Y: The Last Man - General Discussion

[Chicago Redshirt]

11 hours ago, bilgistic said:

The monkey stayed behind in DC, didn't he? I just hope to never see that monkey again.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news...

[AnimeMania]

Y: The Last Man Season 1 Episode 4 "Karen and Benji" Preview Trailer

This looks terrible, I would rather see how they are trying to fix the world instead of people trying to overthrow the government or a bunch of (horny?) women trying to catch themselves a man.

[Chicago Redshirt]

Trying to fix the world involves deciphering what killed almost all males, why Yorick and Ampersand survived, if their survivability can be replicated. 

Trying to fix the world also means overcoming coup attempts and resistance to your efforts. 

And it's possible that some people are going to either think the world either can't be fixed after 4 billion died or that even if it could be fixed, it might be better for various reasons to just adapt to the way that it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. 

[Zonk]

 

21 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It doesn't so much matter the number who believe in the conspiracy is small if they are going to be very active. I think we are living through in real life examples of people buying into all sorts of conspiracy theories despite no evidence or logic supporting them.

Yes, there will be consequences to having hid the existence of Yorick down the line. But sometimes you just have to make it so that future society has to deal with that. Perhaps once more order is restored, people will be able to understand why they held back the info about Yorick, or to appreciate it is pure coincidence that the president's son survived where all the other men have died. Perhaps not. Perhaps they think that they can keep Yorick's existence a secret well beyond a half year. Perhaps after a half-year, it might come out that he's not the last man. 

If they are small it really doesn't matter if they are really active.

I think you are very optimistic in thinking that it would take till more order is established. In any realistic scenario the news would have been out already, especially with how careless Yorick is. Now that he's away from the white house it's much less of a problem, since he wouldn't have been high profile as the son of a random politician, but I call shenanigans that they even made it that far.

1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

And it's possible that some people are going to either think the world either can't be fixed after 4 billion died or that even if it could be fixed, it might be better for various reasons to just adapt to the way that it is now and will be for the foreseeable future. 

Adapting to how it is now means the death of the human race in ~40 years, maybe 60 with lots of medical technology.

I mean you could argue for that being a good thing but I think most people wouldn't.

[Chicago Redshirt]

25 minutes ago, Zonk said:

 

If they are small it really doesn't matter if they are really active.

I think you are very optimistic in thinking that it would take till more order is established. In any realistic scenario the news would have been out already, especially with how careless Yorick is. Now that he's away from the white house it's much less of a problem, since he wouldn't have been high profile as the son of a random politician, but I call shenanigans that they even made it that far.

Adapting to how it is now means the death of the human race in ~40 years, maybe 60 with lots of medical technology.

I mean you could argue for that being a good thing but I think most people wouldn't.

Well first of all, small is relative. In the case of the mob at the gates, it's probably (as shown) only in the hundreds. But it represents a larger absolute number. Even if only 1 percent of the remaining (let's say) 130 million American women believe conspiracy theories, that's a heckuva lot. 

Small can still be quite powerful, especially if it's indulged by people with power like the Republican women insiders we have seen. And of course, small can spread and become medium and become large. Not to dive too deep into real-world politics, but any number of real-world movements started off as fringe and then got to have mainstream influence/support. And compare how  (at least in the U.S.) how people have been reacting to the pandemic. The response has been incredibly politicized and things were very disrupted with a virus a small fraction of as deadly and sudden as whatever caused the men to die. 

I'm not saying that it would take till more order is established for the secret to be out. I'm saying that once more order is established it would potentially be safer for the secret to be out. 

There might be a medical breakthrough that would allow human reproduction without men. And even accepting for argument's sake that there would not be, there's a perspective that it may be realistic to accept that the human race is going to have to die out after the current youngest generation. (which would mean that more like 80-100 years, assuming baby girls could live out the normal lifespan, no new advances in medicine, and sperm samples that exist are somehow nonviable.). It may be bleak and nihilistic, but coming to terms with that realistic prospect might seem the right call for some.

FWIW, I am familiar with the graphic novel and thus have a general sense of where the story is likely to go. Of course, the show can and has IIRC departed from the story of the graphic novel in some ways. But everything I'm saying is spoiler-free.

[revbfc]

23 hours ago, bilgistic said:

The monkey stayed behind in DC, didn't he? I just hope to never see that monkey again.

Nope.  Ampersand is staying until the end.

[Anela]

Amber Tamblyn and her March of the Karens, is going to get on my nerves.  
I’ve never heard of the story before.  I only looked it up, because I saw a promoted ad elsewhere, last week.  
Did Agent355 know that this was expected to happen? 

[Straycat80]

This was bad. It’s like The Walking Dead only with groups of women terrorizing other women. Why aren’t they trying to fix things? Cars and stores are all abandoned just because all the men died. What about checking to see if any male frozen embryos are still viable. This story isn’t making any sense to me. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, Straycat80 said:

This was bad. It’s like The Walking Dead only with groups of women terrorizing other women. Why aren’t they trying to fix things? Cars and stores are all abandoned just because all the men died. What about checking to see if any male frozen embryos are still viable. This story isn’t making any sense to me. 

Again, some women are trying to fix things. It's just that fixing things is not all that easy. Some women have taken to looting and/or strong-arming other women. It is an entire society that is hit with PTSD and with the fact that there are precious few who have experience with a lot of things, due to sexism. With so many fields being male-dominated, getting the right people in place would not be a simple task.

