This week on FX on Hulu’s Y: The Last Man (written by Tor Books’ Charlie Jane Anders!), a town full of former inmates has their shit together better than the POTUS at the Pentagon, surprising no one. What else have we learned from “My Mother Saw a Monkey”? Gaslighting is bad, kids, but so is insisting on driving a camper van when you’re prone to weird-secret-experiment narcolepsy…
Summary
Things are understandably awkward among Yorick, Allison, and 355 after the former two (in the Culper agent’s words) “fucked off” and needed her to fix yet another mess, but they seem to be getting back on track when 355 upgrades their road trip vehicle to a camper van. Unfortunately, one of her bizarre sleepwalking episodes hits when she’s behind the wheel, sending them crashing into a tree and flung from the van in various states of injury and/or confinement (Yorick having had Allison bind his hands so he could show off an escape).
Yorick wakes up among the residents of a mysteriously functioning town—specifically, Sonia (Kristen Gutoskie), who helped the last cis man out of his clothing though she claims it was all in service of healing him. He’s initially bemused to be among such utopian company in a commune that has enough electricity to spare for toast (!), where every decision is voted upon by committee, the town consisting of mostly cis women and some trans men. To that end, Janis (Mimi Kuzyk) and the others find him thoroughly uninteresting as currently the only XY survivor… yet they aren’t ready to let him go off on his merry way. There’s also the matter of what they did with his friends, assuming that he was their prisoner.
355 and Allison wake up inside a jail cell, the former still bleeding and nauseous from a concussion and the latter insisting that she needs to see a doctor who’s not a grumpy geneticist. It’s 355 who cottons on to the fact that this was a women’s prison—due to the fingernail marks and blood on the walls that signaled an inmate who got out rather than hemorrhaging here during the Event—which means that Yorick’s breakfast companions were all serving various (potential life) sentences before getting unexpected parole. The trio (once Yorick joins them to wait on the town’s decision) seem less worried about the inmates’ past lives and more concerned that they might vote that 355 and Yorick, with their political connections, have seen too much to be allowed to leave.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon, the already-shaky status quo—with crowds outside clamoring to be let in—is becoming even more unstable, but from the inside. When the Army team that 355 dispatched last week give their mission report, they mention seeing a cis man and a monkey… and immediately President Brown goes all in on gaslighting the poor women, openly deriding their conviction and then telling Christine sotto voce that they need to be reassigned before they have a chance to spread the story.
Having noted Jennifer’s odd behavior, Regina is strategizing with Kimberly (who is in turn trying to buddy up to Christine) about what the POTUS might be hiding. Kim’s mom Marla is mostly still swanning around in her nightgown watching M*A*S*H reruns, but when they mention the monkey she’s shocked into the first clarity she’s had in months: She saw Yorick and Amp, and was also gaslit into thinking it was just another grief-induced hallucination.
Jennifer is too preoccupied to notice this Republican discontent because… Beth is alive! Yorick’s sorta-ex but also the closest thing Jennifer has to family shows up at the barricades and gets let in. But as glad as she and the POTUS seem to be to see one another, Beth isn’t here to stay: She lingers long enough for a plate of spaghetti (that she manages to not hork à la Yorick), a luxurious shower, a brief glimpse into the tenuous chaos holding the Pentagon together, and absolutely no indication from her could-have-been mother-in-law that Yorick is alive. No ring, no truth?
Unfortunately, Marla hasn’t maintained the best reputation since the Event to back up her claims; Kim doesn’t think her testimony is enough without backup from other, more credible sources. And when Marla does confront Jennifer in the situation room in a big show of near-hysterical emotion, the POTUS easily undercuts her by remaining calm by contrast, though it’s clear in her face that she knows how close she is to being found out.
This, plus the belated realization that their family home in Lynchburg, Virginia, was destroyed in post-Event flooding, sends Marla completely spiraling into despair. After leaving a note for Kim, she puts on a red dress, climbs to the top of the Pentagon, and jumps.
The town votes to let Yorick and his friends stay for now, in a way that seems less ominous than Roxanne’s similar offer of shelter to Hero and co. Yet it’s clear that they’re not entirely safe: 355, who is so concussed she lets Yorick tuck her into bed (while Allison watches from afar), warns him not to trust anyone, and especially not “that girl […] you know which girl.” And while Sonia is indeed making eyes at Yorick once the power cuts out at 9pm for some unintentional mood lighting, it’s Janis and Dominique (Mercedes Morris) who seem to think that the last cis man’s stay will be short-lived, and that Sonia will get her heart broken in the process.
To assuage her guilt over not telling Beth the truth, Jennifer awkwardly tries to gift her a warmer coat, but seeing as it has the POTUS seal on it, it would not be safe for Beth to take it. Yet when she gets past the barricades, we discover another aspect to her motivations: Beth seems to have joined up with some sort of anti-government group who want to know how things are on the inside: “Like a time machine. But it could all fall apart,” she says, “and it wouldn’t take much.”
Commentary
Charlie Jane Anders wrote the teleplay for this week’s episode, and while TV episodes are mostly a group effort, you can definitely see hints of her particular style peeking through in “My Mother Saw a Monkey.” Especially in the seemingly effortless society that these former inmates have created—Anders’ short fiction tackles similar thought experiments about how people might survive outside of the constraints of capitalist society and/or in post-apocalypses. The town seems mostly non-hierarchical, though Janis clearly holds some sway over the younger residents due to her age and experience, and any strife seems to be about difference of opinion rather than gender—see everyone laughing along with Ray’s (Xavier Lopez) joke about being cursed—or who they were before the Event. Most of all, I love how little they care about Yorick’s existence; he’s a scientific quirk, and maybe a lead to other surviving cis men, but not the sole hope for the human race like in the comics.
