We’re officially midway through the first season of Y: The Last Man, and the FX on Hulu series is bringing a take on the iconic Vertigo comic series that is proving to be well worth the wait. The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where nearly every mammal with a Y chromosome has suddenly been killed, except for Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer) and his pet monkey Ampersand. Yorick and a number of other survivors must grapple with this brave new world, and the most recent episode brought a pop culture-savvy twist on that. Spoilers for Episode 6 of Y: The Last Man, “Weird Al Is Dead”, below! Only look if you want to know!
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The episode saw Yorick, Agent 355 (Ashley Romans), and Dr. Allison Mann (Diana Bang) on their trek to the other side of the coast, only to stumble upon a group of survivors having a vigil where they light candles and sing Radiohead songs. Yorick bonds with a trans man at the vigil, where they both remark about all of the male artists and musicians who died in the event. After Yorick jokes that his musical taste basically consisted of Al “Weird Al” Yankovic, the other man remarks “Rest in peace, Weird Al.”
The moment caught the attention of Yankovic himself, who took to Twitter to first acknowledge the episode’s title with a simple “Uh oh.” He later shared the full scene, commenting “Uh… thanks?”
The scene is somewhat of an homage to Issue #4 of the original Y: The Last Man comic, where Yorick finds a vigil being held at the Washington Monument to all of the musicians and bands that were lost. While it might not unfold exactly the same way, those changes from the source material have proven to be one of the most compelling aspects of the series.
“I hadn’t read the graphic novels before getting cast,” Schnetzer recently told ComicBook.com. “I had heard of them, obviously, and I was aware of the prestige and the aura around them. I also knew that there was a series in production, or in pre-production, but I hadn’t read them, and so my first introduction to the world of Y: The Last Man was through Eliza Clark’s script. That was my introduction to these characters and to this team. There’s always pressure when you take on any job, and, of course, there’s going to be more pressure when there’s a built-in fan base, or there are these external expectations. But I think, as actors, usually nobody externally is going to put more pressure on you than you put on yourself. In navigating that, you’ve just got to try and let it go and trust that you’re there in service of the vision of the storytellers, and in vision of the creative team. You’re there to show up and do your job and help realize the vision of the showrunners, and the directors, and the writers.
“As soon as I spoke to Eliza Clark, as soon as I had my first meeting with her, I was just totally sold. I mean, I was sold when I read the script, because it was so good, and then just meeting with Eli and getting a sense of what her vision is was just so inspiring. If anything, I think you can look at that stuff, you can look at the preexisting hype, I guess, around something and you can either look at that as something that can make you nervous or you can also take a lot of inspiration from it. I chose to do the latter. Then, at the end of the day, you just got to let it all go and show up, and do the thing. Just have fun and tell the story.”
New episodes of Y: The Last Man debut on Mondays exclusively on FX on Hulu.
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