Stores aren't abandoned just because all the men died. Some women looted the shit out of the stores (presumably) anticipating that it was essentially the end times, supply chains would be screwed and they better hoard as much as they could while they could. 

The show has specifically referenced sperm banks; just because they haven't said anything that I recall about frozen embryos doesn't mean that characters off-screen haven't looked into that or that characters in future episodes might not.

[AimingforYoko]

Good Lord Jennifer, you raised some dumb, shitty kids. Yorick's oblivious and Hero's a complete narcissist. OK, she helped the kid, but she's still the worst.

[KaveDweller]

11 minutes ago, AimingforYoko said:

Good Lord Jennifer, you raised some dumb, shitty kids. Yorick's oblivious and Hero's a complete narcissist. OK, she helped the kid, but she's still the worst.

Hero really is terrible. She's being pretty awful to Sammy.....why not just tell him she doesn't want to see her mother, rather than dragging him around pretending. Also, you'd think she could rise above her mommy issues to ensure her own survival and tell her mother she's alive.

I won't even get into the fact that she killed a guy in the first episode. So he would have died on his own a few hours later....she still showed he was capable of killing someone.

[bilgistic]

Yorick had one job—stay inconspicuous and near 355. I have no patience for him.

I get this is based on a graphic novel, but if this were real life, I'd have to believe that monkey would be studied by epidemiologists back in DC, not camping out on the way to Boston with his BFF.

Edited September 22, 2021 by bilgistic
Boston, not Boulder. Oh, well.

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, KaveDweller said:

Hero really is terrible. She's being pretty awful to Sammy.....why not just tell him she doesn't want to see her mother, rather than dragging him around pretending. Also, you'd think she could rise above her mommy issues to ensure her own survival and tell her mother she's alive.

I won't even get into the fact that she killed a guy in the first episode. So he would have died on his own a few hours later....she still showed he was capable of killing someone.

She has told him that she doesn't want to see her mother right now. Sammy's response is get over that bullshit. Which is perfectly understandable, especially assuming that Sammy knows that Hero's mother's the president. At the same time, I can see from Hero's perspective that it is easier to do passive-aggressive BS like staying overnight at the house or sabotaging the car than it is to just straight-up say, "Fuck you, Sammy, we're not going to D.C, period" or "Sammy, I'm just not ready to go to D.C. right now. Feel free to head there on your own." One way of looking at what the show says is that mommy issues are powerful enough to survive the apocalypse. 

As for killing her lover, a. I think that very few people aren't capable of killing someone under the wrong circumstances and b. it seems clear to me that her killing her lover was an accident as opposed to straight-up murder or voluntary manslaughter. 

5 minutes ago, bilgistic said:

Yorick had one job—stay inconspicuous and near 355. I have no patience for him.

I get this is based on a graphic novel, but if this were real life, I'd have to believe that monkey would be studied by epidemiologists back in DC, not camping out on the way to Boulder with his BFF.

They are en route to Boston rather than Boulder. And I could see the case for splitting Yorick and Ampersand up. It would be easier to keep monkey under guard and in a controlled environment, and you could avoid the possible problem with the conspiracy theorists thinking that Yorick was spared as part of a government plot.  

But I could also see the case for keeping them together so the same person could be studying them both, as there seems likely to be a connection between how both survived the pandemic.  If it was real life, it would probably have made more sense to bite the bullet and admit to some level of the inner circle that Yorick survived, ask for their discretion and to deal with the fallout if anyone snitches.  

[Chicago Redshirt]

17 hours ago, Anela said:

Amber Tamblyn and her March of the Karens, is going to get on my nerves.  
I’ve never heard of the story before.  I only looked it up, because I saw a promoted ad elsewhere, last week.  
Did Agent355 know that this was expected to happen? 

I think it is safe to say that 355 did not know or expect that the world's men were all going to die.

However...

in the graphic novel, 355 participated in a mission to take an artifact, and there was an unspecific prophecy that taking it would cause a catastrophe. So in the graphic novel, she at least partially believes her action could have triggered this. The graphic novel does not firmly establish exactly what caused the death of all men, although the author has said that he included the specific cause among the many listed and prefers readers to decide for themselves.

[KaveDweller]

18 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

She has told him that she doesn't want to see her mother right now. Sammy's response is get over that bullshit. Which is perfectly understandable, especially assuming that Sammy knows that Hero's mother's the president. At the same time, I can see from Hero's perspective that it is easier to do passive-aggressive BS like staying overnight at the house or sabotaging the car than it is to just straight-up say, "Fuck you, Sammy, we're not going to D.C, period" or "Sammy, I'm just not ready to go to D.C. right now. Feel free to head there on your own." One way of looking at what the show says is that mommy issues are powerful enough to survive the apocalypse. 

As for killing her lover, a. I think that very few people aren't capable of killing someone under the wrong circumstances and b. it seems clear to me that her killing her lover was an accident as opposed to straight-up murder or voluntary manslaughter. 

She said she didn't want to see her mother, but then she agreed that they'd go to DC and find her. That's why they are walking to DC. She shouldn't have agreed if she wasn't really willing to do it. Sammy is not really great for continuing to insist on it after Hero explained she didn't want to, but their lives are in danger so I can get that.

The death was an accident, but she still threw a sharp metal object at a person's head. I didn't say she murdered him, just that she killed him. I agree most people are capable of killing someone under certain circumstances, but not everyone would physically attack their boyfriend because he lied about not leaving his wife.

