roxanne and some other cult members overhear the conversation and immediately begin attacking Sam, implying that he fits their stereotype of an aggressive man, and Roxanne asks him to apologise to Hero (and Hero, wanting to smooth things over with Roxanne, asks him to apologise as well). He refuses, and makes his choice, realising that there is nothing here for him, and that he’s lost Hero. He leaves the same night with stolen supplies, and for a good moment there, I thought that something horrible would befall him – but instead he finds a moment of genuine, joyful peace in a school, playing a piece on a piano, being overheard by the former principal who encourages him, who appreciates his art, and maybe his general idea that this world isn’t worth it if it’s all guns, no music. 

Hero and Sam’s journey overlaps with Nora’s, who is told by Roxanne that she will be asked to leave, very likely because Roxanne recognises how dangerous Nora could be to her. Nora knows that being asked to leave by herself is a death sentence: she is not cut out for the wilderness. She is not resourceful in the same way that Roxanne is, but she does come back into herself in this episode, realising how very useful her past as a PR strategist is. First she approaches Sam to try and sway him into convincing Hero to go back to the Pentagon, to gain all of them entry. But Sam sees her for what she is before the episode reveals how correct his assumptions are. She worked for a President who signed an anti-trans bill into law, she hasn’t even paid enough attention to him to guess that he never played sports, she is selfish, and Sam already has one selfish friend that he can’t rely on, why would he add more to the mix. 

Nora then tries to convince her daughter to go back to DC, but Mack has basically done a Hero – assimilated into the cult, except she is a 12-year-old girl, not a grown-ass-woman who should know better. Nora realises that she is about to lose her own daughter to Roxanne’s influence, that all these strategies of isolation and indoctrination have separated them. Nora is backed into a corner, and she reveals herself to be maybe just as dangerous as Roxanne is. After a drunken party (a creepy, creepy fucking party), everyone else is knocked out, and Nora lights the store on fire, destroying most of their resources, knowing that Roxanne’s power mainly depends on her promise of material safety. It would be so easy to confuse that act for an impulsive one, to underestimate her, but it becomes clear very soon that it isn’t: it’s very calculated. She also comes across a missing piece by accident, finding a police car in a nearby body of water, a police car that Roxanne in one of the flashbacks was desperately trying to sink. 

This is the key to everything, the key that reveals Roxanne’s entire backstory as a lie. In the car, along with bodies, is Roxanne’s employee ID – not a police badge, but an Assistant Manager badge for the very big box store in which she has assembled these women. Roxanne has created herself, created a story based on her avid watching of Law and Order episodes (in another flashback, we find out that she has stolen a boxset and almost got fired for it, her manager incredulously asking her why she couldn’t just stick to the endless and readily available reruns instead). It was a frustrating job, a frustrating career, one in which her attempts to protect the other women workers from the misogyny of their male co-workers was constantly squashed. Then came the Event, and with it, her realisation of how satisfying violence is, that she was capable of murder. Something deeply buried came to the surface, and Missi Pyle’s performance here is astonishing, showcasing Roxanne’s transformation through her realisation that she now could be anyone she wanted. 

We see her barrack down in the Big Box Store, cleaning out dead bodies, killing intruders, cleaning up – and then, over a meadow, regarding the community of women in the shelter, and wanting what she saw. They appear peaceful in the distance, at ease with each other, truly better off without the constant fear hanging over them. She sees it, she wants it, she comes up with a clear plan to take it, creating a place for them and then reintroducing an outside danger that would make it seem as if she were their only source of safety. And they came, and she kept them in line by playing into their fears, by exploiting their traumatic life experiences. 

Nora knows all of this, and she knows that Roxanne’s influence is waning now that her resources have gone, that she will need more than just a promise of food and water to keep these women around, that with the men gone, her constant refrain of male violence and misogyny will eventually lose its power. She has found her out, and cuts a deal for herself and Mackenzie, in which she gets to influence the decision-making and has first dibs on food in exchange for keeping Roxanne’s secret quiet, and helping her keep the other women in line. It’s horrifying, and exactly what Sam must have seen in her this whole time, with his experience of having to quickly read people to ascertain danger – and it’s seriously bad news for Hero, who’s stuck there now without a voice of reason to guide her. 

Random notes: 

I physically shuddered when Hero clapped at Roxanne’s speech, and I’m not sure anymore if she can be redeemed. What a human disaster. Kelsey (who she’s making friends with) reads her palm and tells her she is destined to help humanity, but for now, it seems very unclear how that’s ever going to happen. 

Pastor Rebecca would be SO stern about Hero's choices! 

The vulture that made Nora realise that her old world had ended makes a return here, kind of guiding her towards Roxanne’s past. 

I really, really just want Sam to be happy. 

Y: The Last Man - I don’t know. Maybe hell isn’t other people.

Y: The Last Man: 1x07 My Mother Saw A Monkey.

We have spent a few months in the new world of Y: The Last Man and I have finally found the place where I would like to spend this post-apocalypse: the community of escaped convicts who have created a whole shared life of collective decision-making, music, food and art after making it out of a women’s prison (and of course there are trans men in this community – spend a second to think about why that is). They seem as content as anyone could be in this world after the Event, and I hope nothing disturbs their peace from here on out, especially no fall-out from housing the world’s last-known Y-chromosomed man, his pet monkey, and his two bickering compatriots. 

