If women were in charge, there’d be peace.

How many times have you heard or thought something along those lines? I confess I have. Women would run this world so much better… but would we? If the chips were really down?

Again, Y challenges us, right on the edge of 21st century gender politics, sparking debate with some powerful analytical scenes in this episode. There’s the right-wing politicians speaking of the concept of Feminism as if it’s only for Liberals. Hero’s enthusiastic over-indulgence in pain medication to try to dull her sense of guilt and self-loathing… the latter dissected in a refreshingly non-sexual wash-room scene that’s clearly not constructed to pander to the male gaze.

The mid-episode scene in question seemed odd to me for a moment before I realised that we’re so used to the camera lingering on women’s bodies in a sexual context that it felt unusual to me to see a more run-of-the-mill scene where women of various shapes and sizes are just washing themselves and talking, not concerned with any judgement of each other’s appearance, not sitting or standing in a provocative way, just getting on with things, as every human does every day. This is no Game of Thrones style ‘sexposition’, it’s raw and it’s honest and it’s excellently done, even if it turns a little sinister at the very end.

There’s also Roxanne and Nora’s dialogue, arguably the most militant example of misandry we’ve yet witnessed, but with some killer lines that that pack a punch. “The doctors don’t listen, especially the men… you spend enough time fighting off the cancer, you forget to fight off the doctors…” Some of the myriad ways in which men have, even subconsciously, treated women as lesser beings are brutally and frankly shared. Roxanne, the ‘Alpha-Female’ as she seems to be, isn’t backwards in coming forwards. She has her followers in such thrall, yet she appears to have no accountability whatsoever, and she wields her power entirely at her own discretion. Moving on from her apparently heroic rescue of Nora and her daughter earlier in the series, I now think she might actually be the scariest thing in this entire story.

It’s not all navel-gazing as the third act has some nail-biting tension. Agent 355 keeps surprising me, as President Brown has a new fight on her hands.

Verdict: That bullshit was for the men and that’s over. 9/10

Claire Smith