Welcome, remaining living creatures, to our review of FX’s inappropriately named science fiction drama Y The Last Man. Season one’s penultimate episode sets us up for a thrilling finale that will bring together the show’s three main threads, while delivering equal parts exciting murders and thoughtful introspection. Spoilers ahead, so figure out who the president is before you try to usurp her, and don’t touch the fucking corn pops, here are five thoughts on Y The Last Man season one episode nine, “Peppers.”
1: From the Waco Warehouse to the Amazons
With the Waco Warehouse in ashes, Roxanne (Missi Pyle) and her followers are transitioning from a secluded isolationist cult to an aggressive nomadic cult, now calling themselves the Amazons. They invade another collective, ostensibly to take food, but end up just trashing the place. Nora (Marin Ireland) is focused on survival, but everyone else is more interested in violently evangelizing. Echoing Roxanne’s origin story, their goal is to seize power, and interrogating what to do with that power is not on the to-do list. They’re angry and hungry, and they just want to smash things. Even before they lost the warehouse, they were beating each other for perceived rule infractions, so the level of violence will inevitably escalate. After hearing someone sighted Yorick (Ben Schnetzer), and that he’s hiding out in a town with electricity, Nora suggests making him their next target, satisfying the group’s needs for both supplies and blood lust, promising a a very strange reunion between Yorick and Hero (Olivia Thirlby) and what has got to be an epic encounter between 355 (Ashley Romans) and Roxanne.
2: The Ones Who Did What They Were Supposed To
Attempting once again to ingratiate herself with Hero, Nora describes how, in the before times, she had done everything she was “supposed to.” She got married, had children, and had a successful upper middle class career. Even so, she never felt truly satisfied. She struggled with rage issues. While Hero did none of the things she was supposed to, they both ended up in this ridiculous cult. In a flashback, 355 recalls crying on the floor after a traumatizing Culper Ring training session that is implied to have required her to murder someone. Her handler praises her, saying she did what she was supposed to do. Later, 355 destroys the tracking device she was using to track her handler, rejecting that part of her life. A lot of people believe that they have control over their lives, that making the “correct” life choices will dictate certain outcomes, but that is so rarely the case, especially when half of humanity mysteriously dies all at once.
3: Murderers
Murder is a big theme this episode. 355 remembers the aftermath of her first murder for the Culper Ring. Hero is outed as a murderer by Roxanne to the rest of the Amazons. Back in Washington several murders take place. First the person who seems to be the leader of Beth’s (Juliana Canfield) revolutionaries murders Regina Oliver (Jennifer Wigmore), and then immediately vomits, and then screams that of course people were going to get murdered during this invasion. Then, after a bunch of people are killed in a confusing smokey firefight, Kim (Amber Tamblyn) stabs and kills a revolutionary who threatened her and Christine Flores (Jess Salgueiro). Kim does not vomit, but suppresses whatever she might be feeling to comfort a distraught Christine. Some of these characters were pushed to murder under extreme circumstances that can be traced back to the event, like Kim and the revolutionaries, and some of them were not, like Hero and 355. This is another way the show emphasizes that while the apocalypse changes the world in a lot of ways, in a lot of other ways, the world stays exactly the same. Meanwhile, each murderers’ reaction in the immediate aftermath of their murder says a great deal about each of them as individuals. Just in case you needed more reasons to find Kim terrifying, here you go.
4: A Tale of Two Coups
After finding out Yorick is for sure alive, Kim and Regina are ready to stage a coup. Wisely, first they get the military on their side, because President Brown either ordered two innocent pilots murdered, or she recklessly sent them on a mission with the rogue agent. It was definitely the latter, but neither look great. Then Kim and Regina confront President Brown in front of the cabinet, and though they agree President Brown shouldn’t have lied, and maybe shouldn’t be president anymore, they absolutely don’t want Regina to take over. Before this gets resolved, there’s another coup! A group of revolutionaries bomb their way into the Pentagon, and though it seems like they ultimately fail, they murder Regina in the process, and destroy the evidence that Yorick is alive. The first coup was well-planned, but failed due to the unforeseen second coup. The second coup was not well-planned; they didn’t plan further than taking everyone hostage. They wanted to “burn it all down” and didn’t consider they might be able to use some parts of “it all.”
Continued below5: They Were So Scared They Forgot We Were People
Sonia (Kristen Gutoskie) tells Yorick about her experience in the immediate aftermath of the event. Most of the prison guards had Y chromosomes, and the remaining guards at first assumed the prisoners had somehow killed them. Eventually, the prisoners broke free, and fought the remaining guards for their lives. Sonia says of the guards, “They were so scared they forgot we were people.” In all the various aforementioned murders this episode, a similar mindset seems to play out. 355 feared life outside the Culper Ring. Hero feared being discarded. The revolutionaries feared government oppression and/or inaction in the aftermath of the event. Kim feared for her and Christine’s lives, and for Christine’s pregnancy which she views as a holy symbol for the future of humanity. It’s sort of trite to say that violence comes from fear, but some things are trite because they’re true. As this is only the penultimate episode of season one, the fear and violence are only bound to escalate in the finale.
Y The Last Man is first and foremost a drama, but even in its extreme dramatic circumstances, it never feels over-the-top, and that is entirely thanks to its well-written and powerfully portrayed cast of characters. They are in extreme circumstances, but they are not extreme. They make extreme choices, but for understandable reasons. No one is too smart or too dumb; they all make choices of varying degrees of intelligence that make sense to them in the moment based on who they are and their own experiences, and I believe that they believe they’re all making the best choices they think they can make, even if I wouldn’t make those choices. Y The Last Man is a master class in acting.