But first, the fall-out of the unsuccessful military mission to retrieve Agent 355. The soldiers that Sarah has left alive because she doesn’t like it when Yorick looks at her that way (and I think she straight up doesn’t like killing people unless she has a good reason to) have returned to the Pentagon (yes, it’s the Pentagon, yes, the maps should have tipped me off) to report on their mission to the President and Regina Oliver, and the captain tells them that she saw a whole human man – a report Jennifer immediately tries to undermine with insinuations of trauma and incompetence, and the Captain doesn’t do herself any favours when she mentions the monkey on the man’s shoulder. She does, however, right after being gaslighted by the President of the United States, provide a wealth of possibilities to Regina Oliver and her new ally Kim. They discuss the report, Oliver cautious because she, too, doubts it, but then the monkey is mentioned, and something clicks into place for Kim’s mum. Of all the people who have been at the centre in this show, she is the one who has been portrayed to suffer the most from her loss – she spends her day in bed, watching episodes of MASH, with nothing else to occupy her time while Kim is off on her mission to restore power to Conservative Christian Republicans. But Marla did see a man, and she did see a monkey that day when she followed Yorick and Ampersand, and that is too much of a coincidence for either her daughter or Regina to doubt any longer that the President is hiding something. They come to the conclusion that the person who is being hidden in Yorick – because the description matches him, and because Jennifer has been acting too shady for it to be anyone else. She gets so excited at the idea that this will fuel the toppling of the Democratic President, and help restore men once they get a hold of this last one, that she misses her mother’s suffering. She carelessly reveals to her that their family home no longer exists, that it is under a ton of water and mud after a dam broke, and does not see how her mother has pinned all of her hopes on the idea of one day returning home, of seeing the place she has built with her husband, of normality as she can imagine it. It crushes Marla, and she jumps off the roof after writing a letter to her daughter. 

In the background, another momentous thing has happened. President Brown spots Beth, Yorick’s not-quite-fiancé, in the crowd of protesters and asks her inside. She clothes her, feeds her, but never trusts her enough to tell her the truth about Yorick, even or especially not after Beth tells her the truth about their non-engagement. It’s interesting to watch Beth take it all in, watch the way that government works now, in this building, with none of the aides having any times on their hand to question what they are doing. But what she sees is also the running water, the electricity, the food: and it isn’t quite surprising that, when she leaves, she knocks on the door of a van to give a full report of all she has learned to a group of people who probably do not have the best intentions with regards to President Brown. She did hint at the extent of her loss, losing her mother, but I wonder if these connections are new, and what exactly did happen to Beth to get her into this position. 

But back to the actual utopia, the first place we’ve seen that looks liveable and like a viable future for humanity. Allison, Yorick and Sarah have stolen a RV and are making their way across the country to San Francisco, but while Yorick begins to demonstrate his escape artistry to Allison in the back of the van, Sarah falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a tree. Yorick is rescued by a group who take him to their commune, but since his hands are tied, they assume that the women with him were his captors, and since this group is made up of prison escapees, they don’t appreciate anyone being held captive. They trow Allison and Sarah into the prison they’ve escaped from. 

And of course, Yorick being Yorick, he almost immediately reveals everything to these strangers. It’s an interesting thought that he reveals it to people who appear to be so non-fazed by it and entirely accepting of the idea that there is a man with a Y chromosome left, people who appear to have no interest of capitalising on that information or trading him in. Is it his good instincts, or his good luck? In any case, the commune holds a vote to determine all of their fate and decide that they get to stay; Sarah has a severe concussion and has to heal, and Yorick gently looks after her, which is heartbreaking in an episode that also reveals a traumatic car accident in her youth that killed both her parents, and probably made her who she is now, and is the reason for why nobody has ever looked after her since then. She doesn’t really know how to deal with being in that situation, not being the protector, but the protected. 

Random notes: 

Allison DOES know how to use ropes, doesn’t she?

A bit ironic that after all the shit that Yorick has pulled on Sarah, it’s her sleepwalking that finally really lands them in potential danger. 

“We got men here! We’re not impressed.”  

Look guys, I know it’s probably misguided, and there is a LOT happening in the magical triangle of Allison, Sarah and Yorick, but there was definitely a moment there between Agent 355 and Allison, right? A moment where Allison saw something she didn’t before, something she liked more than she thought she would? I mean, this woman could have probably killed everyone with one shoelace. This show has been really good so far, but 50% of my enjoyment is how much Allison and Yorick are each into Sarah and how slightly uncomfortable it makes them both feel. (also as an aside, straight after their little moment, Allison and Sarah have a conversation and Allison just assumes that Sarah would have a wife if she had anyone, which tracks).

Y: The Last Man – This is what you’ll get.

Y: The Last Man: 1x06 Weird Al Is Dead.

Roxanne: The world ended. It’s okay to be yourself. 

If you’ve watched any of the many recent documentaries about cults (regardless which ones), one of the outstanding details about them is how many of their methods use terminology and techniques from therapy and self-management. They borrow this language to promise an improved sense of self, but in fact it’s a diminished sense of self that now lacks outside support networks and only exists to prop up the charismatic leader. In one of the scenes set in Roxanne’s big-box-store headquarters, the women sit in a circle and she prompts them all repeatedly to think about all the ways in which men have abused them – prompting them more aggressively when she is unhappy with the answer, and not caring at all if her way of questioning retraumatises her followers. When Nora and Mack, who have been forced to participate, attempt to leave, Roxanne singles out Mack, stripping away Nora’s ability to protect her daughter, asking her how men in her family have spoken to her. It’s a demonstration of Roxanne’s power – that she is now not just in control of Nora’s fate, but also determines her relationship with her own daughter. It’s a scary look into things to come. Later, in another scene that seems destined to demonstrate her reach and power, she turns away a group of refugees, even though we know that the surrounding areas have been scavenged, that every scrap of food and medicine is now in the store these women are guarding. Nora is made to understand what it means to be on the outside of this group – it means death. 

