Y: The Last Man ends (for good?) with a too-late backstory for Hero and surprising poignancy
This finale has more than a few emotional gut punches, but don't expect an answer to Y: The Last Man’s central mystery.
TV Reviews Y: The Last Man
A mystery, by virtue of its very categorization, does not provide—nor does it require—answers. It is something unsolved, and maybe unsolvable; unresolved, and potentially unresolvable. And sometimes the answers given for something initially inexplicable just don’t seem good enough (arguably Westworld, arguably Lost), or they take the story in such an unexpected direction that you have to recalibrate your initial assumptions (inarguably, all of Twin Peaks). Given all this, perhaps expecting answers from the first season of Y: The Last Man about why Yorick is the last person with a Y chromosome on Earth was too much, too soon.
Season finale “Victoria” certainly doesn’t offer up much for that particular question, and it’s not like the creative team knew they would be canceled by FX on Hulu when they were crafting this tenth, and potentially last ever, episode. And given all that, it is understandable why “Victoria” ends in an open-ended way that suggests narrative expansion and more to come—in time. But without the promise of more time, and as it stands, “Victoria” is a bit of a letdown.
It is a structurally odd choice to give us Hero’s backstory so late in the game, and it only adds to the sense that Hero is a character the show felt it needed to build out through Nora and Roxanne, rather than letting her stand alone. I think the explanation for Beth’s transformation into an anarchist is still somewhat thin, and I’m not sure I would be interested in much more of the Kim/Christine pairing.
But: Nora’s ascension through Roxanne’s murder? Intriguing! The Hero/Nora partnership made far more sense to me than Hero/Roxanne, and I would have liked to see where that went. Similarly fulfilling: The 355, Dr. Mann, and Yorick trio, which really felt like it began to click together in Marrisville.
The Dr. Mann and 355 friendship was legitimately affecting, since these are two characters who are not at all gentle with other people but who are increasingly vulnerable with each other. And I appreciated Yorick finally being challenged enough to move past his own complacency and realize that the world around him is not as seemingly serene as Marrisville. The mistaken belief that Yorick and Hero both share that their mother is dead could have led to some provocative character development—as could have Jennifer actually being held by the Culper Ring.
If Y: The Last Man continues on another channel, streamer, or service, there were enough threads introduced in “Victoria” that I think could eventually pay off. As it stands, though, any answers about why Yorick and Amp lived when so many others didn’t, and what the Culper Ring has to do with all of this, and what the United States will look like now without a formal federal government, remain elusive. (I suppose I could say here, “Unless you read the comics,” but I am not sure there is a guarantee that the show would have stuck with every detail of the source material!)
So the satisfaction of “Victoria” comes less from any provided completion and more from the character moments: the Yorick/Hero reunion, Sam’s brisk efficiency in knowing that the Brown house is being watched, 355’s blinking awareness that she slept through the night with Dr. Mann’s weight upon her, Roxanne’s death. (She was incredibly irritating! Good riddance!) And if this is really the end of Y: The Last Man, then Ashley Romans needs to be booked on everything, immediately.
“Victoria” begins with a flashback sequence that the episode returns to a few different times: Before the Event, the Brown family, plus Beth, are out to dinner. Here is the messy Hero who felt such a distance between herself and her family. She’s downing drinks, she’s rolling her eyes at her parents’ indulgence of Yorick’s convolutedly planned “illusions,” she’s irritated when her parents ask when she’s going to do something with her life, she’s fully aware that her father is cheating on Jennifer, and she’s practically gleeful when she tells her family about Mike, her new boyfriend who happens to be married.
Hero is both inflicting wounds and pouring salt into them, and I know we are supposed to feel empathetic for her here, but frankly, she sort of sucks. She can mock Yorick for “the burden of the straight cis white guy whose mom’s in fucking Congress,” but Hero is privileged, too! Her real “Woe is me, my parents have high expectations” attitude is frankly exhausting, and I’m not sure if the show is being intentional in its presentation of her problems as not exactly as serious as those of the other women who were taken in by Roxanne. What I’m also not sure about: If any of the Nora/Roxanne argument before Roxanne’s death really worked.
The shootout scene at Marrisville was solid action (355 barely exerting any effort to disarm her captors and defend Yorick—gratifying) and a reminder that Roxanne’s brainwashing is both superficial and enabling for herself and for her followers. Roxanne is abusing these young women just like their partners did, and I think Nora calling her out for that played well. (As did her declaratively telling her daughter Mack, “Roxanne sounds like me.”)
