It was a long and winding road, but Y: The Last Man redeemed itself with its season finale. “Victoria” pulls together all three stories and set things up nicely for season 2. Unfortunately, the show hasn’t been picked up for a sophomore season (yet) and it would be a travesty to end things with episode 10.
“Victoria” was not meant to be a series finale. It’s a cliffhanger, with the future of the show looming in the distance as Agent 355, Dr. Mann and Yorick Brown head toward the fork in the ominous Y-shaped road. If the show ends here, it’ll be a huge letdown.
Y: The Last Man throws curveballs in the season finale, reuniting members of the group in ways that cause them to change their trajectories moving into the next season. It was fulfilling to finally see some progress in the story, but unfortunately it arrived in the last episode with no guarantee that the rest of the story will be told.
Y: The Last Man shocks viewers with surprising twists
The episode features a flashback sequence of a family dinner gone horribly wrong. While Jennifer and her husband talk to their kids about relationships and life, Hero starts to push back against the pressure she’s feeling from her parents to reveal details about the man she’s dating. When she tells them he’s married, they balk, and that’s when she decides to reveal that she knows all about her father’s affair. This is news to Jennifer, and it’s the catalyst that ends their marriage, bringing us back to the premiere episode.
Roxanne leads the Amazons on an attack against the women in the town, but little do they know they’re facing off against a group of former convicts who have been prepared for battle since the day they escaped the prison. Roxanne’s Amazons take a big hit and Nora calls them off, surrendering. When Roxanne confronts Nora about calling them off, Nora kills her, telling the other woman that Roxanne’s actions are no different than those of the men who mistreated her in the past, and they’re all better than that.
At the start of the episode, Hero learns that her mother was killed when the Pentagon came under fire. Later, when Hero follows a group of people who flee the village, she discovers that one of them is her brother. She’s forced to kill another Amazon to protect him, and she tells him to flee. She also tells him about their mother.
Meanwhile, Jennifer and Beth run into Sam, who has been on a mission to find Jennifer after leaving Hero. Now Jennifer knows both of her children are alive but they’re out there and she has no way of reaching them. Unfortunately, they’re all captured before anything can happen.
Lastly, Kimberly and Christine end up in a barn. It’s a bit unclear how they got there, but Kimberly wakes up from a very erotically charged dream about Yorick and realizes that she needs to find him because he can be the answer to her prayers. Namely, he can give her children again.
Is it too little, too late for Y: The Last Man?
There’s a ton of story to tease apart here. It would have been nice to move the story along faster in the middle of the season because the past three episodes have really made a difference in terms of pacing. The season finale presents a lot of information that would have been helpful to give viewers a bit earlier in the season. Now that it’s all out there it’s frustrating to think that there’s no guarantee that season 2 is coming, so the payoff might never happen.
Post-apocalyptic television shows tend to end their seasons on cliffhangers, so the ending was no surprise. Now that the groups are scattering even more than before there’s no sense of what it all means. Hero is back with Nora and the Amazons, Yorick’s group has been called upon by Agent 355’s handlers and Jennifer has been captured (possibly by Agent 355’s people).
Viewers are left with one big question: Now what?
I’ve really struggled with figuring out whether or not I’ve enjoyed Y: The Last Man. I think I’ve finally seen enough to know that I’m invested in the show’s future, but it has to move faster than it did earlier in the season. The finale was a great episode with high stakes and the kind of quest-for-survival stories that remind me of the first season of The Walking Dead. I needed to find a reason to care for the characters and after 10 episodes I found one. Let’s just hope they all come back to finish the story.
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