Also in the comics, this town is called Marrisville, Ohio; I don’t think geographically we’re there yet, so I’ll refrain from conflating the adaptation with the source material here. Still, it overall matches up with the arc: 355 has a head injury, Allison has to find help, while Yorick and Sonia are mutually infatuated with one another. In the comics, Yorick has to get over his initial shock and judgment at breaking bread with “criminals” and rightly gets called out for his self-righteousness; the series seems to have entirely skipped over that, as a 2021-era Yorick would have a lot more sympathy for the women who were locked up (albeit with a healthy side of respectful fear).
Pre-crash, Yorick’s brief speech about the stakes of a magic trick was the most interesting thing he’s said all series: “Life and death, it’s too theoretical. No one thinks you’re gonna risk death for a magic show.” Even though he gets ragged on for identifying as an escape artist, this peek into his ethos is fascinating. Maybe this was how he’d sketched out the show he was supposed to be performing while Beth was in Australia, but his existence has become a very concrete matter of life and death. If he’s still in denial then he’s going to have to work through it, but it’s going to be a while before any of Yorick’s magic tricks can be mere entertainment again.
In pulling more from the comics, 355’s dream post-accident fills in some of her background: She lost her family to a car crash when she was very young, which is likely how the Culper Ring was able to recruit her with no connections to worry about. We get a closer glimpse of her necklace, which has some sort of bird on it. Despite being out of commission for much of this episode, Ashley Romans still shines as 355 in distinct moments—like her and Yorick’s brief spar in the jail cell, another sweet comics callback:
But also, did anyone else notice the Moment that Allison and 355 had before Yorick came in? When Allison is examining her head wound but also asking about if she has a husband (or wife!) wondering where she is. Both are prickly as a neutral state, and each is frustrated with the other for (to carry on last week’s metaphor) how they’re respectively “parenting” their dumb little escape artist. But there’s a flicker of attraction here when they’re trapped and vulnerable, just like 355 and Yorick have obvious chemistry when they’re in a more relaxed state. I’m glad that the show is sprinkling in these little moments, because of course these three are going to clash and spark with one another.
And then there’s Sonia, who seems a little more starstruck by a cis man than her neighbors. In the comics, when Yorick’s clear journey is to be reunited with his supposed fiancée Beth, Sonia represents the first of several temptations for the touch-starved last cis man. Because the series subverted the comics by having Beth say no to his proposal, there’s not that same grand romantic gesture at play; not that Yorick and Beth have broken up, per se, but it certainly gives him a lot more permission to flirt with a pretty ex-con, his own relationship status firmly set to “it’s complicated.”
On a more serious note, the episode ends with a resource for anyone considering suicide, though I’m hoping future episodes address the direct correlation between Jennifer unapologetically convincing Marla that she was as crazy as she felt, and how that helped culminate in her taking her own life. Part of the problem is in how Marla has been portrayed this entire time, as the stereotypical “crazy person”: wearing the same infantilizing nightgown, obsessing over killing bugs, briefly dipping into what sounded like childish regression—it’s all TV shorthand and so makes a character less reliable even to the supposedly sympathetic viewers. Even the manner in which she killed herself was somewhat cliché—and I get it, she was a means to an end, to propel Kim into finally burning things down, but it’s too bad that her arc was so tropey.
What I would have liked to see were more highly specific details, like the fact that Marla was the one who was with Kim’s boys when the Event happened: the doting grandmother helping her working-mom daughter “have it all,” only to be the one waking up to their deaths instead of Kim. It’s dropped in as a quick line, but it does so much work in making both Campbell women, and their respective performances of grief, much more relatable.
Speaking of burning things down, I liked the twist that Beth is part of some anti-government group! What do you think radicalized her? Certainly it could have been her mother’s death because the doctors “didn’t have time for her” (oof) or the fact that she couldn’t even make it to her bedside in time (a very covid feel). Or maybe she’s smart enough to have picked up on the fact that Jennifer clearly isn’t telling her everything; I don’t think she has enough evidence to suspect that Yorick is alive, but she knows Jen well enough to detect her bullshit meter. Considering that she isn’t being set up as Yorick’s romantic prize anymore, it’s a meatier role for her, and smart of the writers to put a sympathetic character into that position rather than just the conspiracy-theory conservatives—because, despite Jennifer’s best justifications, keeping information from the American people is not a good idea!
Also uhh can we talk about the new strain of influenza B quietly rising in the background?? “Nobody’s flying, we probably won’t get hit with it.” FAMOUS LAST WORDS, JENNIFER.
XYZ
- Come on, Yorick is not 6 feet tall. (And actually, the fact that Ben Schnetzer is 5’11” makes me think Yorick would completely be the kind of guy who rounds up on dating profiles.)
- “You said he was a beta boy who did magic tricks.” OK, that was a great line from Regina.
- Last Man on Earth had an escaped-convict plotline, but theirs was done entirely for laughs, with Fred Armisen as a cannibal serial killer who would paint his victims before dismembering them. He always got caught with a whole-ass head decomposing in his fridge… yet his plot arc was also sorta about the question of whether someone could be rehabilitated. In his case, hard nope.
- I was hoping there was some significance to the trio being locked in cell 17, but the Marrisville arc in the comics concludes before issue #17, so who knows.
- We were blessed with TWO wonderful 355 expressions this week:
- “You’re about to get your ass beat with a fuckin’ shoelace”—line of the week.
We’re watching Kim go full Joker, but I want to get back to Roxanne and the Amazons! What are you looking forward to next week?
Natalie Zutter is digging these digressions from the comic… Talk Y with her here and on Twitter!