But Nora’s whole story about giving herself a new name, and about the women attracting fear “because we’ll show them exactly who we are” … that all felt insincere and somewhat murkily written. Are the Daughters of the Amazon still going to be conquerors? It’s not like Nora has different aims from Roxanne. She still wants resources and electricity and a safe place to live. So if this is a commentary on the tactics of cult leaders, and if this was an origin story for Nora becoming one, I guess it sort of works. But ultimately, it felt like this subplot dragged on too long, with too much posturing and too little character depth.
In hindsight, I wish the amount of time we spent with Roxanne, Nora, and Hero had gone instead to 355, Yorick, and Dr. Mann, in particular the former. The back half of this season really became her story, especially as it was revealed that the Culper Ring remains active and watching her, 355’s recruiter Fran is still alive, and Agent 525, with whom 355 spent time outside of Boston, has actually been working with Fran all along. What is the long game here? What are their plans for 355, or for Jennifer, Beth, or Sam? And how, or why, does this relate to Yorick?
I thought Ben Schnetzer did a good job selling the emotional devastation of “My sister is brainwashed and my mother’s dead … I should’ve died, and none of this would have happened,” and Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s shot of 355 and Yorick sitting on the ground of the silo, with the curve of light from the open doorway upon them, was beautifully evocative. The bonds between 355, Yorick, and Dr. Mann are not perfect: Dr. Mann overhead Yorick’s doubts as to whether she can fix all this, and although 355 offers to train Yorick, that might be an uphill battle. But they get into that car left by the Culper Ring together, and they take a certain fork in the road together.
“They’re like your family, right?” Dr. Mann had asked 355 of the spy organization, but I think the more applicable question is what Yorick raised at that family dinner so many months ago. “Why does fate choose one man over another?” he had wondered, and I think that ponderance applies to 355, too. Why did that car crash kill everyone in 355’s family except for her? Why did the Event leave Yorick and Amp alive, and so many countless others dead? What is the future, and why is that future?
Maybe we’ll never get the continuance of this story, and we’ll never get those answers. But at least Y: The Last Man, in its potentially final installment, gave us the poignancy of Dr. Mann running out of that silo to hug 355, and the thrill of Hero breaking out of her shell to defend Yorick, and the shock and relief on Jennifer’s face when she recognizes Sam. It’s just a shame that those person-to-person connections might be the last we see of Y: The Last Man’s potential.
Stray observations
- Thank you to the reader who corrected me regarding the episode “Peppers” and let me know that Kim attacked that random protestor with her nail file, not the glass shard I thought.
- Whatever magic trick or, excuse me, illusion that Yorick was going to do involving Elvis’s twin … no conceivable way that would have been anything but awful.
- Sonia’s pitying “Are you one of those guys that thinks sex is a big deal?” was great; RIP, Sonia.
- Shrill had the best women’s pool party episode, and that is a fact.
- I wish we had gotten more time with Mimi Kuzyk as Janis; her bemused delivery of “Can’t shoot them after they’ve surrendered” and patting 355’s shoulder made me think the two of them would have been a good pair.
- Kim’s sex fantasy with Yorick—the breastmilk and the wedding rings were so on brand, and that’s all I have to say about that.
- Thanks for reading!
31 Comments
Most of the time when a show I’m watching gets cancelled, I cancel watching it.
I’m still watching this.
I like this show, but I don’t know if I’m going to miss it. One of the problems with these comic adaptations is that they don’t trust the source material enough to let the plot just start. So you get all of these origin stories, which aren’t really “stories” in the classical sense, just exposition.Like the Nora – Victoria thing, In the comics, Victoria just is a wild eyed cult leader, and Hero’s lost, like so many survivors, and gets taken in. In the comic world, a line like “my sister’s been brainwashed” would have made sense and landed.Here though, Hero’s very much on the outside of this group of people who are brought together by being survivors of a previous trauma. She’s not really like them and her being with them has been painted as the choice she makes to have a band to survive the apocalypse. She loves her brother, is happy to see him and kills a comrade to let him escape. The appropriate line should be, “She’s with group of people who want to kill me, but she saved me from them.” but if he said that, he couldn’t have that moment of growth and then choose not to go back and rescue her. But he can’t because that’s not how the comic arcs played out.Same thing happened with Preacher and The Boys. They write themselves into these senseless moments, and they have to break the characters in order to get the cool plot points that they arc’d out when they sold the show. Y could have created a powerful character driven show, but in that case I think they would have had to background yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann, and made the trio a macguffin. Alternatively, they could have hued closer to the comics and prioritized Yorick, 355, and Mann’s story and jettisoned the palace intrigue stuff. The show just doesn’t work if you have both moving at cross purposes.
