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Five Thoughts on Y: The Last Man‘s “My Mother Saw a Monkey”

By | October 26th, 2021
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome, remaining living creatures, to our review of FX’s inappropriately named science fiction drama Y The Last Man. Episode seven takes seriously the difficulty of teamwork, and the harm the patriarchy has caused that has outlived the Y chromosome. So beware of non-daughters-in-law, and put on your eighteenth century nightgown like the grounded trustworthy individual you are, here are five thoughts on Y The Last Man season one, episode seven: “My Mother Saw a Monkey.”

1: 355 and Yorick

Following the brief rebellion at the end of last episode, tensions are high between 355 (Ashley Romans), Yorick, (Ben Schnetzer), and Dr. Mann (Diana Bang). Yorick attempts to smooth things over by saying “good job” to 355 after she completes any mundane task, which of course, only irritates her. This move is classic Yorick: good intentioned and sort of sweet, but unthoughtful and ineffective. It’s the sort of thing that would mean a lot to him. He yearns for the day 355 tells him “good job” for any small task he manages to complete, but by now he should know this is not the kind of thing 355 needs or appreciates. Every small moment between 355 and Yorick elegantly captures their complicated relationship. His mistakes are as believable and relatable as her impatience for them.

2: Y The Chosen One

After hearing that a tall man with a monkey was seen accompanying 355, Kim (Amber Tamblyn) and her mother Marla (Paris Jefferson) put two and two together and realize it’s Yorick. While they’re both understandably furious to learn Marla had been gaslit after she saw Yorick and Ampersand all those episodes ago, Kim also takes this as a hopeful, spiritual sign. She believes Yorick was chosen by God to save humanity. She believes this will help America return to being “a nation of mothers.” Though Yorick is (sigh) a Democrat, and the son of the president she wants to depose, Kim feels it’s not up to her to question God’s will. She takes Yorick’s picture from the memorial wall and holds it like a religious totem. As a Christian Republican, Kim’s faith is very much intertwined with her politics, so it’s interesting to see these two sides potentially at odds.

3: Hysterical Women

All those episodes ago, Marla saw Yorick and Ampersand, and President Brown (Diane Lane) and 355 made her think she was hallucinating. Kim was a little suspicious, questioning why Marla would hallucinate Yorick instead of her own husband or grandsons, but she ultimately believed them over her mother. Marla expresses her anger, donning a long white nightgown, confronting President Brown in front of the whole Pentagon, but not revealing what really happened, perhaps because she appreciates the danger that would put Yorick in. President Brown quietly asks to continue the discussion in private, and instructs the room of onlookers to “be respectful.” This might’ve been cathartic for Marla, but if she wanted to prove she was sane, the nightgown didn’t help. Though one might be loathe to question the feminist credentials of the first woman President of the United States, she has used and continues to use the trope of the “hysterical woman” to her advantage. It’s easy for people to think of Marla this way because the trope fits her particularly well. She’s an elderly traumatized woman wearing a nightgown, and should therefore be pitied, and not trusted. Gross! All the people in that room were raised in the patriarchy, and all the harm it caused did not die with the Y chromosome.

4: B The Spy

For the first time since episode one, we catch up with Beth (Juliana Canfield). She briefly visits President Brown, just to spend time with someone who also knew and loved her ex Yorick. The struggle President Brown feels, to not tell her that Yorick is alive, leaps off the screen from her face. When Beth leaves, we learn that she’s actually with a group of revolutionaries, and used her connection with the President to case the Pentagon. (!) So far the revolutionaries have all been background characters, existing to be debated whether they should be dismissed as crazies, or empathized with as understandably crazy. Going forward, it will be interesting to see them from a more nuanced point of view from the inside. How did Beth go from being a goal-oriented career-focused capitalist grown up TM to a manipulative radical insurgent?

Continued below

5: Teamwork

Y The Last Man the comic book thrives as a story of a rag tag group of misfits and ne’er-do-wells who work together to save the world, but Y The Last Man the show, with the help of its phenomenal cast, goes deeper into the individual experiences of each character, and each of their unique reactions to collective trauma. So far, 355, Yorick, and Dr. Mann don’t work well together. If they’re going to, the camaraderie has to be earned. At the commune that used to be a women’s prison, one former prisoner says the reason they have electricity is “teamwork.” There are a bunch of examples of communities and teams working together in this post-apocalypse, in seemingly healthy ways like this women’s prison, and in obviously unhealthy ways like in Roxanne’s cult. President Brown leads a team that is the federal government, and while a lot of their meetings seem productive, they’re overshadowed by the big secret of Yorick that President Brown is keeping from them all. Kim and her Republican compatriot Regina Oliver (Jennifer Wigmore) want the same thing, but they’re coming from two different wings of the Republican party, and have very different approaches, both emotionally and practically. The show goes much further than the comic to appreciate the difficulty of great teamwork in the extreme circumstances that necessitate it.

Y The Last Man the show takes the premise of the comic and asks, what if we took this premise seriously? What if the last person with a Y chromosome, possibly the last chance for a reproductive humanity, was an unemployed magician? How would he get along with the smarter more competent people trying to use him to save the world? What would happen to societal gender roles, or to the patriarchy? The answer is that the patriarchy doesn’t disappear with the Y chromosome, because despite what a lot of patriarchy-supporters will tell you, the Y chromosome had nothing to do with it all along.


//TAGS | Y The Last Man

Laura Merrill

Screenwriter and script doctor. Writer for UCB's first all-women sketch comedy team "Grown Ass Women," and media critic for MultiversityComics.com.

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