FX has finally debuted the first four episodes of their long-awaited adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan’s classic comic series, Y: The Last Man and the first episode, “The Day Before,” was a doozy! Let’s dive right in!
Backtracking | Beginning the series is a title card that says “Three Weeks After” as a monkey named Ampersand is scouting the deserted streets of New York City, which is littered with corpses. A man named Yorick (Ben Schnetzer) spray paints a message for someone named Beth on a wall right before saving Ampersand from being crushed by a falling helicopter.
We then cut to “The Day Before,” as Yorick is giving magic lessons to a young boy, as his mother, Jennifer Brown (Diane Lane), a congresswoman, makes headlines for calling out the US President as a misogynist to the press. Yorick calls his sister, Hero (Olivia Thirlby), to beg for money so he can cook a nice dinner for his girlfriend Beth before he proposes to her, which she reluctantly hands over.
The New Mission | We then see a woman (Ashley Romans) preparing a homemade bomb in a house somewhere so her boyfriend can sell it to terrorists, but she sneaks out the back door when they arrive and detonates the bomb as she leaves. As she does, she sees horses and other animals dead on the side of the road before she’s picked up in a car and given a new identity as a Secret Service agent by a mystery man.
Yorick pops the question to Beth (Juliana Canfield), but she is less than thrilled when he suggests going with her to Australia, causing them to fight and she storms out. At a birthday party for the First Lady, the President (Paul Gross) calls out Jennifer for her comments, and to make matters worse, Jennifer’s husband tells her at the party that he wants a divorce.
The Morning Of | Hero’s boyfriend tells her that he told his wife about their relationship, but as he leaves to go to the bathroom, Hero sees texts from his wife on his phone that prove otherwise. They fight, during which Hero throws a fire extinguisher at him, which slices his throat open and kills him. The next morning, a cop arrives to investigate, but before he sees the body, he drops dead on the ground.
In the Pentagon, the woman takes her position as a Secret Service agent- just as the President starts vomiting blood and dies. In a matter of moments, every single man in the room starts coughing up blood and keels over, as well as every man and boy around the world. Children die in their beds, planes fall out of the sky, bodies are everywhere. Only the women are spared. Yorick wakes up in his apartment and sees the chaos outside. Cut to black.
Y: The Last Man is now streaming on FX on Hulu.