I did find it a little bit surprising how little it took for Hero to change her mind about them. She starts the episode on the outs, hanging out with Sam, who has been implicitly or explicitly told that he is not welcome in any of these group activities. She tells him that she has found testosterone in the connected pharmacy, and a wealth of other drugs that Roxanne has apparently left right there. They get high together. Later, when she is taking a very awkward bath surrounded by women who have no qualms about being naked around each other, she is approached by the collective about her obviously unhappy state of mind, and given repeated reassurances that her past is no behind her, that she can be a new person here. It does make sense that this promise sounds appealing to Hero, who has, after all, betrayed Sam only to delay a return to the person who would hold her responsible for her actions (her mother, now President), but she has previously appeared to be a lot more cynical than to fall for the promises of a cult so easily. It is obvious that she is carrying the weight of what she did just before the plague, that she can’t share this with Sam, who would regard her differently if he knew that she killed someone. But telling Roxanne – an ex-cop, who, not unlike Kim, uses every piece of information that she has to gain an advantage, seems extremely ill-advised, even if it provides her with temporary forgiveness from someone whose opinion of her should have absolutely no consequence. 

Hero: No one knows. It’s like it never happened. You can’t kill someone and get away with it. 

Roxanne: Seems like you did.

It’s the right thing to say at the moment to someone who appears to have been looking for punishment for a very long time, but is equally unwilling to face consequences for her actions – Hero has been suffering, has been stuck, has never addressed any of her issues, but at the same time, doesn’t want to actually encounter something that would have her change permanently. 

Beyond that, it is becoming increasingly more obvious how dangerous this place is for Sam – a girl approaches him (and weirdly sexualises him), then reveals that she isn’t allowed to be alone with him, then gets caught and kicked and beaten up by the other women, punishment for unwanted behaviour. This is a ticking time bomb for Sam, but the only person he trusts there appears to be unwilling to leave with him. 

President Brown’s decision to have someone look into Sarah’s files has unforeseen consequences in this episode, even though it remains a bit shady as to how it happens exactly. Kim secures her alliance with Regina Oliver by sharing her suspicions about Yorick, and then somehow, a machinery is kicked into motion where the military tracks down Sarah’s location and begins chasing her. It appears that Jennifer was not fully briefed before the mission commenced, as she would have presumably immediately realised what it would mean if American soldiers laid eyes on Sarah’s charge. From Sarah, Yorick and Allison’s perspective it means that they are now hunted, even if Sarah keeps them in the dark about the fact that she is the person these people are looking for. They first see them at a spooky and beautiful memorial event (at which, once again, Yorick passes as trans) that includes a choir performing Radiohead’s Karma Police and many, many candles, and ends up with them holed up in a church building, where Sarah intends to lay traps for the soldiers following her. Her secretiveness and admission that she hasn’t been in contact with the President troubles both Allison and Yorick, who end up deciding to go to San Francisco on their own. 

It’s troubling that the other person Sarah is now charged with protecting is equally unlikely to listen to her – instead of one petulant child, she appears to now have two on her hands. They barely make it out of the woods, Sarah hesitating to kill the soldiers (if it’s moral qualms, or worrying about how Yorick will feel about it), but one of them has definitely seen Yorick’s face. And considering the power struggle happening back in DC, that sounds like really bad news for President Brown. 

Random notes: 

It is a cruel irony that Roxanne repeats that she used to be a cop, as if cops were famous for helping women in abusive relationships. 

Allison assumes that Yorick has a crush on Sarah, but wouldn’t anyone stare at her in awe if they were travelling with her? Also, Yorick finds out about her sleepwalking, which seems like an inconvenient condition to have with her particular job. It remains kind of unclear how aware of it she is. 

Lols at Allison trying to tempt Ampersand with “the body of Christ”. 

Hero: They’re staring at you because you’re a sight for sore eyes. You’re fucking dreamy.

I know that there are criticisms of Kim as a character – how she is basically a caricature – but I think it’s fair to say that this is a legitimate representation of what the political divide not just in the United States looks like right now. The way she and Regina Oliver (now with freshly blonde hair, wearing a red dress and a leather jacket to in the situation room) talk about their opponents, it’s like they live in an entirely different reality, one that is only held together by a hatred of what they call “liberal values”, but appears to be just factual reality. It’s impossible to argue with because it is so far removed from reason. To top things off, Kim indicates that she wants to adopt Christine’s child (adoption is obviously the only option Christine is given if she doesn’t want the child). Christine walks away from that conversation absolutely stunned – after stealing bits and pieces here and there to address the gaping hole left by the loss of her children, it seems like Kim’s next aim is to take someone else’s child. 

Y: The Last Man – No one can hide forever when the whole world’s looking.

Y: The Last Man: 1x05 Mann Hunt.

Yorick: Do you care about me as a person?

Sarah: Not even remotely.

Yorick and Sarah have arrived at Harvard to find Dr Allison Mann (Diana Bang, pitch-perfect), but realise that the campus is basically under siege: protesters regularly attempt to take over the building, while the military beats them back with tear gas and non-lethal projectiles. This appears to be the first time that Yorick realises how divided the country is, and how much of the people’s ire is directed towards his mother, President Brown. In another moment that proves he never listens to the woman who is trying to protect him, he once again wonders off even though she’s told him to stay set, and meets some of the protesters, who are not quite what you would have expected from the masses in front of the White House, and the characterisation we have previously gotten. Instead, their grievances seem legitimate (after all, Yorick himself is proof that the government is keeping secrets from its people). Luckily for Yorick, the women he meets (who are maybe former students?) think he is trans, and also that he is a supporter, even offering him a contact for testosterone (another irony that this just comes to Yorick even though he doesn’t need it, while Sam is struggling). 

They fail to find Dr Mann in her apartment, and while Yorick spins theories about how far removed from the reality of the working man this Harvard lecturer will be, the woman they end up finding in her campus office is very different from what he expected. She immediately realises (after stabbing him a little bit – he totally had it coming though) that he has a Y chromosome and gets excited once Yorick tells her about Ampersand, and she’s a second away from getting to work then and there. She does tell them that she needs to go to San Francisco because her own lab equipment here has been destroyed in the protests and the one across the country is the only one holding the (shady, borderline illegal) tech she needs to figure out what has kept Yorick and his monkey alive. She isn’t very secretive about how her research doesn’t exactly meets the standards of American regulators, and is disdainful about such restrictions, but to be fair, Sarah hasn’t much ground to stand on to criticise for it as she spends the whole episode doing shady shit without telling anyone about it. 