[Chicago Redshirt]

20 minutes ago, KaveDweller said:

She said she didn't want to see her mother, but then she agreed that they'd go to DC and find her. That's why they are walking to DC. She shouldn't have agreed if she wasn't really willing to do it. Sammy is not really great for continuing to insist on it after Hero explained she didn't want to, but their lives are in danger so I can get that.

The death was an accident, but she still threw a sharp metal object at a person's head. I didn't say she murdered him, just that she killed him. I agree most people are capable of killing someone under certain circumstances, but not everyone would physically attack their boyfriend because he lied about not leaving his wife.

I see something of both characters' perspectives. 

It seems like it should have been obvious to Sammy that Hero didn't want to go to DC because she didn't want to deal with her mother, whatever issues that they might have had since childhood, and that she is now a killer. I can only imagine the pressure her parents put on her, given that mom is a longtime congresswoman and dad is a college professor. There presumably are class expectations that she has fallen short of by working in a blue-collar job. Just being expected to live up to the name "Hero" would be a lot. Adding to that she is a killer and a homewrecker. I can sympathize with Hero preferring to risk living on her own rather than undergo scrutiny from mom.

And like you, I can sympathize with Sammy not giving a f--- about any of that personal drama and wanting to secure a safe place in this topsy-turvy world. I can even understand having blinders on to the clear signals that Hero has given that she wants no part of DC. 

I'm not pro-infidelity, but I can definitely understand how someone could be outraged and even violent after they just made passionate love under the notion that they and their lover were finally going to be together in the light. Discovering that the lover lied and what they thought was beautiful and romantic was basically sex under false pretenses would drive a lot of people at least a little crazy. 

[xaxat]

After four episodes, there is one character I find compelling, Agent 355.

That's not good.

[Chicago Redshirt]

2 hours ago, xaxat said:

After four episodes, there is one character I find compelling, Agent 355.

That's not good.

Add me to the list of people who would prefer to watch "Agent 355" and who would be all in for a prequel about her just doing badass stuff like blowing up racist terrorists.

But I will take what I can get.

[Haleth]

More Agent 355 and less everyone else please.  Ok, the President can stay too but let's get rid of her annoying children.  (I did laugh out loud when 355 pointed out that Yorick's parents named him after a dead clown.  I mean, really.  Of all the beautiful Shakespearean names, Yorick and Hero?)  Also annoying?  Meghan McCain I mean Kimberly.  Most annoying?  The stupid monkey.  It's such a cliché that a child will chase after a pet and endanger him/herself.  Lose the damn monkey, show.

[Anela]

I don’t mind the monkey, but it’s stupid to keep him in a carrier that he can escape from, when moving around a city like that. Or anywhere that isn’t his home.  
I didn’t see Kimberly as mature, at all.  Spoiled, power-grabbing, malicious.  

[AuntieMame]

Agent 355 is the most compelling character. It’s like she dropped in from another show. 
 

On 9/20/2021 at 8:33 PM, KaveDweller said:

Hero really is terrible. She's being pretty awful to Sammy.....why not just tell him she doesn't want to see her mother, rather than dragging him around pretending. Also, you'd think she could rise above her mommy issues to ensure her own survival and tell her mother she's alive.

I won't even get into the fact that she killed a guy in the first episode. So he would have died on his own a few hours later....she still showed he was capable of killing someone.

Hero killing her lover was just unrealistic to me, even by the standards of fiction. Honestly though this lines up with the misogyny of the entire franchise wrapped in faux feminism. It would be pretty difficult for a woman to kill a man accidentally in the circumstances shown. Just more lack of realism. Reading the comments here it seems many people are  reacting to the ridiculous and conflicting assumptions that the source material and the show make about people and the world. 
For starters it’s assumed that women would do everything men did except stupider and worse with less efficient outcomes. There’s absolutely no creativity in this series in terms of imagining what a world suddenly emptied of men would be like. How women would react? Nothing. Women keep all male social systems and are even more violent. Uh huh. I guess that the fact that males commit 92 percent of all violence and violent crime just doesn’t effect things. Uh huh. What would happen in a sexed apocalypse with the far from perfect but demonstrably less violent sex the survivors? That’s an interesting question but the writers aren’t even trying to answer it. The show falls apart if you look at it too hard and it’s difficult to miss the misogyny and the muddled lack of thought. Every fictional world, no matter how fantastic, needs a coherent philosophy and worldview underpinning it even if it’s never stated explicitly. The Last Man lacks this and is contradictory. I think this is a part of why people’s response is so lukewarm.  

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, AuntieMame said:

Honestly though this lines up with the misogyny of the entire franchise wrapped in faux feminism. It would be pretty difficult for a woman to kill a man accidentally in the circumstances shown. Just more lack of realism. Reading the comments here it seems many people are  reacting to the ridiculous and conflicting assumptions that the source material and the show make about people and the world. 
For starters it’s assumed that women would do everything men did except stupider and worse with less efficient outcomes. There’s absolutely no creativity in this series in terms of imagining what a world suddenly emptied of men would be like. How women would react? Nothing. Women keep all male social systems and are even more violent. Uh huh. I guess that the fact that males commit 92 percent of all violence and violent crime just doesn’t effect things. Uh huh. What would happen in a sexed apocalypse with the far from perfect but demonstrably less violent sex the survivors? That’s an interesting question but the writers aren’t even trying to answer it. The show falls apart if you look at it too hard and it’s difficult to miss the misogyny and the muddled lack of thought. Every fictional world, no matter how fantastic, needs a coherent philosophy and worldview underpinning it even if it’s never stated explicitly. The Last Man lacks this and is contradictory. I think this is a part of why people’s response is so lukewarm.  

