Y: The Last Man travels back in time in a blandly conceived episode
The Daughters Of The Amazon are born in a tediously plotted episode.
TV Reviews Y: The Last Man
Is it foolish to hope that all various narrative tracks of Y: The Last Man would have the same amount of tension, excitement, and overall interest? Because whatever is going on with Yorick, 355, Dr. Mann, and the community of formerly incarcerated women is intriguing. Whatever is going on at the Pentagon with Jennifer, Regina, Kimberly, and Christine could explode at any moment, especially with Kimberly now grieving the loss of her mother Marla, her final immediate family member. And then there’s the PriceMax, Roxanne, Hero, and Sam story, which is just… a slog.
I suppose “Ready. Aim. Fire.” is a broadly necessary episode, to finally move Nora’s story into its next phase and to separate Hero and Sam. But learning that all of Roxanne’s Olivia Benson affectations really are just affectations? That was neither fulfilling nor particularly logical. Roxanne is a psychological mastermind who can easily murder woman after woman, who can assume an all-new identity, who can sway an entire group of women to her will, who can plan a safety perimeter to maintain a lie, who can wage trauma-mining mental warfare against her wards, and who also doesn’t find it particularly important to properly dispose of her PriceMax ID?
On the one hand, I could see writer Coleman Herbert making the argument that Roxanne’s forgotten nametag was proof that she didn’t initially know what she was doing, and that she got in over her head too quickly. On the other hand, I think if there had been more clues in the preceding seven episodes that Roxanne wasn’t to be trusted not because she’s an increasingly deranged cult leader but because she’s deliberately playing that role to retain power, maybe this reveal would have hit a little harder.
As it was, I just didn’t really buy it. And it’s difficult for me to get a grasp on who this show is telling us Hero Brown is. Clearly we’re meant to see her as a vessel for Roxanne’s brainwashing, and I think we’re supposed to sympathize with Hero now that we know so much of Roxanne’s misandry is just the stuff she thinks her captive audience of domestic abuse survivors will want to hear. But Hero’s character arc has been so reactive, instead of proactive, until this point that we don’t have a strong sense of who she was in the first place. (Once again, I ask: Hero, why did you confess your crime to Roxanne? Bad move.)
Comparatively, we know so much more about Sam, and his arc is so much more compelling right now than whatever Hero is going through. I know the point of Y: The Last Man is not to compare characters against each other; that’s something Kimberly has been doing at the Pentagon for weeks, and it’s reflected her fairly selfish motivations. But the series has done a solid job so far in capturing the isolation and loneliness felt by the people on the road, and the varyingly conniving moves by everyone posted up at the Pentagon.
It took a while for Yorick to get going as his own man, so to speak, and for Jennifer to reveal a darker side of her personality. Hero, though, remains nebulous, and not in a provocative way, like whatever Beth is up to. I just want Hero to snap out of it, rather than plummeting further into this faux-victim ideology! It honestly is a little offensive that any of these women fell for what Roxanne is selling! Of course Nora would align herself with a charlatan leader relying on lies to sustain her upper hand! That’s politics, baby! Man, what a bummer of an episode of Y: The Last Man.
Let’s get into plot of “Ready. Aim. Fire.”, which is told in backward time; I will not do that to you. I will simply divide up the subplots. In the present day, Hero is falling more under Roxanne’s spell, while Sam continues to (rightfully) look around like, “What in the actual hell?” and Nora learns that Roxanne plans to kick her and daughter Mack out. Why is Roxanne keeping such tight control over who gets to be at PriceMax? What, really, is the definition of the “our people” Roxanne mentions, except for, as Nora pointedly says, being young, female, and impressionable?
Nora can’t figure it out, but she knows that she and Mack couldn’t survive out there alone. Now we know that you do not want to make an enemy out of Nora, because she’ll use all those political-maneuvering skills to figure out your whole deal. All it took was one wandering walk outside of Roxanne’s established perimeter (had we heard about this before?) to see the cop car, find Roxanne’s ID, and put the pieces together.