For one, she does track down the Massachusetts address she retrieved from the secret base she raided earlier, and it turns out to be an abandoned mansion – abandoned apart from the other Culper Ring agent (played by Lou Jurgens), whom she has a Terminator-off with until they begin to talk. They mention a mysterious woman whom they expected to find there, the same person that recruited them, Nikita-style, from maybe foster care, maybe juvie (Sarah remains secretive about her past, but hints that she does have people who miss her). This other agent is furious with this woman and says she will kill her if she finds her, and then finally begin living a normal life (a hint at how bad their lives must have been, if she can envision a normal life in the apocalypse), but it’s Sarah who grabs one of the trackers. Also, she does not, at any stage, track down a new satellite phone to call the President and update her about the state of the mission, which is significant because she does lie about it to Yorick, and makes the single-handed decision for them to go on a road trip to San Francisco. 

Meanwhile back in Harvard, Yorick bonds with his future scientist (Sarah does tell him to “charm” her, as charm is the only talent that she can come up with for him), and he does manage to have a sort-of productive conversation with her about the state of the world, in which she explains to him exactly how weird and non-binary sex is and how humanity has lost so much more than just men in the event. She grieves for biodiversity, for animals, for the brilliant women with Y-chromosomes that were lost (and somehow it feels like that particular loss is personal for her?). She also points out to him that from now on, he won’t have much of a life that’s his, and this is literally the first time that this has even occurred to Yorick – he definitely doesn’t like it. 

In DC, the return of Secretary Oliver means that the great power struggle is beginning. There are disagreements over how to greet her, how to manage her ambitions even before she lands, and once she does, it becomes almost immediately obvious that this woman cannot be underestimated and is not going to be happy to play her part in the administration. It comes at the worst time, with Jennifer finding out about the crash site and wondering if her son is dead, and if Agent 355 killed the pilots (at least giving the impression to her aide Christine that she didn’t know about the plan, which was my assumption). As mentioned before, we don’t see on-screen that Sarah contacts her and it’s safe to assume that she doesn’t, and is now on her own mission, leaving Jennifer in limbo with regards to Yorick’s survival. It also coincides with Kim continuing her scheming, this time accidentally stumbling over Christine having what she thinks is a miscarriage in a bathroom stall and bonding with her when she helps her, becoming the only person to know that she is, in fact, still pregnant. Information is power in this place (and remember, Christine has some very damning information on Jennifer), and Kim will use whatever she can to get what she wants. She also puts her feelers out to Oliver, revealing that the two haven’t always seen eye-to-eye (some minor disagreement in their right-wing ideologies? A class thing?). She offers up all the right-wing wives she has collected around her, and I’m guessing these two will be wreaking some havoc together very soon. 

Random notes: 

This episode has a lot of meat, but I really liked the scene in which Sarah basically just strolls past the military barrier, posing as a Sergeant, having all the authority in the world that people listen to, once again proving she does not need to resort to violence to get what she wants. How terrifying would it be if there were more than two Agents out there, doing what she does so well?

Yorick: Did you draw all these dicks? 

Allison: People grieve in their own way.

Allison did have a baby crib in the apartment, but is very elusive when Yorick asks her about it, which makes me wonder if she is deep in grief or if maybe this lady has successfully cloned a child. How Orphan Black are we going to go?

Y: The Last Man – I thought that I had more time.

 Y: The Last Man: 1x04 Karen and Benji. 

Sarah: From the day you were born, the whole world told you you’re the most important thing in it. You know you fuck around all you want, no consequences, a whole life of just being given shit. Like, I don’t know, the benefit of the fucking doubt? You walk into any room, you take it for granted. And now that you actually are the most important person in the room, you could give a shit, is that right?

It hasn’t been articulated yet directly, but the main reason why this “world without men”* is in such strive is, of course, because of patriarchy. This is why the literal folders of women that Jennifer and her staff have at the White House are so slim, why for each essential role they need to fill, the list of possible names is short, why the entire infrastructure of the world has fallen apart so completely, and so quickly. There were too few women in those roles because of structural reasons, and this is not a problem that can be fixed within the time that the world has. This is also why the horror of the Event happening in the Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting was so effective: for every woman in the room looking on in horror, many more men died on the spot. And patriarchy didn’t end on the spot either: it has its hooks in the remaining women, some of which are actively working to restore a world that they can recognise again, even if this discounts entirely the new situation civilisation is in. 

The twist at the heart Y: The Last Man is that the sole survivor is not particularly worthy or adept. Yorick doesn’t want to be the sole hope of humanity, nor does he accept that others have taken great risks to protect him. Karen and Benji is a frustrating episode, but especially so whenever his inability to accept what is asked of him is contrasted with Sarah’s dedication to her role as his protector. They have landed in the woods a few days away from Boston because it would have been more dangerous to fly closely, and at each turn on their journey, Yorick’s selfish actions put both of them in severe danger. He wanders off, he escalates situations, he still lives in a fantasy world in which his great romance with Beth is the sole thing worthy to be pursued. In the woods, as Sarah washes his clothes (how ironic is it that she does), she hears noises in the distance and finds that their tents are being looted by strangers – and she enters the situation confidently, knowing that she won’t need violence to get rid of the interlopers. But Yorick decides to storm on the scene, wearing his gas mask, narrowly avoiding disaster. Later, when they are at a market, he stupidly wanders off when he thinks he sees Beth and almost gets killed by the self-declared police, who all see his face and don’t buy for a second when he tries to pass as trans. He later blames Sarah for resorting to violence because he is shook by the realisation that she disposed of the pilots, but the truth is that Sarah only reluctantly and very effectively uses violence when she absolutely has to – her approach is to de-escalate situations with her presence, making it felt that it is a bad idea to attack her (which it obviously is). 

