‘Y: The Last Man’ Isn’t About Politics—It’s About Survival

At its core, Y: The Last Man is about surviving trauma. Set in a society trying to rebuild itself after a mysterious plague killed every mammal with a Y chromosome (save for two), its premise is this: What would happen if cisgender men were suddenly out of the equation? If you think the answer is “peaceful matriarchal rule,” you’d be wrong. Instead, it’s a global reckoning with the fact that patriarchal ideas are ingrained in nearly all aspects of human life. What happens after the elimination of cisgender men is that a lot of devastated people must decide how much they want their new world to look like their old one.

A lot of this, of course, has to do with power. In Y: The Last Man, which is based on the comics series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra and currently streaming on FX on Hulu, American power goes, by the presidential line of succession, to a senator by the name of Jennifer Brown (Diane Lane). She’s a Democrat, taking over for a Republican-led administration. She’s capable, of course, but also struggling to reform a government that consists of allies and those loyal to the former president. She also has to serve a population that, post-tragedy, has divided into factions. Some believe the government is at fault for the plague; some have formed separatist groups; some find spiritual meaning; some are struggling to get by.

Managing that anxiety, says showrunner Eliza Clark, lies at the center of Y. “I’m really interested in the ways people in a crisis turn inward—and not just inward into themselves, but into their communities, into their frames of reference and points of view,” Clark says. “We’ve seen it play out with Covid-19 and with the many crises that we’re dealing with every day. People are scared and when people are scared they look for someone to make sense of the world.”

In Y, the individuals people turn to for those answers look different than they do on most TV shows. In the show, they are a swath of women and trans men and nonbinary people from all over the political spectrum. (One of the original comics’ blind spots was how it dealt with trans people; Clark was insistent on rectifying that, including adding a new main character, Sam [Elliot Fletcher].) There are feminists and democrats, gun-toting self-described Amazons living in shopping centers, and women like Kimberly Campbell Cunningham (Amber Tamblyn), the former president’s daughter who is something of a hybrid between Meghan McCain and Ivanka Trump. There’s also Agent 355 (Ashley Romans), a member of a secret special ops group of the US government who goes to find President Brown’s daughter, Hero (Olivia Thirlby), and instead finds her son, Yorick (Ben Schnetzer), and his pet monkey, Ampersand—ostensibly the only two mammals with Y chromosomes left on Earth.

It’s in the Yorick-Agent 355 relationship that Y makes its strongest points. Yorick, whose line of work is literally “escape artist” and who is generally a mess, is for the first time forced to face his own privilege, and the fact that he is now a minority, albeit an incredibly valuable one. It’s Agent 355 who finds herself constantly in the position of having to explain this. “You know, you fuck around all you want with no consequences,” she tells him. “An entire life of just being given shit, like, I don’t know, the benefit of the fucking doubt! You just walk into any room and take it for granted.”

Ultimately, Agent 355 and Yorick must embark on a journey to find Allison Mann (Diana Bang), a scientist at Harvard who can analyze Yorick to find out why he’s seemingly the only one who survived the plague. She also serves as the character tasked with explaining to the audience the facts of the outbreak in the first place. “Not everyone with a Y chromosome is a man,” she explains. “We lost so many people that day.”