I think there is a tension inherent in the premise that I don't know think the graphic novel handles too deeply or well, and it of course remains to be seen what the TV show will do.

Namely, how much are we products of nature, nurture, circumstance, biology, culture, etc.?

In our current society, relatively fewer women are violent. Is that because of how they have been socialized? A relative lack of opportunity? Because of their biology?  Because we live in societies that make it relatively easy to get what you might want without violence?

Would women attempt to innovate with new social structures if given the chance? Or borrow from what has worked in the past out of a sense of tradition/familiarity/continuity/other reasons?

I think the writers try to answer somewhat but it sounds like the answer(s) may not be to your personal liking.

[AuntieMame]

@Chicago Redshirt

Its not that they’re not to my liking so much as they’re poorly thought out. I can appreciate a point of view that doesn’t match my own if it’s intelligent and well argued. Sure women would keep some of what worked but I think we’d innovate too. We would have to just because of the circumstances. And in early days we would be hard pressed just to keep things organized and running. Some new traditions might grow just out of necessity. 
The socialization accounting for less violence in women has been tested in other circumstances such as when society has temporarily broken down during war. It seems to hold. Female violence is generally limited by the context and is usually defensive. Hopefully the series will address some of the less thought out aspects of the comics. But that remains to be seen for me. Except for 355 nobody else is really standing out. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

I was inspired to go back to the first collection of the graphic novel and take a look for the first time in a long time. Some divergences so far:

 

Yorick is much more of a comedian in the graphic novel and less of an emo whiner, although he still is an emo whiner.

In the comics, Beth is a blonde as opposed to a biracial one and she is in Australia at the beginning of the action already, as opposed to planning on going. Yorick is on a telephone call proposing to her when the apocalypse happens and doesn't get her response. So Yorick's interest in finding Beth makes more sense than the scenario in the show where a) the last he spoke to her, Beth seemed to have pretty clearly rejected his proposal b) there's less reason to think that Beth is interested in finding him since she could have gone looking for him with them being in the same city at the outset of the plague c) he had the wherewithal to search for Beth for the weeks between when the plague first hit and when 355 finds him.

Hero is said to sleep around with firefighters broadly as opposed to having an affair with just the one that she is trying to get to leave his wife. The scene with her accidentally killing her lover is new. Sammy is a new character.

Jennifer Brown is a conservative Democrat who stays a representative. Another character, a cabinet secretary, gets elevated to be president.

We get introduced to 355 by her conducting a foreign mission to retrieve a necklace. The necklace's owner tells her that there's a legend if it's taken from that country it would trigger a tragedy greater than the Trojan War. 355 takes it out of the country just as the apocalypse happens.

The Republican characters we have seen so far in the series seem to be whole-cloth new creations of the show. At least, the Republicans that were in the first volume of the graphic novel were mostly wives of congresspeople who thought they were entitled to get their husbands' seats since generally widows who attempt to succeed their husbands apparently were batting 100 percent.

Edited September 23, 2021 by Chicago Redshirt

[xaxat]

Some of you probably knew this, but I was doing some reading about an unrelated topic and found out that the name "Agent 355" is a reference to a real historical individual. The real Agent 355 was a spy during the Revolutionary War.

[JH Lipton]

On 9/22/2021 at 4:20 PM, AuntieMame said:

Hero killing her lover was just unrealistic to me, even by the standards of fiction. Honestly though this lines up with the misogyny of the entire franchise wrapped in faux feminism. It would be pretty difficult for a woman to kill a man accidentally in the circumstances shown. Just more lack of realism. 

Hero nicked her lover's carotid artery.  It doesn't take any strength to do that.  If she missed the artery, he would be dead from blunt force trauma. 

On 9/23/2021 at 12:13 AM, Chicago Redshirt said:

 

  Hide contents

Sammy is a new character.

I'm not sure if this portion of your post is a spoiler or not, but just to be safe.

Spoiler

The issue of trans-men didn't come up until a few issues into the comic -- trans people were far more "invisible" back then.  That's why they have a new trans character early in the series.

 

[BasilSeal]

On 9/23/2021 at 12:20 AM, AuntieMame said:

For starters it’s assumed that women would do everything men did except stupider and worse with less efficient outcomes. There’s absolutely no creativity in this series in terms of imagining what a world suddenly emptied of men would be like. How women would react? Nothing. Women keep all male social systems and are even more violent. Uh huh. I guess that the fact that males commit 92 percent of all violence and violent crime just doesn’t effect things. Uh huh

There's a difference though in a functioning society populated entirely by women, and an apocalyptic even which only women survive. Before the survivors think about reforming the patriarchy they have to think about the lack of power, food, medical care and the collapse of law and order.

As i said previously, i don't think the message her is that women aren't capable of running the world without men, half the worlds's population has died, regardless of gender that level of death would be a global catastrophe. Leadership structures are destroyed, critical individuals with critical skills are lost, there aren't enough people left to make everything work any more and there are a shit load of dead bodies everywhere and everyone is grieving.

On 9/23/2021 at 1:30 AM, Chicago Redshirt said:

In our current society, relatively fewer women are violent. Is that because of how they have been socialized? A relative lack of opportunity? Because of their biology?  Because we live in societies that make it relatively easy to get what you might want without violence?

