Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Ben Schnetzer, Ashley Romans, Olivia Thirlby, Diane Lane, Elliot Fletcher, Amber Tamblyn, Juliana Canfield, Diana Bang, Missi Pyle, Jess Salgueiro, Yanna McIntosh, Jennifer Wigmore, Paul Gross, Kristen Gutoskie.

Nature abhors a vacuum, remove a species, destroy a civilisation from existence, and what you are left with is a power struggle, a false manipulation of authority and dominance that requires feeding, and can turn on what remains on itself; the sense of the diminishing resonance that comes with extinction.

It is possible to witness such devastation in the ultimate war of the sexes, remove man from the equation as many have suggested would be beneficial to the planet, and what you are likely to find is the power shift is one where the breach in nature is enough to split the remaining half of humanity till one side emerges dominant, the vacuum once again sealed.

This is of course an extreme reaction to the premise that by destroying all with a y chromosome in the hope that humanity stands a chance to survive, that the insistence of the species fault lays directly at the door of one sex over the other, and one that is the central premise behind the television adaption of the post-apocalyptic graphic novel Y: The Last Man and one that arguably delves much deeper into the idea of gender, reprisal, and extinction due to lack of cohesion and compromise, than might have once considered not just possible, but would have been shunned for appearing farfetched.

It is arguably in the misandrist and psychopathic nature of Missi Pyle’s Roxanne that sets the tone for the new world that is sought as governments and societies start to crash and burn, and whilst one sympathises with the character’s own path of discovery in her burning hatred, she is the epitome of the vacuum created by the virus that has seen all but one male human, and one capuchin monkey, destroyed, killed. In her haste to rid the world of the last, she becomes her own epicentre of destruction, and it is that end that Missy Pyle sets such a dramatic and captivating performance on fire.

The counter punch to Roxanne is seen in the performances of Amber Tamblyn as the daughter of the former President, and in the exceptional non-committal to anything except orders framed sincerely by Ashley Romains as Agent 355/Sarah Burgin; in this triangle of emotions, the fate of humanity rests, and as each twist is revealed, so the uncomfortable understanding of what we have created by not having an egalitarianism system in place is shrouded in shame and the knowledge that in the end war between nations, between ideologies will cause pain, but a war between the sexes will lead to our own annihilation.

Whilst it is doubtful that there will be a second series of Y: The Last Man, what was shown to come to pass in the initial ten-part series serves a warning, that the last man, or indeed woman, will become a fixated commodity, and one we must avoid at all costs. An excellent series, one that will be a shame to see not continued.

Ian D. Hall