So: Nora sucks too, right? Someone could have been hurt in the fire she set after the “Better Off Without Them” party, and the fact that she aligns herself with Roxanne—someone she knows to be a liar—instead of revealing her falsehoods and trying to build a new community is a cowardly choice. I grasp that Sam’s rejection of her suggestion that they flee together must have hurt, but Sam isn’t an idiot. He knows that Nora sees Sam as just another stereotype, too, and in reality, she wants Hero on their side more than she wants Sam. And Hero, of course, is too far gone.
It’s dispiriting that Hero really has no answer for Sam when he asks, “They like me because I’m not really a man? Or I am, and I’m just another fucking serial killer or rapist?” All it took was a few weeks in this environment for her to turn her back on her best friend, which speaks to the rapidity with which the aftermath of the Event is transforming people. And it’s a little ironic how Hero turns into the kind of woman who tries to apologize for a man (“He’s just tired”) in that interaction between her, Sam, and Roxanne, as if Roxanne’s “all men suck” ideology is in fact having the reverse effect. The whole vibe here is hypocritical and superficially considered, and yet Roxanne and Nora joining forces, with Hero as an obedient follower, cannot be a good thing.
While all this is happening in the now, we also move backward throughout the episode and learn that Roxanne used to once work at this PriceMax, making enemies out of slacker male colleagues and her eye-rolling boss. Did Roxanne genuinely want to protect her female coworker from sexualization, or was she actually jealous about other people ignoring her? “Ready. Aim. Fire.” isn’t clear, but I honestly lean toward the latter because of how easily she starts killing other women who come to loot PriceMax after the event. Not much solidarity there, huh?
(I will admit that the closeup on the charm bracelet threw me, because at first I thought Roxanne was collecting already-dead male bodies to burn. The backward reveal that those were women she had murdered was a jarring one, and probably the most effective moment of the episode.)
After securing PriceMax, Roxanne draws in followers by mimicking the good cop/bad cop pretensions she watched on stolen Law & Order DVDs, scaring the women from the shelter, and then inviting them to live with her back at the store. Protection is a lure, and the women fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
But all the other stuff—I don’t know. Yes, I can buy that the confusion we’re seeing on the ground now, especially regarding which men died and which men lived, links back to the failures of Jennifer’s administration in battling the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Yes, I can acknowledge that cults work by cutting their followers off from their families, and by establishing a new community in which obedience is the norm. I watched The Vow, I watched Seduced, I know what’s up.
Yet everyone reacting to everything Roxanne planned out in exactly the way she hoped for is a little too narratively tidy. The Daughters Of The Amazon are now born, and with PriceMax burned, they’re on the move. How long until they cross paths with Yorick, or with Jennifer? Will the Browns still recognize each other? Or is Hero, well… the villain? (I’m sorry, I’m sorry.)
Stray observations
- Showrunner Eliza Clark confirmed on Twitter on October 17 that FX on Hulu has not renewed Y: The Last Man for a second season, and the creative team is now trying to find a new home for it. We have two episodes left, and that might be it! I’ll keep my thoughts on all this until my finale recap. If you want to read Clark’s whole statement, it’s here.
- Any episode without Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann really makes me miss Yorick, 355, and Dr. Mann.
- “I’m not a gun guy.” I appreciate how the very existence of Sam challenges all the heterosexual-stereotype stuff Roxanne is parroting, and of course that’s why Sam has to go. In a storyline that otherwise seems somewhat flatly considered, their animosity toward each other works.
- Related: “Not everything is about me being trans” felt like a very intentional moment from the Y: The Last Man creative team in signaling that Sam serves a greater purpose than just being “the trans character,” and I hope that stands. The Sam/Hero divide has worked narratively because the show has been clear that their friendship had a lot of toxicity and codependency to it regardless of their genders, but I wonder where Sam’s story goes now. It can’t just be playing piano in an abandoned elementary school, can it?
- “We don’t vote,” said one of Roxanne’s followers, and yeah, that’s bad. How do none of you realize this is bad?
- “You don’t trust cops, do you?” is a real meme waiting to happen.
- I flashed back to a lot of college Resident Life bonding sessions when someone demanded that Hero “interrogate that” when she praised Yorick. No thanks!