It’s endlessly frustrating for Sarah to be stuck with someone like Yorick, as the two of them couldn’t be any more different. It’s also definitely not the first time ever that she has come up against sheer male incompetence (after all, in the first episode, we saw her use that incompetence for her own goals), which doesn’t make it any easier on her. Yorick meets every cliché of a useless bin possum, and it’s only due to Ben Schnetzer’s acting that there is a trace of humanity somewhere underneath the unquestioned entitlement – the final scene between them, when he grudgingly steeps to entertain her with card tricks and genuinely surprises her when he pulls it off, in spite of her awareness, works – but to think that this is the only hope humanity has left is deeply unsettling. 

It didn’t take long in The Day Before to realise that Hero is similar to her brother in many ways. She appears more useful at least on the surface, and has real-world skills that come in handy in this episode, when she patches up Nora’s daughter Mackenzie and later one of the women from the shelter, but deep down, she is just as selfish as he is. There is a profound insecurity at the centre of both their identities, and it costs the people that love them and are now stuck with them dearly. Hero is travelling by foot to Washington, D.C. with Sam, who has already given up so much for her, and she is clearly stalling their journey to buy them more time. They find an abandoned house and settle down for the night, but they also find a functioning car in a horse stable that Sam insists would get them to their destination quickly, and safely. It’s off-screen but clear that Hero, during the night, sabotages the car, accepting not just that she is smashing Sam’s hopes to get help before his supply of testosterone runs out (they mention having visited several pharmacies, which have all been looted), but also prolonging an inherently dangerous journey in a world that is running out of essential resources. It’s a selfish, horrible move, driven solely by the fact that she fears her mother so much. And we don’t even really know yet what Jennifer did to her. She does tell Sam that she was with her partner when the event happened, coming close to admitting she killed him but then pulling back, and she reveals that her mother knew about the affair and judged Hero for it, maybe more so because her own husband was cheating on her. But does this explain why Hero would risk both their lives just because she can’t get over her alienation?

Later, after they find the injured Mackenzie in a raided store, Hero suggests that they stick together – another ploy that has little to do with her empathy for the girl or her clearly lost mother, but with being able to prolong the journey, perhaps endlessly. Sam is reluctant but doesn’t have much choice in the matter. In a complicated scene, they almost hook up before Sam pulls back – complicated because Hero has a difficult relationship with intimacy, and is maybe trying to distract Sam, or find a different way to bind him for her, but at the same time, I do think that their friendship and closeness is genuine, if very very bad for Sam – but then the owners of the house return, and the true horror of every single decision Hero has made to get them there is revealed. 

Nora told them earlier that the house used to be a shelter for women, and Sam has consistently been freaked out by the absence of dead bodies. The women return on horseback, immediately overpowering the four of them while spewing transphobia at Sam. He knows he is in severe danger, and the only reason they don’t kill them on the spot is because Nora lies and claims that Hero is doctor, and the women need someone to patch up their friend who has been shot. It’s a tense scene in which it’s clear that Nora doesn’t have the qualifications to keep the woman alive, while the return of their leader is looming. Roxanne (Missi Pyle) is scary in a similar way to Sarah – imposing, violent – but also an unknown entity who makes it clear how far she will go immediately, when she shoots her injured friend. I expected this situation to turn bad more quickly, but instead she offers to take all four of them in – but Sam knows that he won’t be safe there, and they don’t have much choice in the matter. Hero realises that they have stockpiled resources in a warehouse, which doesn’t bode well at all. 

Random notes: 

Yorick tells Sarah that he rescued Amp from “eating lipstick for science”. I’m guessing it wasn’t cosmetics. 

I’m still not sure why the previous episode was titled Neil, but this one is the aliases Hero gives Nora, who reveals at the end that she knows exactly who she is, and that she shouldn’t tell these women that she is the president’s daughter. THESE PEOPLE ARE FREAKING SCARY, and anti-government.

Two things I missed in the last episode: Sarah is taking Yorick to Boston, and of course the address she found in the first episode was in Massachusetts (not a coincidence then that she choose that particular geneticist?). And the bombs were likely hidden in the medal-cases she gave the pilots. She is, after all, an excellent bomb builder. 

This show makes me want to rewatch Jericho to see how it would hold up. Some of the big power play seems to be going that way.

From what other reviewers mention I gather that I should give the original comic a miss, but it would be interesting to see how the difference between the post-9/11 years and the post-Trump years plays out. This is definitely a world that has the same levels of radicalisation and division as ours does, and the recently departed President used all of that for his own gain, leaving chaos behind.

Y: The Last Man – He makes this whole building vulnerable.

Y: The Last Man: 1x03 Neil.

For the first time since this show started, an episode focuses on just two storylines, which I think is a good thing, as it gives the characters room to breathe and develop. The minor storyline is Nora (Marin Ireland, who has been great at showing how stoic yet increasingly desperate her character is), returning to a house she shared with other grieving mothers after being turned away from the White House, and being told almost instantly that the others are leaving, and do not have the resources (time or food) to take her and her daughter with them. Left with no food, they return to their home, where Nora’s husband and son are wrapped into blankets in the garden with crows waiting for a meal. Her daughter injures her leg badly, but insists that they cannot leave their dead behind unburied. Nora makes an attempt to bury her loved ones in the backyard but barely makes a dent, and when she looks up, she isn’t just surrounded by crows, but has a literal vulture watching her progress. It’s a quiet moment of realisation that this world has radically changed, and it’s a great moment in an episode filled with unburied bodies in a world where there aren’t any resources to give them the kind of last rites that society would have before the great catastrophe. Nora leaves them there and drives off – and I wonder where she will go now, and what it means for her that most of her qualifications and talents lie in a field that the President thinks aren’t relevant anymore (I think she is wrong on that account, but we will see). 