Women are demonstrably less violent than men, the majority of violent crime is committed by men, the question is whether there is something inherent in women that makes this so or whether this is simply an outcome dictated by men being on the whole physically stronger, and also men and women reacting to social expectations regarding their respective behaviours. Once you remove men, and also remove most social constraints by creating an existential threat to the survivors and their families in the form of social breakdown and general chaos, i'm not convinced that an entirely female cohort would behave any better than one made up of both genders.

I'm an equal opportunities pessimist, i think an all female apocalypse could result in just as much shitty behaviour as a mixed gendered one.

[AuntieMame]

1 hour ago, BasilSeal said:

There's a difference though in a functioning society populated entirely by women, and an apocalyptic even which only women survive. Before the survivors think about reforming the patriarchy they have to think about the lack of power, food, medical care and the collapse of law and order.

As i said previously, i don't think the message her is that women aren't capable of running the world without men, half the worlds's population has died, regardless of gender that level of death would be a global catastrophe. Leadership structures are destroyed, critical individuals with critical skills are lost, there aren't enough people left to make everything work any more and there are a shit load of dead bodies everywhere and everyone is grieving.

Women are demonstrably less violent than men, the majority of violent crime is committed by men, the question is whether there is something inherent in women that makes this so or whether this is simply an outcome dictated by men being on the whole physically stronger, and also men and women reacting to social expectations regarding their respective behaviours. Once you remove men, and also remove most social constraints by creating an existential threat to the survivors and their families in the form of social breakdown and general chaos, i'm not convinced that an entirely female cohort would behave any better than one made up of both genders.

I'm an equal opportunities pessimist, i think an all female apocalypse could result in just as much shitty behaviour as a mixed gendered one.

Shitty behavior absolutely. But I’m not convinced it would be the same shitty behavior. Someone else described the characters in The Last Man as men with boobs rather than women and that’s my main criticism. That none of these female characters seem female. They’re men with boobs and that just leaves me kind of meh about the whole thing. And I love post apocalyptic media. Graphic novels generally aren’t my thing but I read all of these before they were famous because of it. Same feeling. And I haven’t rushed to watch the next episodes, which is telling. Normally I’d be right there for a show that was even average. I wish this was better. 

[marceline]

Yorick. Sigh... The last man on earth is a goober with no impulse control.

First he goes chasing after "Beth" like a cat chasing a dot on the floor. He follows this ghost into increasingly remote locations even as he carries that stupid monkey in a hard carrier on his hip. When Sarah shows up to save his narrow ass the only thing she tells him to do is "Run!" so he does. For five or six steps. Then he turns around to look behind him and stops to watch the fighting like a goober with no impulse control. Once Sarah has dispatched the villains she looks up, sees him standing there, and is forced to say it again louder: "RUN!!"

Then when they finally escape?

"We have to go back for my phone."

Sarah is a far stronger person than I am because after that I would've killed Yorick and just taken the chance that the monkey would be enough to save the human race.

[AnimeMania]

 

[Chicago Redshirt]

One thing about the series, like most post-apocalyptic fiction, is that it cheats. The transition between the normal world and the post-apocalyptic world had a bunch of things that get skipped.

It seems to me, for instance, that it would take a while for power and cell networks and the Internet to go down. In that day or so, Yorick should have been able to leave phone messages, e-mails, etc. for Beth, Jennifer, Hero and everyone else in  his life that he was alive.

[bettername2come]

Unpopular opinion it seems, but I like Yorick. The actor's good, the character seems like a real person, and I think he's funny. He plays well off 355 and Dr. Mann. I liked that he was upset the pilots died because of him. I do wish he'd stop being such a COMPLETE dumbass, although I appreciated that he thought to tell the cops at the marketplace he was looking for testosterone, since I was yelling at the screen for him to pose as transgender. But he really needs to listen to Agent 355 and just stay put and keep his freaking mask on. I liked that Dr. Mann wouldn't have been interested/as interested in Yorick alone, but the implications that he was with another male creature who survived makes things more interesting. 

Also, the monkey of the pilot was played by the Friends monkey before being replaced by CGI: https://slate.com/culture/2021/09/y-last-man-friends-monkey-ampersand-marcel.html

[Zonk]

 

On 9/23/2021 at 1:20 AM, AuntieMame said:

Hero killing her lover was just unrealistic to me, even by the standards of fiction. Honestly though this lines up with the misogyny of the entire franchise wrapped in faux feminism. It would be pretty difficult for a woman to kill a man accidentally in the circumstances shown. Just more lack of realism.

I think you seriously underestimate how fragile the meat sacks that contain our conciousness are. She had a potentially very deadly weapon in her hand and hit him just right.

On 9/23/2021 at 1:20 AM, AuntieMame said:

For starters it’s assumed that women would do everything men did except stupider and worse with less efficient outcomes. There’s absolutely no creativity in this series in terms of imagining what a world suddenly emptied of men would be like. How women would react? Nothing. Women keep all male social systems and are even more violent. Uh huh. I guess that the fact that males commit 92 percent of all violence and violent crime just doesn’t effect things. Uh huh. What would happen in a sexed apocalypse with the far from perfect but demonstrably less violent sex the survivors? That’s an interesting question but the writers aren’t even trying to answer it. The show falls apart if you look at it too hard and it’s difficult to miss the misogyny and the muddled lack of thought. Every fictional world, no matter how fantastic, needs a coherent philosophy and worldview underpinning it even if it’s never stated explicitly. The Last Man lacks this and is contradictory. I think this is a part of why people’s response is so lukewarm.  