- Kelsey is not dumb, and it took bravery to stand up to Hero’s mean girl tendencies. But with Kelsey now cowed by that beating she received for daring to talk to Sam, will the Roxanne-murdered Kate ever get justice?
- The vulture balanced on the floating lights of the cop car: a good visual moment.
23 Comments
She looks pissed. Does it have something to do with that hat?
Sounds like they should have kept Michael Green as showrunner. Already cancelled.
Aaaaaaand the show’s canceled. I was disappointed, and then grateful that they didn’t wait until the season finished and I was fully invested before notifying me.
Olivia Thirlby is in this??? I was hoping she would become more popular after Dredd cause she was sooo good in it. Great to see her here… but now it’s cancelled. 😐
I don’t know, I’m about good. I read the graphic novel a long time ago so I’ve forgotten most of it (particularly the weird sex stuff that apparently comes later). I’m still kind of stuck on that we would know by now if animals like bunnies that were pregnant could have male babies (just needing a long enough gestation)…and that if all the animals are now going to die off that’s it for earth (where are all the washed up depths creatures?).But I didn’t need Roxanne to not be a cop, learning that didn’t help and her transition over the course of like a week was dumb (her cop story about the men talking about her was probably about that teenager at the CostCo). At least before she was crazy and competent, she still would have needed Nora. Nobody likes Nora, that’s the defining trait of her character, she’s the worst. Hero is an idiot, and her gaslighting Sam that he could be accepted into an openly hostile environment where they know his life is in danger is borderline unforgivable, she’s the worst. Sam is great so now he’s exiled and the show has no idea what to do with him, at least they didn’t blame him for the fire. This whole narrative was a black hole of boring and distasteful wallowing.Should they have made this show by cross-cutting the stories more, or is the timeline that important to preserve?
The Daughters Of The Amazon were the worst part of the comic, so I’m not surprised that they are the worst part of the show.
I feel like I’m in the
minority but I’m super bummed this is cancelled. The show overall has made a
lot of changes from the comic for the better, and it’s just an overall more intriguing
cast of characters (though Hero and Yorrick continue to be the least
interesting).I found the Roxanne
reveal to be pretty creepy, that she was just some lonely, murderous woman who
wanted a community to control and specifically targeted abusive victims. The
note about her shoplifting Law & Order DVDs was clever. Was it idiotic that
she literally left her nametag sitting on top of the people she murdered? Yes.
Also it doesn’t make sense that she’s so chill with murder yet didn’t kill Nora
the second she said she knew her secret, but I guess the “advisor” role makes
sense.It’s hard to believe
this group of easily manipulated women could be a possible threat to someone
like 355, but I’m sure as they travel, their group will get bigger.I guess I understand
the indifference over the show, as apocalypse settings have been done to death
at this point, and the criticisms from trans viewers are valid and make sense.
It’s just a shame, because I feel like this show could’ve done so much better
had it come out a few years ago, and I really want to keep watching these characters.
I’m kinda bummed out by how much I agree with this. Really gutted it could be gone.
No I’m with you. It may have helped that I read the comic when it came out, thanks to my brother buying each issue, but only remember the broad strokes. Also, I just sorta assumed it was safe for at least two seasons…
I’m with you too. I think they’ve done some really interesting things to adapt, update, and improve on the comics. The way they’re handling the Amazons is 1000 times better than the comics.
With the show about to end (possibly forever), we got a filler episode that does not advance the story at all. Great…
I felt similarly as I watched, but once it got to the end I was left with the impression that Roxanne/Nora are going to be central antagonists at some point, to both the President and Yorick’s crew, and this was their origin story. That said, up until the final act, which I thought was strong, this episode was pretty dull.
Did we watch the same show? I found this fucking riveting.
This episode felt the most like a Walking Dead episode to me!… That’s not a compliment.
