Hulu Y: The Last Man (FX on Hulu) (1 Viewer)

[Adam Lenhardt]

"Based on DC Comics' acclaimed series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, Y: The Last Man traverses a post-apocalyptic world in which a cataclysmic event decimates every mammal with a Y chromosome but for one cisgender man and his pet monkey. The series follows the survivors in this new world as they struggle with their efforts to restore what was lost and the opportunity to build something better."

Trailer:

 

[TravisR]

Based on a few seconds of footage, that's not quite how I pictured Yorick in my mind but it's like Agent 355 has just come off the page to the TV screen. I might be using my sister's Hulu password to see this.

And I know you're just posting the press release but this comic book was released by Vertigo (an imprint of DC Comics that their corporate masters dissolved) and not DC proper. There's a massive difference between the two.

 

[Tommy R]

I’ve been meaning to read the comic because I love his other series called Saga. I’ve always heard good things about this one.

 

[DaveF]

I’ve been meaning to read the comic because I love his other series called Saga. I’ve always heard good things about this one.

This is same guy behind Saga?!?! I’ve been meaning to read Y for years but never get to it — I’m not a big comics reader. I’m hallway through Saga and recently bought the second half of the series.

so, interested in the TV series

 

[TravisR]

You guys are f-ing up if you've read and enjoyed Saga and haven't read Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, Paper Girls, or Ex Machina (my personal favorite and something that would make a really good dramatic pay cable series).

 

[Tommy R]

You guys are f-ing up if you've read and enjoyed Saga and haven't read Vaughan's Y: The Last Man, Paper Girls, or Ex Machina (my personal favorite and something that would make a really good dramatic pay cable series).

I can’t say I’m too big on comics, but I heard about Saga randomly and sounded up my alley, and ended up loving it, so I definitely have some catching up to do with broadening my familiarity.

 

[TravisR]

I can’t say I’m too big on comics, but I heard about Saga randomly and sounded up my alley, and ended up loving it, so I definitely have some catching up to do with broadening my familiarity.

It seems like Hollywood has found Vaughan's books too. There's this and Paper Girls is being adapted as an Amazon Prime series. Amusingly, last I heard was that Ex Machina is getting turned into a movie with Oscar Isaac. Needless to say, they'll have to change the title since there's already a movie called Ex Machina also with Oscar Isaac. I guess the comic book trade paperbacks will have to use the retitle as a subtitle so people can find them.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The first three episodes dropped today, with subsequent episodes dropping weekly on Mondays.

I've never read the comic, but I watched them all and really enjoyed them. A good cast full of unconventional characters.

Diane Lane is phenomenal in this, as a loved and hated Hillary Clinton-style politician who is a longtime congresswoman worrying about a primary challenger when the world ends. She finds the presidency thrust upon her, and does a pretty successful job of shifting gears from politician to administrator working all day everyday on a list of problems that only ever seems to grow. She's been asked to do far more than most presidents, with an extremely tenuous claim to the office: When the entire line of succession seemed to wiped out, the surviving members of Congress elected her Speaker, and the Speaker of the House is second behind the vice president to be president, and so the vote was a de-facto instant promotion. The characters played by Kiefer Sutherland and Mark Moses in "Designated Survivor" and "The Last Ship" respectively were at least on the list.

Yorrick, the titular last man, is also an interesting choice for the last member of his biological sex: he's a directionless, idiosyncratic person who has coasted on the privilege of his parents' wealth and power, and developed an unconventional skill set in the process. Someone more Type A probably wouldn't have been able to roll with the punches nearly so smoothly.

The supporting cast is doing strong work too. So far the one that stands out to me is Ashley Romans as Agent 355, the last survivor of the president's off-books ring of James Bond-style hitmen and fixers. There's something really compelling about watching Romans take in and process information and then proceed decisively forward. Some characters are plagued by doubt. Agent 355 isn't one of them.

Our popular understanding of gender has expanded significantly since the original comic, so the show in its early going takes care to demarcate the living from the dead as purely a matter of biological sex. Trans men survived, because they didn't have Y chromosomes. Trans women, and women with androgen insensitivity who are biologically female but possess a Y chromosome, died. Yorrick and his monkey are the only two mammals with Y chromosomes known to survive.