I actually found it refreshing that this didn't trod the usual ground of "women are special magical creatures and all the evils of the world stem from men". Female world leaders actually start more wars than males. Angela Merkel was all for joining the Irak war. Luckily, she wasn't chancelor yet, at that point and Schröder said germany would have no part in that war.

If the world was ending and there were no men around to do their violence for them, I'm sure women would be just as violent as the men would be in a similar situation.

In that way I think this show is very feminsit. It shows that men and women are both human and humans can all be crap under the right circumstances.

[Zonk]

1x05:

Scientist: "You were together when it happened? You alone, meaningless. But you two together? Two survivors? Two fucking together?!"

What the fuck do you mean? That means the opposite of what you are saying. It would make it meaningless for you, because that means the reason they survived was environmental and you are a fucking geneticist! For you it would be meaningfull if only one of them survived because then it would likely be a genetic cause!

[AimingforYoko]

2 minutes ago, Zonk said:

1x05:

Scientist: "You were together when it happened? You alone, meaningless. But you two together? Two survivors? Two fucking together?!"

What the fuck do you mean? That means the opposite of what you are saying. It would make it meaningless for you, because that means the reason they survived was environmental and you are a fucking geneticist! For you it would be meaningfull if only one of them survived because then it would likely be a genetic cause!

Genetics are involved, because whatever this was attacked the Y chromosome, but the cause may be environmental. And the fact that the only two mammals on earth with said chromosome that survived were together when the shit went down means it's highly unlikely that the reason is random. One surviving is an anomaly that may or may not be explained, two together narrow the scope of research considerably.

[Zonk]

1 minute ago, AimingforYoko said:

Genetics are involved, because whatever this was attacked the Y chromosome, but the cause may be environmental. And the fact that the only two mammals on earth with said chromosome that survived were together when the shit went down means it's highly unlikely that the reason is random. One surviving is an anomaly that may or may not be explained, two together narrow the scope of research considerably.

Yeah, no. One out of 4 billion surviving is not random. It just means that he likely has a genetic anomaly that makes him immune.

Two in the same place surviving would mean the cause of them surviving was environmental, which means a geneticist couldn't do shit and somebody really should check that apartment...

[KaveDweller]

1 hour ago, AimingforYoko said:

Genetics are involved, because whatever this was attacked the Y chromosome, but the cause may be environmental. And the fact that the only two mammals on earth with said chromosome that survived were together when the shit went down means it's highly unlikely that the reason is random. One surviving is an anomaly that may or may not be explained, two together narrow the scope of research considerably.

She mentioned that they were together, but then didn't ask where they were or want to go there to look? I know she is a geneticist, but you'd think she'd still have an interest.

Also, they are the only two male mammals that the characters know about. And I know the title of the show is The Last Man, so clearly he is supposed to be the only one. But if I was a scientist and didn't know I was on a TV show, and I learned a human and a monkey with a Y chromosome survived, I would leave open the idea that somewhere else on the planet there could be more that are in hiding.

[Chicago Redshirt]

4 hours ago, Zonk said:

Yeah, no. One out of 4 billion surviving is not random. It just means that he likely has a genetic anomaly that makes him immune.

Two in the same place surviving would mean the cause of them surviving was environmental, which means a geneticist couldn't do shit and somebody really should check that apartment...

It could mean that there was something in one of the environments that they were both in that caused both to become immune.

Or it could mean that one of them has a genetic immunity that they passed along to the other somehow by being together. 

Even if it were the former, it only really matters if the immunity can be detected and duplicated on the genetic level. You probably would never be able to tell what combo of environmental factors caused Yorick and & to become immune, especially because you wouldn't necessarily know all the environments they'd been in. You could start with the obvious ones, like Yorick's apartment and wherever Yorick picked & up from. But what if the environment was a random subway car that they traveled in, or a friend's house they were both at? What if the X factor was something one of them carried on their person but faded away now that it's, what, two months after the apocalypse?

I don't disagree that it is a lead that was worth potentially exploring but it might be a lot of spinning wheels for no direct gain (even factoring out that apparently Manhattan was about to be submerged.)

Also, Alison's reaction seems to in part justify why they didn't split Yorick and & up. Having the same scientist examine both of them might expedite identifying what the X factor that allowed both to survive, whereas having separate teams examining each of them might be better in some ways, but also could lead to things being missed. 

Also also, I think she is using "meaningful" in the sense of statistically significant. It is conceivable that there are is an anomalous situation where a male mammal survived where 4 billion humans and let's say another 3 billion male animals died. But for two male mammals to have survived in close proximity an event that killed the other 7 billion has to be relevant as a pure number crunching thing.

Edited September 28, 2021 by Chicago Redshirt

[Chicago Redshirt]

13 hours ago, bettername2come said:

Unpopular opinion it seems, but I like Yorick. The actor's good, the character seems like a real person, and I think he's funny. He plays well off 355 and Dr. Mann.

I think Yorick doesn't necessarily act like how I would expect a real person to act. Which is fine to a certain extent. I get that TPTB want to make their points and that they are going to stretch plausibility along the way. But for instance:

I don't see any man being so monomaniacal about their "fiancee." Especially when, as far as we've been shown, the last time they spoke, Beth pretty much pissed on his proposal and said that she was looking forward to going to Australia to meet other people. Especially when Yorick (presumably) had been looking for her for weeks in NYC and found no sign of her. Meaning for all he knows, she is dead or injured.  There is pretty much no reason to think that even if she is alive that she is in Ohio (other than they presumably are both from there originally). That is a long way to travel post-apocalypse.. And as shallow as it might be, I don't think most men would not use the fact that they were the only known man in existence to get laid left and right. 