Man, Seth Rogen really leaned into the least important part of Preacher’s source (Ennis’ penchant for violent, hyperbolic dark humor).
Interesting take! Y0
I don’t fully agree but, yeah, that “my sister’s brainwashed” line didn’t really land with me because… Does he really have enough evidence to come to that conclusion?
FAR too many things – between the show AND the comics (I am one of the few who did NOT love the comics; I still cannot believe Brian K. Vaughan is the same person who wrote the excellent “SAGA” and “Paper Girls”, after the dumpster fire that was “Y”) – to comment on…but the show *has* (inexplicably) grown on me.
I *did*, however, swing by to comment on Diane Lane’s/President Brown’s fucking LINDA RONSTADT/NELSON RIDDLE ORCHESTRA TOUR SHIRT. /winning
I hope the show gets picked up. It has a lot of flaws but I’d like to see where they go with it. I agree that Hero’s had the worst time with characterization. The dinner scene illustrated the point that Roxanne made about her family’s internalized misogyny, but if also failed to make Hero at all interesting or sympathetic. She was just another asshole in a family of assholes. They also should have shown here more heavily buying into the Amazon cult.
I liked Nora coming into her own here, mostly because I love Marin Ireland and seeing her get to play a big range is always fun. Also, yes, we need more 355 and Dr Mann! Also, also, it’s nice that Sam would be sticking around if the series gets a new home.
I really enjoyed Elliot Fletcher as Sam (hopefully he gets more big roles after this), but I’m guessing the dynamic between him, Beth, and Jennifer was going to place him in the middle mediating their two opposite view points. If the show gets picked back up somewhere I hope they write him a plot that isn’t just him facilitating other characters.
Very good point.
literally noone must have watched this show, and those who did weren’t talking about it online. RIP Y: The Last Man. you went through a million different revisions behind the scenes and ultimately noone gave a shit.
Roxane Gay and Stephen King are talking about it on twitter right now. Others are too. Maybe it was just people not in your circle, which is very different from no one.
I would love to the chance to see more of this, but at least it’s going out on a high note.But I gotta know, how the fuck was the pool so clean? When the Diana and Ruth come try to reclaim it they say they’ve been at the government camps, that’s why they know what happened to the Pentagon. So who’s been cleaning the pool? I know chlorine does a lot of heavy lifting, but it’s been months, how long have Ruth and Diana been out? And when resources are presumably getting a bit thin out in the world (implied by the Amazons searching for resources the last few episodes), why are they spending their time on pool cleaning instead of finding food?It was definitely satisfying to see the Amazons so out of their depth at the shoot out. But it does make me wonder what future Nora sees for them. She claims the world will fear them because of who they are, but if they aren’t the destructive groupthink minions that Roxanne was shaping them to be, why should they be feared?Three cheers to whoever spent hours on Google maps location searching that perfect last shot. I often get in my head about what the logistics behind making TV shows/movies look like, and how many weird jobs and details someone has to spend time on. The actors, directors and writers get so much of the credit. But especially with post-apocalypse shows location tells the viewer so much about the story, and they consistently nailed the atmosphere of a world transforming after such a colossal event.
The worst part is that all the effort to clean the pool went out the window once Nora shot Roxanne. Do you know how hard it is to get blood out of that?On a more serious note (yeah, I just used a murder for a punchline), I was impressed with the last shot as well. The opening shot of the series was a Y shaped intersection in “New York” and now the closing shot is a fork in the road. I wonder if the second road was actually CGI.
It looked like a drone shot to me (or maybe a crane?). My guess is they had already chosen whatever location to shoot the Marisville stuff and had someone look at Google maps looking for Y and T shaped intersections (with the right angle you could use a T-intersection). After coming up with a bunch that person drove out to them to see what they looked like in real life and how practical it would be to film at them/how well they blended into the landscapes they chose for Marisville. It’s certainly possible that it was CGI, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a behind the scenes on this particular shot to find out either way.
Actually, I have no idea how hard it is to clean blood out of a pool. And that’s the story I’m telling the cops.
Y from the comic to the TV series has gone through a ridiculous amount of challenges where it looked like everything was over and it kept coming back stronger. The book started right after 9/11 (the artist literally was about to start drawing the first page on the day) and the TV show during a global pandemic. Both times people said, “this is the wrong time for the story” but in both cases the creators put their whole hearts into it and it connected with people deeply. Characters you don’t see in comics and TV talking about things no one else was and rising above the sci-fi/fantasy premise making something unique. Y was a comic for people who didn’t read comics, bringing a new audience to the medium. If the TV show is over the people involved should be proud but coming back when it’s been counted out is pretty much Y The Last Man’s brand.
