Everyone in the finale of “Youth” is dressed for a good night, and almost nobody gets one. The last half hour of the first season is set mostly at the Women’s Literature Awards, where Alex (Sharon Horgan) has authors up for prizes, a teenage son to keep upright and a love life that was already taking on water before she arrived. The episode, “Agent of the Year”, aired on HBO on Sunday, November 1st, closing an eight-episode run that opened on September 20th with a locked jaw and a cameo from Damian Lewis.
Horgan wrote the finale and Jim O’Hanlon directed it, and the reaction has split in a way that is worth taking seriously, because the people who liked it and the people who did not are mostly describing the same events. HBO moved fast on what comes next, renewing the series for a second season on Monday, November 2nd, less than a day after the finale aired. Whether this first season earned that second one is a more interesting question than whether the network wanted it, and the episode is built to leave the answer open. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Youth” Season 1, including the finale, “Agent of the Year.”
Whether this first season earned that second one is a more interesting question than whether the network wanted it, and the episode is built to leave the answer open.”
The episode picks up the morning after “Last Night on Earth”, in which Alex found a list of her pros and cons in the kitchen of her boyfriend Patrick (Rupert Friend), read the one con that mattered, that she cannot give him a family of his own, and walked out without a word. Her sister Delly turns up first, returns a dress she had borrowed and tells Alex it is better to know now, and the A.V. Club notes that Alex agrees even though part of her would like to reschedule the pain for five years from now. Then Alex collects her son Ruari (Aran Murphy) as her plus-one for the awards, while Patrick spends the evening texting to explain that the list was a therapy exercise and not a verdict. She starts to type a kiss-off, backs out and sends “You gave me a UTI” instead, which buys her time and sets up the infection that follows her around all night. Horgan told Entertainment Weekly that the UTI was “the thing that really saved it”, and she explained why with a line that could sit in the script: “Because nothing makes a broken heart worse than having to deal with cystitis.”
Inside, the agency’s problems arrive in a queue, and Alex’s first stop is the men’s room, because her UTI will not wait and the line for the women’s is too long. Sam (Sharlene Whyte) tells Alex that her husband Frank (Robbie Gee) has asked for some space, which Sam is trying to read as a provocation. She adds that Malcolm (Douglas Hodge) is sitting with Grayson (Freddie Fox), whom Entertainment Weekly describes as a rival agent, instead of at Alex’s table, and that the erotica author Coco August is coming in and she means to sign her over Alex’s objections. The bigger problem is Charlotte (Anne Reid), a veteran author up for a lifetime achievement award, and her daughter Livonia (Harriet Walter), who tells Alex that she wrote her mother’s speech, and “Wagon Burner”, and the books that came before it. Livonia means to say so on the night, Alex warns her that the publisher would drop them both, and Livonia answers that she is doing it anyway.
Once the ceremony is under way, the night starts losing things. An author Alex backed has signed with a rival agency, which hands Sam the argument she has been making all season, and in the A.V. Club’s account Sam tells Alex she was “delusional” to expect mainstream success. Alex fires back with “You wanna talk about delusional? Look at your marriage”, which the same recap says shocks Sam and Ruari both. By the end of the night Frank has left, Sam has learned of it by text, and the A.V. Club’s last glimpse of her this season is of her crying quietly. Horgan told the A.V. Club she never wanted the pair to read as “frenemies” and wanted “a very complicated friendship” instead, and this is the scene where the complication sends its bill.