I think most men, as shallow and stupid as they might be, would probably have learned not to fuck with/ignore 355's instructions as much as Yorick has.

I enjoyed the introduction of Allison and look forward to the dynamic between the three of them. 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Chicago Redshirt

[moonshine71]

On 9/22/2021 at 5:05 PM, Anela said:

I don’t mind the monkey, but it’s stupid to keep him in a carrier that he can escape from, when moving around a city like that. Or anywhere that isn’t his home.  
I didn’t see Kimberly as mature, at all.  Spoiled, power-grabbing, malicious.  

I'm just here to point it that carrying a monkey on a motorcycle by holding it in a cage with one arm behind your back would be sustainable for about 30 second.

 

Don't get me started in how they try to pass off the motorcycle as some old beater that needs all kinds of work when it's actually like a brand new, $16,000 Triumph Scrambler. 

[Haleth]

5 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

It could mean that there was something in one of the environments that they were both in that caused both to become immune.

Yorick said he rescued the monkey from a lab.  Maybe it was something in the testing that caused the monkey to become immune, and it was somehow passed on to Yorick.

[BasilSeal]

2 hours ago, Haleth said:

Yorick said he rescued the monkey from a lab.  Maybe it was something in the testing that caused the monkey to become immune, and it was somehow passed on to Yorick.

Ah, so it's monkey magic then?

Actually the magic monkey theory is the best one i've heard so far for what might have caused Y's survival. there has to be some plot point to the monkey other than simply being a quirky gimmick, well at least one would hope so.

2 hours ago, moonshine71 said:

Don't get me started in how they try to pass off the motorcycle as some old beater that needs all kinds of work when it's actually like a brand new, $16,000 Triumph Scrambler. 

the wonderful world of product placement, like in the walking dead when they were driving around the 2010 zombie apocalypse in a brand new 2013 model Kia SUV

Overall i thought this was an improvement, there was a fair bit of exposition thrown in, Y's discussion with Dr Mann sets out the technical aspects of the whole Y chromosome thing and explains that the event will have killed many women too, Mann also outline the implications for biodiversity, pretty much all mammals will become extinct too. Brown's aid having a suspected miscarriage tells us what has happened to women pregnant with male children, and we also get some more background on the mysterious agent 355.

355 as mentioned above is a reference to the codename of a female agent of the Culper ring in the American Revolutionary war. It seems this 355 also belongs to some shadowy organisation that Brown also refers to as The culper ring if i heard correctly, clearly this organisation (and it's mysterious female commander) is significant, and to coin a phrase, well dodgy.

[Scarlett45]

I am only up to episode 3 (watching with a friend) and so far I have to say I want to be Agent 355 when I grow up, she has mad skills.

On 9/17/2021 at 11:56 PM, Sesquipedalia said:

Agent 355 is by far the most intriguing character. I might keep watching just to see what happens with her. I loved the fake-out where it seemed like she had won the pilots' loyalty but then just blew them to smithereens. I might keep watching just to see what happens with her.

I agree.

 

[Chicago Redshirt]

3 hours ago, Haleth said:

Yorick said he rescued the monkey from a lab.  Maybe it was something in the testing that caused the monkey to become immune, and it was somehow passed on to Yorick.

I think that Yorick was lying about rescuing & from a lab. I don't remember if they have explicitly said or shown how he got &, but it does not really seem like a Yorick think to do. I think he was trying for an explanation that was easy to accept and that would impress the woke women he was talking to.

Also in the graphic novel, how he got & is different from that.  Although it is entirely possible that the show will diverge on this point, as it has on a number of things so far.

Yorick gets him because he wanted to train him to be a helper monkey for the differently abled.

46 minutes ago, BasilSeal said:

Overall i thought this was an improvement, there was a fair bit of exposition thrown in, Y's discussion with Dr Mann sets out the technical aspects of the whole Y chromosome thing and explains that the event will have killed many women too, Mann also outline the implications for biodiversity, pretty much all mammals will become extinct too. Brown's aid having a suspected miscarriage tells us what has happened to women pregnant with male children, and we also get some more background on the mysterious agent 355.

355 as mentioned above is a reference to the codename of a female agent of the Culper ring in the American Revolutionary war. It seems this 355 also belongs to some shadowy organisation that Brown also refers to as The culper ring if i heard correctly, clearly this organisation (and it's mysterious female commander) is significant, and to coin a phrase, well dodgy.

355 referred to herself as CR355 in some radio transmission before, so yes, she is a member of the Culper Ring. I don't think that it had a female commander before the apocalypse, although presumably the highest-ranking woman who survived is now its commander. I took it that the woman that 355 and the other agent were looking for is not the commander of the Culper Ring, but rather the woman who trained 355 and apparently the other woman.

[BasilSeal]

2 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

I think that Yorick was lying about rescuing & from a lab. I don't remember if they have explicitly said or shown how he got &, but it does not really seem like a Yorick think to do. I think he was trying for an explanation that was easy to accept and that would impress the woke women he was talking to.

