Summary
“Victoria” all feels like too little too late, bringing Y: The Last Man to a close without us ever having seen the best of what it has to offer.
Y: The Last Man was pretty clearly an adaptation relying on multiple seasons to tell its story, but it turned out not to be very good and was subsequently canceled by FX on Hulu. It’s yet to find a new home, which is partly expected but also partly a bit of a shame since lots of talented people worked on it and it pretty inarguably got better as it went along. That leaves the first season finale, “Victoria”, in a bit of a strange position. More of consequence happens in it than several of the season’s weaker episodes combined, but there’s a good chance none of it will matter.
Y: The Last Man season 1, episode 10 recap
As several others also have, Y: The Last Man episode 10 utilizes flashbacks to help develop present-day relationships and themes, and in “Victoria” it’s a painfully awkward family dinner shared by Yorick, Beth, Hero, Jennifer, and Jennifer’s obviously adulterous husband. We return here time and time again throughout the finale, mostly to get a sense of Yorick’s naïve optimism and Hero’s hard-drinking and self-destructive impulses and how the two go hand in hand. It isn’t exactly a revelatory gimmick, but I actually didn’t mind its implementation here. Hero has largely been purposeless as part of the Amazons since that story has revolved around Roxanne and Nora, so one can’t complain, really.
Speaking of those two, they’re naturally in disagreement in how best to assault Marrisville, which reinforces a lot of the problems with this entire subplot since Roxanne is so annoying and stupid that everything she does and says feels contrived. We should care more about all of this, I think; we keep cutting back to Marrisville itself, where 355, Mann, and Yorick are bickering about whether they should leave, but it doesn’t feel like it’s really building to anything of substance. Yorick’s relationship with Sonia doesn’t take. It all just feels like pieces being maneuvered into place so that predetermined things can happen – there’s a particularly egregious example of this when two random older women appear to the Amazons just to reveal the information that the Pentagon has been stormed by rioters and the President has been killed, which Hero obviously needs to hear for plot purposes.
At the very least, this stuff in combination with the flashbacks helps to paint a clearer picture of the Brown family dynamics, and how Beth fits into them all. She’s a very different person at that restaurant than she is in the present-day with Jennifer, but “Victoria” doesn’t spend much time with the two of them. It’s clearly a plot thread that subsequent seasons were supposed to really unpack.
Predictably, the Amazons’ siege on Marrisville is a mess, both in its execution and how it comes across on-screen. It all erupts into wild gunfire pretty much immediately, with Yorick, Mann, and Sonia all escaping thanks to a distraction provided by 355 and a trans man who poses as Yorick, but the random chaos only seems partly intentional. Eventually, unavoidably, Hero comes face-to-face with Yorick, mostly just to tell him about their mother supposedly being dead, and so one of her fellow Amazons can kill Sonia, who was already surplus to requirements, plot-wise.
Y: The Last Man ending
After a while of aimless carnage in both directions, Nora surrenders on behalf of the Amazons, and they all just magically teleport back to the indoor pool. It’s a bizarre, clipped sequence that is really only designed to facilitate a transfer of power from Roxanne to Nora. The former is obviously nuts, and her plans are likely to get everyone killed, whereas Nora is rational and now has a staunch ally in Hero, at least in part because she knows who Hero is and that her brother is the man who remains alive in the post-Y apocalypse. Nora blessedly executes Roxanne and takes charge after accusing her of being just like the abusive men they are all supposedly free of, which is a nice, overdue moment, but probably too little too late.
You could say the same about this finale in general, to be honest. Yorick finally wants to become tougher and more self-reliant, but isn’t it about time? There’s a part of me that kind of wants this show to be renewed somewhere since I like the source material, and the closing moments here that reveal Jennifer and Beth are prisoners of Fran and the Culper Ring, designed to bait 355 and Yorick, are promising. But, again, too little too late. The audience probably just isn’t there to justify any other network or streaming platform picking this up. We might very well have seen the end of Y: The Last Man. And we never saw the best of it.
You can stream Y: The Last Man season 1, episode 10, “Victoria”, on FX on Hulu. Do you have any thoughts about Y: The Last Man’s ending? Let us know in the comments.
It seemed hastily put together as if the producers backed out at the last minute