There is a surplus of apocalypse shows right now, but if this one doesn't spin its wheels I think it's really going to be something special.

 

[TravisR]

Our popular understanding of gender has expanded significantly since the original comic, so the show in its early going takes care to demarcate the living from the dead as purely a matter of biological sex. Trans men survived, because they didn't have Y chromosomes. Trans women, and women with androgen insensitivity who are biologically female but possess a Y chromosome, died. Yorrick and his monkey are the only two mammals with Y chromosomes known to survive.

I haven't had a chance to watch the show yet but it seems like what you're describing is how it went in the comic book. Anything with a Y chromosome is dead... minus Yorick and Amp.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

This week's episode kind of felt like wheel spinning. I hope it doesn't take all season for Yorrick and Agent 355 to get to the geneticist and for Hero to come face to face with her mom.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

This week's episode did a better job of moving things along, with both character groupings featured.

I really liked Diana Bang as the show's version of Dr. Mann, the first performance of hers that's really stood out to me since The Interview. She's petite, probably a half foot shorter than Agent 355, and they gave her really enormous frames for her glasses. So visually, the audience might be preconceived into thinking one thing, and then she opens her mouth and speaks. Her lack of social niceties and inability to work well with others probably shouldn't have been a surprise; it was those very qualities that kept her off Washington's radar and made her stand out according to 355's selection criteria.

Yorrick is the perfect foil for both 355 and Mann; they are so intense and focused, and he's so laid back and congenial that they don't quite know what to make of him.

The mystery of 355 and the organization she works for deepens this week; she very consciously chose not to call the president and let her know that Yorrick was safe and that Mann had been located. And the handler that recruited her is apparently also female and alive but AWOL.

Back in Washington, a fraught power struggle is just getting started. It's an interesting dilemma: Amidst the greatest crisis in American history, the federal government desperately needs steady, sensible leadership with a technocratic focus. Regina Oliver, a fringe wacko who got where she was by playing to the worst impulses of partisan media, is not someone who will provide steady, sensible leadership. Yet she arguably has a stronger claim to the presidency than Jennifer Brown does. While the Speaker of the House is higher in the line of succession than the Secretary of Education, Jennifer Brown wasn't Speaker of the House when the presidency became vacant. Her elevation to Speaker, and thus to acting President, was a procedural workaround for the fact that everybody in the line of succession as laid out in the Presidential Succession Act was dead. Except Oliver, while unreachable and temporarily unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office, was alive.

Further complicating matters: The prospects for future elections are murky at best. The national elections infrastructure has collapsed, and the census data is useless. The idea that America could continue to operate under the regular constitutional framework was murky even before the country had two dueling claims to the presidency.

And, given the government's lack of success getting the power grid operational again and reestablishing interstate transportation, the president probably matters significantly less to the average person on the street than the president did before the world went to hell.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Ashley Romans is so good as Agent 355. Smart as hell, competent as hell, but not a robot.

I like that Dr. Mann is kind of a screw up when it comes to daily life; she entered the show with very strong views about pretty much everything, so it was nice to see her grapple with uncertainty this week.

I'm fascinated by the depiction of Kimberly Campbell and Regina Oliver, the show's two conservative women. The writers of the show are obviously coming from a progressive point of view, so they're on the outside looking in with these characters. I believe Kimberly Campbell, who is sort of a Meghan McCain type, more than Regina Oliver -- who is more of a Marjorie Taylor Greene type. Both drew their power from their association with men, but for Kimberly being President Campbell's daughter shaped her entire worldview and values. She is earnest in her beliefs, so it would follow that she would remain consistent even in the face of a radically altered world. But Regina Oliver feels like a persona crafted to appeal to right wing media. Given that most of the country doesn't even have electricity at this point, that's not a skill set that has particular utility in this moment. Oliver has a strong claim to the presidency, and she seems Machiavellian enough to package herself in a way that shores up the legitimacy of her claim. Having her strut around like a Fox News talking head seems to underestimate her as a character.