The substantive part of Neil takes place inside the White House, after Yorick’s rescue. Yorick is now a ticking time bomb, with 5,000 women who have lost loved ones in the building and protestors outside falling prey to increasingly crazy conspiracy theories. President Brown doesn’t seem to fully grasp how dangerous Yorick’s presence truly is, and is just glad to have him back and close – but Agent 355/Sarah knows, and spends almost the entire episode finding a way to deal with this threat to the woman she has sworn fealty to. It goes awry almost immediately, when Ampersand escapes the President’s room and Yorick follows him through the hallways of the White House, where the worst possible person catches a glimpse of him. Marla – who is still haunting the building, grieving – follows him, and Sarah narrowly prevents her from confirming that there is indeed a man in the building, and it is the President’s son. They conveniently construct a narrative where Marla is too addled to give a true account of her perceptions, but they forget what an apt political player her daughter Kim is, and how desperate she is to exert influence in a regime that she considers illegitimate, and not representative of her father’s and her own values. 

While Sarah tries to find a way to extract Yorick from the place he is putting in danger, Jennifer is busy finding a nuclear physicist or engineer to restore power. And it’s interesting to see how their lack of resources – time, personnel – creates a void into which Sarah, with all of her pragmatism and ability, steps so capably. From what we know of her, she is an operative, but she goes way beyond that in this episode, going through files of renowned geneticists to find one that can work on Yorick’s miracle. And she finds the best one among the discarded pile, a woman who tried to get funding from the Saudis, whom the aides discounted instantly but who she points out is the most qualified, the most dedicated, and therefore the best candidate. It’s a standoff between politics and the pragmatism that the situation requires, and it’s important to note that Sarah wins that debate, because Jennifer doesn’t really have an option not to have her win it. 

The other shocking development is that Regina Oliver, believed to have died in Israel, awakes from a coma in a field hospital. Regina Oliver was next in the line of succession, and even after brain surgery, and even after finding out that every mammal with a Y chromosome has died, her first thought isn’t about the people she has lost, but about the fact that this makes her the President of the United States. It’s not a good sign, considering that Yorick, a few scenes earlier, has summarized her politics as “anti-immigrant, anti-government, anti-vaxx”. This is a woman who wants the power that this weird monarchal quirk of American politics legally grants her, and instantly, when President Brown and her team find out about it, they realize the danger of allowing this woman to step up into the situation they are barely managing. 

I think it’s interesting in that moment, while some of Jennifer’s team theorise about whether a traumatic brain injury legally makes Oliver unfit for office, that Sarah’s allegiance doesn’t change. She has told Jennifer that her organisation takes its orders from the President, so it should lie with whoever is the President, legally – but I think she has made her choice regardless, and identified Jennifer as the person most qualified for the job, and therefore deserving of her service. Presumably there are also ways in which Jennifer could lose that trust and devotion.

Kim spends the whole episode scheming on the sidelines, making it clear how dangerous a political player she is. She speaks to the remaining wives (but finds little support initially from people who claim to have no political ambition, unlike her), she furiously exploits her connection to the secret service agents for information, and the only error she makes is approaching Sarah, trying to get her to her side now that she knows how close to the inner circle she is. Sarah knows she is a serious threat, especially with the spectre of Oliver, who represents all the hideous politics that Kim supports. It’s the combination of Kim’s threat and Yorick’s presence that drive Sarah’s plan to get Yorick out of the White House, and in the final moments of the episode, when Kim approaches Jennifer in front of the memorial and eulogises about the men they have lost, to come to a conclusion that loss is quantifiable as lesser and greater, and then makes a direct threat about her mother recognising Yorick in the hallways, she is proven right in her concern. 

How far Sarah would go to fulfil her mission of protecting Yorick and the President is made clear when she sets up the two pilots who flew Yorick to the White House to accompany them on a separate helicopter to Harvard – as Yorick watches on in horror, their helicopter explodes and crashes, and there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that this is Sarah’s work. I didn’t even expect these two to make it into this episode, and I think Sarah was trying to figure out whether she could trust them, and decided in the end that it was too dangerous to leave them alive. It does feel a bit harsh that she handed out those medals right before killing them. President Brown convinces a vital nuclear engineer she needs to return to work by saying that it is women like her, who have often found themselves alone in their career surrounded by men, who will be essential for survival in the future, not politicians like her, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that information control is just as essential for survival. 

Random notes: 

As mentioned before, the reason why I started watching this show was Olivia Thirlby (Hero’s not in this episode at all), but I think Ashley Romans has been the outstanding find here. 

The scene with the crashing helicopter is set up perfectly by Sarah’s anecdote about Russia: after the event, the Russians pretended that the male leadership was still alive, but the public decided it wanted proof and stormed the seat of government, and now all contact is lost. She knows exactly what’s at stake here. 

The episode directly addresses one of the biggest questions and inconsistencies – why are there so many bodies still around, months later – with Jennifer pointing out that they are dealing with survival, with very pertinent questions of nuclear power plants and water and food supply. I still think they could have probably done a bit better than just leave dead bodies at their desks and seal off rooms – the stench alone must be unbearable, and the risk of serious disease is great. I think maybe the show needed dead bodies for atmosphere in this episode and disregarded that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, especially considering how humans are made to respond violently, physically and emotionally, to dead bodies. 

I demoted Nora to an aide in the last recap, she is of course the former President’s press adviser. It’s difficult to be entirely sure what each of the remaining staff members were before the catastrophe.

The other thing I’ve previously missed is that Ampersand is a male monkey, and should therefore be dead like the other Y chromosome-having mammals – it’s fair to assume that his survival is connected to Yorick’s, and, as Jennifer said, “he bites”. Let’s assume Yorick’s has a fair share of Ampersand bites, and that Ampersand was a lab monkey. 