I probably missed when Hero gave Roxanne her real name — I’m pretty sure she first met the group using an alias — but when Roxanne called her Hero at the shootig range, I thought it was an accidental reveal that Roxanne knew who she is. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve never met anyone named Hero and though she had only recently got the role, it would be one hell of a coincidence for there to be another Hero who wasn’t the daughter of the President. It should at least prompt the question.I’m hoping that if it’s available, Amazon picks it up. The story seems to have that long-form narrative that other shows have on Prime, plus Bezos is a nerd and it wouldn’t hurt or him to have a show that stars all women considering some of the recent allegations regarding Blue Origin. They could also use it to promote book sales of the source and it would be a good addition that people watch someday.
It’s not a cowardly choice for Nora not to reveal Roxanne, it’s a smart one. This way if shit goes sideways, the girls will blame Roxanne, not Nora. And she’ll always have leverage over her. Nora has the real power here but without any of the weight of leadership that the girls would be putting on her. Nora worked for the President; she knows the most advantageous position to have.
This seems like a good place to drop out of this show. If it ever gets un-cancelled, I’ll watch the rest of the season.
I … kinda … sorta … really liked this episode? And not just because I like Missy Pyle and Marin Ireland. I liked how they’ve updates the Amazons from the strawperson feminazis of the comic to something more recognizable as people. And I actually liked the reveal of Roxanne as a bitter, frustrated retail worker who sees her chance to finally be in control. It goes with the broader theme of most post-apocalyptic scenarios where people can suddenly re-invent themselves. It’s great to see Marin Ireland’s character finally move into action. It’s too bad we might never get to see it, but they are planting the seeds for the Amazons becoming a credible threat instead of just a bunch of people hanging out at the superstore. My poor sweet Sam though! Really hope things work out for him at the school. I also hope this show finds a home somewhere to keep going.
Roxanne’s reinvention reminded me of Woodberry from the Walking Dead, for better or worse.
Roxanne’s established perimeter (had we heard about this before?)It is only inferred from the scene when Roxanne drives the semis, so it is a little confusing. It is the area Roxanne blocks in with horseshoe of semi trucks.
I had to watch this episode a second time. The first time I saw it I did not realize Nora did not know about Roxanne’s name tag when she burned down the PriceMax with her daughter in it. So she did it intentionally to rescue Hero and earn her favor. When Hero does to return the favor and agree to go to D.C. the next morning, Nora goes to put medicine she found into her supplies. So Nora only finds the vulture and name tag the morning after the fire. So she had zero plan when she burned this place down with her daughter inside?
I have so many moments I like from this episode, but the way the writers chose to lay out the timeline is actually very disorienting. You sort of have to watch it a few times to unpack it all. At first it feels like they put too much into one episode, and it muddles the main plot as well.
So it is what it is. Narratively speaking, it is like watching a show in a different language and translating it. In other words, this episode does not handle the passing of time very well in a meaningful way unless you listen over and over again and interpret it.
So here is one of many wonderfully written moments. When Roxanne’s boss, as neglectful and downright lazy as he seems, calls her out for stealing the box set of Law & Order. Specifically Season 10, which he recalls from memory in the same breath he says he did not want to bring it up. Clearly he through about it enough to remember the exact season. Roxanne’s boss drives his point home by saying she could have just turned on the TV because there is always a Law & Order marathon out there on some channel. This is some good writing. On top of this, as if to prove it is extra good writing, Roxanne also lies and tells everyone she has been a detective for 11 years and this is a nice touch. One year after the season she stole.Anyway, one of many moments. I love this show. It definitely has its moments. I still smile when I remember how excited Yorick was to have toast again. Or how Dr. Mann drunkenly eulogizes the loss of biodiversity, especially Kualas. The depth of the characters and the actors who bring them to life somehow always manages to surprise and captivate me.
I just wanted to start a thread this week, even without a new review.I am going to keep talking about this show. Anyone can reply with random thoughts.
There is still so much to talk about. Simple example here but there are so many more.Take 355’s sleepwalking in episode 4 to “Taking a Chance on Love” and her grandmother’s profession as a singer. Her trip to the club with her Grandma lead to the death of her family that night. So yeah 355 sort of repressed that but for better or worse she can still dance with Yorick to “Scrubs.” It is just a cool moment of healing in a world gone wrong.