Ruari’s night runs on a parallel track. Plum has gone quiet since their awkward night together in the previous episode and does not show up at the ceremony, so Ruari decides she is avoiding him. The A.V. Club adds that he also worries she is avoiding Malcolm, who she recently revealed had sexually harassed her, and that when he tries to raise it, Alex assumes he has done something to push Plum away. He calls her a hypocrite for working with a man who treats women that way, and her reply is what the same recap calls a “mealy-mouthed defense”. In that account Ruari starts on Coco’s vodka and Alex keeps pace with him, and Ready Steady Cut’s Jonathon Wilson wrote that it was “really disappointing for him to regress so quickly and completely”. Jessie, the author who told Alex a week earlier that she was hiding from a stalker, wins an award and never turns up, so Alex accepts on her behalf, and Nexus Point News says storylines like that stalker “feel like throwaways meant to fill screen time”.
Charlotte’s lifetime achievement award is presented by James Norton playing himself, a last-minute idea, Horgan told Entertainment Weekly, that came when she decided Charlotte had also written “these terrible plays” and needed someone famous rather than literary to hand over the prize. She had met Norton at Wimbledon, where he told her he admired her work, and she says “James Norton was an absolute win that I still can’t believe”. She also liked the way he bookended the season with Damian Lewis’s premiere cameo as “another chunky bit of celeb muscle”. Charlotte does not thank her daughter, and as she starts her speech Livonia has a stroke at the table, which Charlotte carries on through without appearing to notice. Somewhere in the chaos Plum turns up, Ruari kisses her, and Alex, watching from nearby, forgives him on the spot for nearly wrecking what was left of her career, which Nexus Point calls “too easy a resolution” for the masculinity storyline the season had been building.
Then comes the turn the recap headlines are about. Alex wakes up in Malcolm’s bed, and the episode declines to say exactly how she got there: Horgan told the A.V. Club that what happened is “very ambiguous”, Deadline files it under a one-night stand, and Ready Steady Cut, which counts it as the most unconscionable decision of the night, writes that she sleeps with him “by all accounts at her own insistence”. Malcolm, according to The Cinemaholic, says she started it. On the walk home Sam calls to say Malcolm has signed with the agency, and the A.V. Club says the call is enough to turn Alex’s stomach. Horgan told TV Insider that Malcolm “starts out as the comic relief” and that she sees “an incredible foil for Alex” in him, which is a polite way of saying that her nemesis is now a client of the agency.
Patrick is waiting outside her building, and the scene gives both of them an honest line. He tells her “I don’t want to lose something this good for something I’m not certain I even want”, which the A.V. Club hears as almost romantic and which Alex hears as a compromise, so her answer is “You don’t even know what it is that you’d be giving up, okay? I do.” Horgan calls ending it “quite a selfless thing”, a mother sparing a man a future he might want. Alex hurries away, her exit takes out a cyclist, and she climbs into Ruari’s bed, reversing the premiere, so the season closes on the two of them scrolling videos.
The reviews are not unanimous. The A.V. Club’s Danette Chavez calls the finale “one riveting catastrophe after another” and says it builds “a bumpy bridge to the future”, Nexus Point News’s Emma Fisher writes that the episode tries to close its storylines but “fails to do so in any way that feels complete or satisfying”, and Ready Steady Cut’s Wilson calls it “an unexpectedly damp squib of a half-hour”. The complaint has merit, because the episode is overcrowded, with a stalker, a ghostwriter and a collapsing marriage competing for the same few minutes. Still, the choice at its center, Alex ending something good to spare someone else a regret, is arguably the most honest thing the season has done, and the bedroom scroll probably lands harder than a tidier resolution would have. Horgan told Entertainment Weekly that “you gotta follow it with an awful bike crash”, which works as a mission statement for the whole show. Her statement on the renewal kept the tone: “I can’t think of a better platform to air my UTI problems on.” HBO’s Amy Gravitt said “each performance in Youth is more delightful than the next”, and TV Insider notes that no cast list or details for the second season have been announced.
What Do You Think? Was Alex right to end it with Patrick, or did she make a choice for him that he never got to make himself? Does the night with Malcolm make a second season sharper, or just more uncomfortable to sit through? And did a finale that tries to close this many storylines in one room deserve a tidier ending than the one it got?
See you on the next binge!