Kim calls the sole Republican who is working with President Brown “not a real Republican” because she in pro-choice, which gives you a sense of what’s at stake here. I wonder how close this story will get to the moment in Battlestar Galactica when President Roslin (I think, by the way, that Roslin would deserve a reevaluation in the world of 2021) decided that women’s bodily autonomy was trumped by the survival of humanity (and of course, I am sure we will return to the "how we survive is just as important as survival itself" theme). 

“We found plenty of men, none with a Y chromosome” is such a great little line in there, good writing.

Is it becoming a running joke how little Hero’s family cares for her? Yorick mentions that he went to her apartment but it was already raided, and nobody brings up the idea of continuing to look for her, while Yorick spends precious time pleading for them to track down Beth in Ohio. He also lies about their engagement. NOT JUST A DEAD CLOWN, also theatre’s most famous skull, I guess. 

Y: The Last Man – It’s a house. We’ll rebuild.

Y: The Last Man: 1x02 Would the World Be Kind.

In these days after the disaster, the world is grappling with sheer survival. Chaos is everywhere, and Congresswoman Brown, the highest-ranking person in the White House, assumes the role of President without much debate, after staff in the room go down the Presidential succession order and find no viable candidates. The most pressing issue is right at the gates of the White House, where violent protesters demand answers and spin conspiracy theories about what happened, but Brown is also concerned about the situation in New York City, where the effect of millions of dead bodies are beginning to threaten the health of its remaining inhabitants. She orders the evacuation whoever remains – knowing fully-well that her daughter Hero, who has not been in contact with her, could still be there, or could be dead. 

This coincides with the endlessly capable Agent 355 finding herself, for the first time, without a clear mission or person in command. She attempts to contact her agency, but receives no answer, and then proceeds to extrapolate from her previous posting – protecting the President, who is now Jennifer Brown. She swears her fealty to her, expecting perhaps important, world-changing tasks befitting her supreme and impressive skill-set. Instead, Brown sends her off to New York to find Hero, because being a pragmatist (or perhaps being whatever it is that makes Hero want to not be near her, and fear for her sobriety when she is close to), she feels like can’t spare anymore resources. There is a great scene later in this episode, when the former President’s wife Marla, who haunts the White House like a drunken ghost, speaks to Jennifer about their children, and tells her that she would have sent the whole army to search for hers. After the clear political differences between the two in the first episode, the interaction makes it clear that there is a much deeper rift here, that Marla sees nothing she recognises in this woman but maybe correctly diagnoses that Jennifer saw much she feared about herself in her daughter Hero. 

Talking about Hero, she is still in New York City, in a government centre that compiles information about dead loved ones. She is maybe looking for Yorick (who is definitely not looking for her), maybe assuaging her guilt over killing her partner, especially when we see that the other person she keeps bumping into her is her partner’s wife and his baby daughter. They are all stuck by their grief, by not knowing, Hero by her guilt, the wife by her grief for someone whose body she has not seen, whose fate she cannot be certain about. Hero also hangs out with friends she made at the AA meeting, a group of trans men who are planning to hike to Vermont to escape a city that is threatened by starvation and lack of drinking water, who ask her to join them, or else at least contact her mother, so that she can be safe there. Hero is hesitant for any kind of safety until she finds some sort of closure - -returning to the ambulance in which her partner’s body is decomposing, and taking his ID out of his wallet to give to his wife, to make it possible for her to leave. In the process, the wife realises that Hero is the woman her husband had an affair with, but instead of anger, she reacts with what almost seems like relief, for having confirmation that she wasn’t going crazy. Hero, who appears to believe that she deserves nothing good at all, finds that her friend Sam stayed behind with her instead of leaving with his friends, and in what is the best scene in this episode, he shares with her how difficult his life has become now that he has to explain his existence constantly to strangers, how precarious his life feels with the anonymity and safety that he used to feel in New York City utterly removed (and with his friends having taken all of the remaining testosterone). He asks her again to seek out her mother, because “He just wants her to find her mom, to suck it up. I don’t care what she did or didn’t do to you 100 years ago when the world was different. “ We have yet to find out what Jennifer did to Hero exactly, but it would be safe to assume it has something to do with her unwillingness to have a drink with Marla and the fact that her daughter is an alcoholic about whose behaviour her political rivals have spoken in great detail. 

I think it befits the impression that we have of Agent 355 that she equally fails in her mission to retrieve Hero and yet accomplishes a task that should be utterly impossible in this post-catastrophe world: instead of a lost daughter, she returns a lost son to the President. We don’t know much about her yet except that her personal effects were sparse and that her main reaction to the crisis unfolding was suddenly being without a mission, and having to make her own choices and decision about how to proceed. 

Yorick’s way home to his mother is complicated and scarring – he hides out in the apartment for as long as he can, until he and his monkey Ampersand are down to his last Snicker bar, and then he leaves only to lose Ampersand in the chaotic city, ending up diving through the poisonous water in the New York subway tunnels and then naked in a dry-cleaner at the mercy of strangers who do not comprehend his existence, but consider how it could benefit them, before they show mercy. Nothing could make it clearer to Yorick that he is in utter danger here – a scientific mystery with no people around him – but he is still haunted by his break-up with Beth, and is looking for her instead of Hero or his mother. He is found, in the end, holed up in the apartment again, where he would have likely died by himself, and in an eerie moment at the end, Agent 355 takes the two soldiers who have flown them all back to DC away with her, presumably to ensure that they can’t spill the greatest secret of all – that the newly-made President of the United States has miraculously not lost her only son. 

Random notes: 

There are other stories with the same premise as this one, most recently, Creamerie and Lauren Beukes’ Afterland, but I think this is the first time that I have seen the existence of trans people acknowledged. I hope we will get to see more of Sam, who appears to be Hero’s only friend in the world. It's also a pretty gut-wrenching moment when Hero talks to her friends about what they are going to do, and finds out that the only way for them to survive that they could have thought of was going to a transphobic relative in Vermont. 