When he said the line i took it not to be entirely literal, in that he didn't actually break into a lab and spring &, but rather by being Y's pet, & has been spared the fate of being used for vivisection.

 

2 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

355 referred to herself as CR355 in some radio transmission before, so yes, she is a member of the Culper Ring. I don't think that it had a female commander before the apocalypse, although presumably the highest-ranking woman who survived is now its commander. I took it that the woman that 355 and the other agent were looking for is not the commander of the Culper Ring, but rather the woman who trained 355 and apparently the other woman.

It's a fictional organisation though isn't it? in that there's no modern day Culper ring in our reality as far as i'm aware, in this case they were answering directly to the president, and only him,, i wondered if the origin of the name from the American revolution indicated that they were involved in some sort of attempt to overthrow the current US govt, though why the president himself would want to overthrow democracy would seem a bit odd, oh, hang on....

but anyway, i looks to me as if they intend this series to make a commentary on contemporary US politics, which isw why they've included the new political characters, and why Brown is president rather than a congress woman as per the comic(don't think that's a spoiler at this stage) 

they made her president in a particular way, they made her leader of the house for an hour, so then she was next in line after the POTUS and VP, finding the cabinet member alive means that actually, she wasn't next in line at the time of the president's death so that creates a potential constitutional crisis. they obviously intend to make a point by having this alternative claimant to the president be a far right anti vaxer. it's not hard to see where this is going, particularly given the nature of opposition to Brown that suggests she is part of a conspiracy, though this is not an unreasonable assumption in this case, she has, as Yorick puts it, 'won the apocalypse', and the only male survivor of the event is her son, all of which may be coincidence, nevertheless, it's also, as i said before, well dodgy.

Edited September 28, 2021 by BasilSeal

[PinkRibbons]

I think it's safe to say that if the Culper Ring does exist, any of us even hearing or knowing anything about it would mean it's a failure and can't work.

Edited September 28, 2021 by PinkRibbons

[Haleth]

Just a couple media related comments.

If anyone is interested in the Culper Ring check out the series Turn.  It's about the original spy ring during the Revolution.  The show is based on the (nonfiction) book Washington's Spies by Alexander Rose.  (One of my ancestors gets a nod in that book.  My jaw dropped when I read his name.)

Seveneves is a scifi book by Neal Stephenson that has a similar premise.  

Spoiler

Following the break up of the moon and while waiting for the chunks to fall to earth, humanity prepares for its survival at the International Space Station.  Because things happen every man who was given a spot on the ISS dies and the last seven women have to science the hell out of the situation to keep humanity alive without men.  

It's pretty interesting.

Edited September 29, 2021 by Haleth

[SlovakPrincess]

If this show and the decline of Walking Dead and other post-apocalyptic shows achieve anything ... they at least show that an apocalyptic world would be super boring and unpleasant.  So maybe we should stop trashing the world and humanity.

Edited September 30, 2021 by SlovakPrincess

[AllyB]

I have a lot of the same problems that other posters have with the premise. But my main one is that between the comic debut and the tv show debut, science moved on. 2 years after the comic started, scientists successfully created mammals with genetic material from two females. In the intervening 17 years, this has not only been replicated repeatedly, but we've learned that those babies (all female obviously) have a lifespan about 30% longer than others of their species and can successfully reproduce as adults.

And while in the real world, it's going to be a long, long time before we create human babies with two genetic mothers. If we were in the world of Y the Last Man, that research would be accelerated and would be far, far, far more relevant than Yorick and Ampersand. Would they be studied too? Absolutely. (A real life example is how we pursued MRNA vaccines, adenovirus vector vaccines, inactivated whole virus vaccines, etc. While also working on creating medical treatments for the infected. We don't just pick one potential solution and focus on that. We pursue all realistic avenues.) Yorick and Ampersand are extremely important but they aren't our last, best hope. Because humanity's long term survival would be much, much more likely to be achieved by replicating our existing science in humans, than by working out why Yorick and Ampersand are immune and then cloning them to save two species through inbreeding. And not only would we be able to save humanity, but eventually it's likely that most mammalian species could be restored, albeit as females only and dependent on human assisted reproduction.

Most of humanity would be facing the tough task of restoring a functioning civilisation, food supply chains, water and sanitation, restoring and maintaining our technology, etc. It would take a couple of decades to really get society back firmly on it's feet. And in those decades we would have also come up with other innovations and positive changes. But it would have been made firmly known to people there was hope for our species, possibly for all species. That the sooner we pull together and make things run more smoothly again, the more likely it becomes that we can begin functional reproductive programmes.

[General Days]

On 9/28/2021 at 9:54 AM, Scarlett45 said:

I am only up to episode 3 (watching with a friend) and so far I have to say I want to be Agent 355 when I grow up, she has mad skills.

 

355 is the only character I like.

I enjoy Diane Lane and Amber Tamblyn as actresses, so I'm enjoying their performance, but Yorick, Hero, and now Dr. Mann set my teeth on edge, as does the returned cabinet secretary (sorry, I forget her name). The writers should be making the characters sympathetic in some way, even if they're going to turn out to be antagonists or villains.

And if the yahoos of Oceanic flight 815 realized that in a day or two that they had to burn the dead bodies from the plane crash on Lost, the women of the United States should have been able to do the same.

Also, the women of the US armed forces (active and reserve) ought to be put to work on getting the power back on, towing wrecks off the roadways and basic functions like that.

Sure, there are a lot of dirty jobs done mainly by men, but not only by men, and women have transferrable skill sets.