The rampant nudity is also interesting, and makes a certain amount of sense; society's rules of modesty evolved to avoid riling up men's sexual attraction at inappropriate moments. Without any (genetically-identifiable) men left, those rules of modesty no longer apply.

What sets this apocalypse apart from most others is that there was no real destruction of infrastructure except the destruction caused by protests and riots in the aftermath. It's a monumental task to train and deploy all of the people needed to get that infrastructure going again, but compared to a comet or a nuclear holocaust or an alien invasion the dark ages here should be a lot briefer.

 

[TonyD]

I watched the first one and have almost totally forgotten all about this show.
May have if I did it bump into the topic

 

[Josh Dial]

Ashley Romans is so good as Agent 355.

Agreed. This show is great, but she's phenomenal. I hope she gets wide acclaim/fame.

 

[TravisR]

Agreed. This show is great, but she's phenomenal. I hope she gets wide acclaim/fame.

I still haven't had a chance to see this show yet but when I first saw a picture of the character, it was like 355 had come off the comic book page into live action.

 

[Jason Goodmanson]

Diana Bang looked really familiar to me, but IMDB didn't provide any clues except her name. Bang. Korean. Vancouver. Kim's Convenience. Andrea Bang. Andrea's IMDB page mentions that she's the younger sister of Diana.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The most recent episode humanized 355 a bit; while she is incredibly skilled in an incredible number of areas, a person can still only go so long without sleep and take so much of a beating before it catches up to them. It was also nice to see Yorrick navigate a sensitive situation without his handlers making all of the decisions for him. And given all of the ways the world has gone to shit since the men died, it was nice to see a group that had really managed to make lemons into lemonade.

It'll be interesting to see what Beth's agenda is. I wasn't expecting to see her again this soon.

Really liked the depiction of the widowed first lady. She's not as naive as her daughter, had Regina Oliver's number right from the get-go. I also think suicide is an understandable course of action when your entire family save one daughter dies, some of them right in front of you.

Save for the small handful of people who know about Yorrick and Ampersand, the obvious conclusion is that humanity's days are numbered. Even they managed to keep the cryogenics powered for all of the sperm banks (and we know they haven't), you're still talking about a very finite number of potential babies. And given that all of the male fetuses died in the womb, there's no guarantee that any of the frozen Y-chromosome sperm or biologically male embryos are still viable. Even if they ration the female embryos, you're still only talking maybe a dozen generations of humanity left.

Diana Bang looked really familiar to me, but IMDB didn't provide any clues except her name. Bang. Korean. Vancouver. Kim's Convenience. Andrea Bang. Andrea's IMDB page mentions that she's the younger sister of Diana.

I knew her from The Interview, where she played the North Korean chief of propaganda who hooked up with Seth Rogan's character and later deposed Kim Jong-un.

 

[The Obsolete Man]

Canceled.

 

[TonyD]

Wow

 

[DaveF]

I’ve watched the first three or four episodes. I’m watching on travel or a free weekend afternoon, and I’m kinda stalled at the moment. Unfortunately, the show is less interesting than I’d hoped. It’s kinda middling so far. I’m hoping it picks up as the story progresses.

I’m also struggling because they titular character, York, is so stupid and unlikeable. The list episode I watched, he’s discovered by Agent 355 (whom I like a lot). The world is collapsing. He’s the only man alive. He was nearly killed and/or kidnapped by random women hours earlier. And his mom is trying to explain that he’s both extremely important and in incredible danger. But he’s living some completely different narrative where he’s going to go out and search for his fiancé. I was trying to interpret his behavior as coming from someone in shock, maybe having a psychotic break from stress, but he wasn’t seemingly indicating that. So I read him as profoundly stupid, willing to kill himself rather than give his mom satisfaction of being right.

The politics of the show are … realistic… but bluntly and tediously so. This is a matter of personal taste. I enjoy a strong political opinion in shows. But I think I like some abstraction, some distance from my literal reality. But Y is set firmly in 2019 with its dialog and RINO-isms. It wasn’t landing for me.

Ultimately, I’ll finish this on my own. But it’s not strong enough to recommend it to my wife, let alone rewatch with her.