Nora, the ex-President’s aide, is turned down at the gates of the White House, fruitlessly insisting that she is needed inside but told by the guard that if she were important, someone would have looked for her. An indication of how brutal this world is already becoming, only a few weeks after the event. 

The President’s daughter brings a different concern to Jennifer – a cryogenic bank in New York – and Jennifer, who is now dealing with infrastructure issues everywhere, confirms that the contents of sperm banks have been secured, just not that particular one that Kimberly is concerned about. 

Agent 355 explains to Jennifer that she works for covert task force called Culper Ring that answers only to the President, and that she does not know if the mission she went to DC for was connected to the catastrophe, or if it was just a coincidence. She also retrieves an envelope from the hidden field office that has the words “NOT YET” written on it, and a Massachusetts address inside. Ominous. 

Y: The Last Man – The Day Of.

Y: The Last Man: 1x01 The Day Before. 

I come into this show with no knowledge of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s comic book. It begins after the apocalypse has already happened – with one of our main characters, Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzler) walking through the chaotic streets of an unrecognisable New York City, in which cars have been abandoned and dead bodies are everywhere, most of them not in body bags. Whatever this apocalypse was, it’s already clear that it happened suddenly, with a bang, not a whisper, and that three weeks later, there are no signs of civilisation, at least not in this city. Yorick has with him a capuchin monkey, whom he saves from a helicopter that crashes from a rooftop where it must have fallen – and he shows clear signs of severe trauma. In 2021, it is an interesting idea to see the slow-rolling catastrophe of a world-wide pandemic contrasted with the imagination of a sudden disaster – a disaster that is yet unexplained. 

Then we return to the day before whatever event created this chaos. We are introduced to a sprawling cast of characters, some of which will be dead by the end of the episode (spoilers as to the target of the catastrophe: all the male characters, apart from Yorick). We find out that Yorick, fittingly, bills himself as an “escape artist” (a fine title for The Last Man, although the reveal of his general aimlessness in life and disastrous choices turn the titular Y into the question it spells out). He is a tutor of  magic slowly working towards creating his own show. His girlfriend, whom he is intending to propose to, is a school teacher and about to move to Australia, all things that set off alarm bells in everyone else’s head as to how successful his proposal will be, but not at all in his. After not managing to escape up-side down from a straitjacket in front of his soon-to-be-ex tutee, we next see him meeting his sister Hero (who turns out equally disastrous, they are the disaster siblings) in the middle of her alcoholics anonymous meeting. They are both named after Shakespeare characters that ask the question of why anyone would name their children after them (a dead jester and a suffering woman). Hero, on the surface, appears to be the more successful of the two, AA or not, since she is an EMT, but it soon turns out that she is having an affair with her partner, who lies to her about having told his wife, and happens to die a few hours before all the other men on earth when their argument turns violent. Conveniently, before they are discovered, the world ends, so all that remains are (additional) emotional scars. Olivia Thirlby is fantastic so far, and also one of the main reasons why I’m watching this show, and I can’t wait to see if Hero turns out to be exceptionally capable in this post-apocalypse or not. 

This first episode is almost like a ranking in terms of how well we’d guess that the characters would fare in the world that will soon begin. On that ranking, Agent 355 (a stunning Ashley Romans, who was also great in NOS4A2) would definitely come out on top, since we first meet her building a bomb for some radical right-wing nationalist, and then setting it up so they all blow themselves up with it. Agent 355 appears supremely well-placed to do very well in the post-apocalypse, but when the event itself happens, she is on an undercover mission in the Secret Service, tasked to protect the (right-wing – the show very much reflects the political climate of now, but under the previous presidency) president from what her employer terms a “credible threat”. She ends up not being able to do much about him bleeding out once the virus/mysterious cause of all of this hits. 

Because the second half of the show takes place in Washington DC, through the eyes of Hero and Yorick’s mother, congresswoman Jennifer Brown (Diane Lane!), we get a good sense early on of how dramatic the impact of only men dying would be, because most of these scenes are utterly dominated by men. The congresswoman is fresh off indirectly calling the President (a President who will ultimately be inconsequential, because man-plague) a misogynist, and threatens to come for him in 2.5 years, but then the critical moment comes way earlier when she is in a national security briefing that turns into a blood-soaked horror-show. Whatever is causing this, it isn’t slow, and it isn’t quiet – it takes less than a minute for every single man (apart from Yorick, who sleeps through it after unsuccessfully proposing to his girlfriend) to die, and to leave Congresswoman Brown as the senior person in the room, now tasked with looking after the horrified women in the room with her. It’s clear early on that this will be a trajectory towards power, considering how calm and collected she reacts. 

The episode sets up the concept of the show perfectly, portraying  a whole bunch of heterosexual relationships that are cruelly torn apart by death at the end of the episode, leaving only the women and Yorick standing. Some of the characters aren’t fleshed out yet – the aides to the Congresswoman and to the former President lose much and I wonder how they will fare, and the same goes for the daughter of the president (Amber Tamblyn, stepping into very unexpected territory), who has just written a book about Cancel Culture just in time for the ultimate misogyny cancellation event (but my guess is that misogyny will still make its way into this world, and if anything the great New Zealand show Creamerie has just portrayed a post-men world that is still a hellhole for all but privileged white women). 

Random notes: 

It’s hard to go into this show without being aware of the general premise, but I think the various dead animals strewn throughout the set-up (most traumatising, a dog) do a good job of building suspense, especially the swarm of rats. 

I’m guessing the weird scene in which the President makes his aide shoot a gun, which she does very reluctantly, as if also processing past trauma, is a good hint that a lot of these women will soon be wielding guns for survival. 

I like the set-up of the disaster siblings against their extremely capable mother elsewhere, and also the fact that Yorick just happens to have a capuchin monkey somehow. I guess he truly is the ultimate escape artist.