Welp, if they get another that’s fine, there is some stuff to work with, but if not then that’s okay…the quality has just not been there. This episode I have to think it was DvSM who brought the upped quality, she is a pro who I always pay attention when she’s helming (she didn’t have as much to work with in the last one she did in the series). They are talking about making an arc for Nora/Victoria, but honestly after being whiny and annoying and somebody nobody likes “Roxane sounds like me” and the speech before she killed her were the only real time Marin Ireland got to be anything other than a booger this whole season. Hero is worse than a booger, I was actively rooting for her character to die. I also agree that they did some great work between 355 and Dr. Mann in this episode and wound up in a good place with the three of them, sad that it is going to waste but, shrug, this hasn’t been cutting it. I wonder if they should have hit fast forward and got to this point earlier in the season. I still thinking that they should have just let Roxane be a cop, that switcheroo was dumb as heck, still annoyed about that cutesy Shyamalan LOST bs
I dont understand the shootout, one side surrenders and the other side lets them leave, with guns?!? No prisoners taken? or at least guns taken?
Thanks, I thought it was just me
Struck me as odd that Roxanne was just allowed to walk away, smashing up the furniture as she went.
I’d keep watching the show if it went to a service to which I subscribe and I’d binge it if it goes to a service that I only ge for a month or two at a time.At the pool after the failed invasion, I expected Nora to push the idea that it was stupid to just ride a horse into town and expect people to surrender. There was no reason for them to go to Marrisville and for so many Amazons to die.Of course, I also don’t know why Hero didn’t go with Yorick. Thankfully, I’ve never had to face a post-apocalyptic society, but if everything was by the seat of the pants and there were no established means of communication, unless I needed to stay back to provide cover, I’m pretty sure I would go with my sibling.
I am so happy you mentioned the silo scene. It was also a nice touch that very early in the episode, when Yorick and 355 are packing up the car and talking to each other 355 mentions silos too. Yorick asks 355 if she knows her counterparts in the Culper Ring. She says no. Her handler was a man, and they kept everyone “siloed.”Yorick asks 355 if she is the only woman in the Culper Ring and she sort of skirts the subject. She says everyone was separate.Later in the episode, she and Yorick are actually in a literal silo and she is with him. He is breaking down and she finally shares a true memory of hers with him as he has been begging for since they dismantled the helicopter in the woods in an earlier episode. Moreover, 355 even gives him the opportunity to leave.355 even protects Yorick from hearing Dr. Mann’s objections. Allison is her good friend at this point and she says no. Wait for him. Which I remember is very different than how 355 was treated when she was having a breakdown in her training. So I thought that was a very complex moment, a very interesting climax, and a heartfelt touch. The episode is called Victoria because the show probably wanted to tie Nora’s rise to power with the leader of the Amazons in the comics, but I sort of wish it was called “Silos.”There are so many nice touches in these episodes. I love this show.
Did anyone figure out Yorick’s tuna sandwich joke?
My guesses are, “A tuna sandwich walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘we don’t serve food here’.” Or, “What’s better than a tuna sandwich? A threena sandwich!”.
Haha clever but no. This is the equilivant of a card trick. Yorick would have some elaborate situation.
I know a couple of escape artists and the main thing they do is busk. Try to gather a crowd then get them to stay through the whole escape before passing the hat around. They do this with a load of corny Dad jokes.
haha if you are serious, I wish I could see this.
My grandfather could have 20 minutes with a “tuna sandwich walks into a bar” setup. His jokes were excruciating to a 5 year old who just wanted to be excused from the dinner table.
Honestly I hated the comics explanation and would’ve been interested to see some kind of better alternative.
The show made a big mistake from the beginning by setting the story immediately in the aftermath of the Event. Some of the character work in the show was so excellent, but the worldbuilding so plodding and tedious to the point of being generic. It felt indistinguishable from any scene from The Walking Dead not involving zombies. Setting it a few years into the post-apocalyptical future as the book did would have been far more interesting, giving us a chance to explore what that new world looks like instead of just another generic apocalypse but with all women this time.
Roxana don’t give up on us! This show is probably my favorite show during the pandemic. That is saying something. I watch a lot of shows and I know I am not the only one. It has also been a year of this so yes, I have watched so many shows and I really mean it.There is just something about this show. This show is just so rich, and someone may not expect it from an FX show. It is filled with little moments and nuances. It is worth watching a few times to pick them out. This show is just so carefully written and planned out. I am also still laughing about how true it is that Missi Pyle as Roxanne sounds like an actor playing an actor. There have been so many great reviews of the show on here, but seriously. There is so much more to unpack. Fingers crossed.