Inside Y: The Last Man’s Radiohead Sequence and Al Yankovic’s Weird Moment

Episode 6 of the FX comic adaptation Y: the last man received a bit more attention when it aired on October 4, due to its provocative title, “Weird Al Is Dead.” The name of the episode comes from a sequence a few minutes into the story: as the series’ protagonist Yorick (Ben Schnetzer) travels across the country with his protector, Agent 355 (Ashley Romans) and the controversial doctor Alison Mann ( Diana Bang), they stumble. through a ritual concert where women meet every week to sing songs in recognition of the dead men of the world. As a solemn circle of candle-holding women perform an a cappella version of Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” Yorick talks to one of the locals, a young trans man named Jack (Tsholo E. Khalema).

“I saw Radiohead live,” Yorick tells him. “My sister took me. I think she wanted me to know that there was more to music than ‘Weird Al.’ Jack looks shocked, as if realizing for the first time that the death toll includes the musical satirist. “Rest in peace, ‘Weird Al,'” he says.

The own “Weird Al” responded to the episode through Twitter, with a characteristic irony.

The Radiohead segment stands out in a series that thus far has been largely slim and linear, focusing on character development and action, without many moments for thought or art. It was inspired by a sequence of number 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra Y: the last man comical, but that version of the story is very different. For one thing, it takes place at a large open-air festival that surrounds the Washington Monument. On the other hand, the focus is not on Radiohead, but on the Rolling Stones.

Showrunner Eliza Clark tells Polygon that the series’ writing team decided to update the reference for a more contemporary audience: “The Rolling Stones are so old!” she says, laughing. “I feel like 20 years ago [when the comic came out], that was a different reference for Yorick than it would be for Yorick of 2021. I think it says so much about who he is as a person, that he heard ‘Weird Al’ and his sister said, ‘Let me help here.’ It says a lot about their relationship. I felt more like him. “

Image: Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra / Vertigo Comics

The decision to remodel the scene was made in part for practical reasons. “I really love that part of the comic, the memorial,” says Clark. “I wanted to include that in the story, but we weren’t going to be in DC; We couldn’t do the Washington Memorial. I felt like we could do our own version. “

The episode’s director, Destiny Ekaragha, tells Polygon that the sequence looked significantly different in the original script.

“We plan to have flashlights and float them on the water,” says Ekaragha. “But finding a location that could accommodate what we wanted in the time we had was nearly impossible. […] And we had the singers planned, but there were also practical problems with that, due to COVID. We were going to have all these singers and they said, ‘Okay, you can have six singers.’

Ekaragha says she worked with production designer Alexandra Schaller and cinematographer Catherine Lutes to work out the sequence with available resources, focusing on lighting the scene almost entirely with candles. “I wanted some kind of light source in the middle, to bring the scene to life,” he says. “I thought, The obvious thing is to make bonfires, but they are so played, man. Everybody uses bonfires; I don’t want to see another bonfire. So I said to Alex, ‘I want something like a wedding cake, something tiered, which is a source of light.’ She left and came back with the idea of ​​having these cinder blocks that seemed to come from where they were performing, and she put little candles on the blocks and put the singers on top. I saw the design and fell in love right away. “

An important point of the scene, according to Ekaragha, was giving the characters the first breath they had to process the massive changes in the world and mourn their losses.

“We all knew we wanted the song to be serene and pretty sparse,” says Ekaragha. “When I listened to the demo of the song, I was immediately excited. I wanted to feel that feeling when I created that scene, so I had that song playing in the background when I saw the location. I walked around the circle myself to make sure it felt the way the song made me feel. “

“It’s a time for Yorick and 355 to connect for the first time, for her to have a moment of pain for a brief second, for us to see her mask slip off,” says Clark. “Radiohead came to mind because of the scene. I think that song is so beautiful and the lyrics are really perfect for the story. Radiohead has this very masculine quality to me, and hearing ‘Karma Police’ rephrased as a kind of funeral lament with female voices was really moving. And then our music supervisor, Sue Jacobs, was upon that. She was like, ‘I can do this amazing!’ So we talked about other songs that we could use, but it never got any better than ‘Karma Police.’