Note: This story contains spoilers from the “Youth” Season 1 finale.
Just when you think things could not get any messier on “Youth,” its heroine goes and sleeps with “Goblin Seed” author Malcolm (Douglas Hodge) … or did she?
The “Youth” Season 1 finale follows Alex (Sharon Horgan) as she copes with the discovery of Patrick’s (Rupert Friend) list of pros and cons of dating her, which include her inability to give him any kids of his own, by, well, not coping with it. She avoids Pat for much of the episode and instead spends it attending an awards ceremony where several of her agency’s clients are set to be honored. While there, she makes repeated trips to the men’s bathroom to deal with her ongoing UTI, disappoints her son Ruairí (Aran Murphy) by humoring Malcolm and insults her boss Sam (Sharlene Whyte) over her crumbling marriage to Frank (Robbie Gee).
And then, just when you think it cannot get any worse for Alex, she flirts with Malcolm at the end of the night and wakes up the next morning in his bed. Malcolm implies that they slept together, a notion that is further reinforced when Sam calls and informs her — much to Alex’s horror — that Malcolm has agreed to re-sign with their agency. “I don’t want that!” she tearfully exclaims, only for her protests to be ignored by Sam.
Speaking with TheWrap, Horgan, who created “Youth” in addition to starring in it, floated the idea that things are not quite as black-and-white in the show’s Season 1 finale as her character may fear.
“The thing is: Did she hook up with him? I don’t think she did,” Horgan said of Alex’s morning-after with Malcolm. “Look, he’s such a problematic character and and she’s at such a low ebb and I hate that the wrong person says the right thing to her at the right time. But in my version of what happened, she gets f—king hammered and she wants to keep drinking. She’s drinking through the pain.”
“I’ve definitely ended up back at people’s houses that I do not like just to keep the party going, so in my head that’s what happens,” Horgan explained, before noting that she did not want viewers to take her opinion as concrete fact. “I love when things are ambiguous. I am very, very attracted to an ambiguous ending, because I like it when the show sits with people and they’re left to figure out for themselves what happened.”
After her phone call with Sam, Alex runs into Pat outside her apartment. While the latter tries to explain that the list she found was not an indication that he wanted to stop seeing her, Alex tells him she does not want to live with robbing him of the chance to be a parent. She announces her intention to walk away first and does exactly that when a bicyclist almost crashes into her, offering her the perfect opportunity to slip away while Pat attends to the injured pedestrian.
The “Youth” finale ends moments later with an inversion of its premiere’s gut-punch final scene. Alex walks into her apartment and asks Ruairí, still riding the high of his first night spent with girlfriend Plum (Libby Mai), if she can crawl into his bed with him. He wordlessly agrees, and “Youth” concludes its first season on an image of mother-and-son connection — albeit an emotionally complex one.
One day after the episode aired, HBO renewed the series for a second season. During TheWrap’s conversation with her, which took place before the “Youth” Season 1 finale premiered, Horgan said she was still in the brainstorming phase of Season 2 planning. “I’m noodling ideas,” she admitted with a laugh, adding, “It’s hard not to.”
“I found myself doing that a bit while we were shooting,” Horgan added. “You think about Ruairí falling in love and you think, ‘What happens now? Does he put too much into it? Does that become his whole world now?’ You start to think of the unhealthy things that can happen off the back of that and off the back of any wholesome moment. Your brain just indulges a bit. So yeah. I am thinking about it. But it’s more just noodling at the moment.”
Below, Horgan offers further insight into the “Youth” Season 1 finale, including the episode’s increasingly chaotic series of events and its melancholic conclusion. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: Congratulations on making the most emotionally chaotic season finale of the year!
Sharon Horgan: Thank you! It’s quite a bit of effort to fit that much mess into an episode and feel like it’s not just a kind of relentless mess. You write as much chaos as possible, and then you go, ‘Oh my God. All she’s doing is running around like a headless chicken,’ and then you’ve got to thin out some chaos and bring in those quiet moments. I really fought to keep the UTI in there because I knew it would give us those quiet moments. But that also gets worse for women when they’re in menopause. I tried to show in the show the menopause-y things that are less talked about or known. Everyone knows the hot sweats and the dryness and all that, but not everyone knows about random periods and UTIs.
In terms of managing all the chaos, you do yourself a favor by setting the whole episode at one event.
Horgan: I had that idea at the very beginning, post-green light. I went to what’s called the Women’s Prize ceremony in London as research and I was just like, “This is gold.” Work is such a big part of the show and I wanted to explore one of those times where you’re meant to be able to celebrate and get a pat on the back and you’re not able to enjoy it. At that ceremony, too, it really was all just women. Like 1% of it were men and there really was an excess of Baileys and Prosecco and it was just women! Miranda July was there and everyone was talking to each other, like, “Have you seen her!?!” There was this buzz going around because she was there and nobody knew how to actually find her.
So I just took that and thought, “I would love to have the finale be a sort of bottle episode and have Alex be in the worst state with a broken heart and not even be able to deal with that because of her f—king UTI.” The ceremony was an idea I had from the very beginning. It was a nightmare to shoot and we had so little time to do it, but I just thank God that it worked out.
How would you describe Alex’s headspace at the end of the episode after everything happens with Malcolm?
Horgan: Just more absolute self hatred, because of the very fact that she ended up there and she wakes up in that bad man’s bed. Something that was a really early idea I had was the notion that she could make a bad choice and then something “good” comes out of it. How do you reconcile that in your brain? When she says, “I don’t want that,” to Sam, she’s thinking, “Did I actually prostitute myself for this client that I don’t even want?”
It’s just pure commerce from her boss’ point of view, but it creates a violent response within Alex. She thinks she’s going to be sick. She feels like she let herself down. A boundary was crossed and then the ultimate f—k you is that he then signs with them. It’s a very, very manipulative move on his part.
You have a habit of interrupting very emotionally frank, confrontational moments with these bursts of random, everyday chaos. I’m thinking specifically of the bicyclist interrupting Alex and Pat’s conversation at the end of the episode. Why do you find those injections of chaos so appealing?
Horgan: In that particular moment, I wanted to completely contradict what she says, which is that she’s making it easy for him. Because she still leaves this wreckage for him to clear up that is also a kind of emotional wreckage.
I do think that what she does in that conversation is a really emotionally mature thing. She asks some difficult questions, but what she does is a sort of love. It’s how she has been as a mother the whole series. It’s a kind of love letter to that. She’s saying, “How can I take that from you? This incredible experience of parenthood?” So she does this emotionally mature thing… and then follows it by walking away from a car crash, basically. It’s one of the most mature things she does — not the leaving the biker in agony but letting Pat off the hook emotionally.
Generally, those moments of chaos happen off the back of an emotional punch, and I do it because you can do that in comedy. Comedy is such an incredible medium for dealing with really hard stuff because you can grab a release valve. On a comedic level, I like to throw those moments in there because life is chaotic and I think I also recognize that stuff in myself — this mess that you leave behind for someone else to clear up.
How did you land on the finale’s last scene and making it an inversion of the premiere’s ending?
Horgan: Sometimes, as a parent, you just want to get some kind of comfort from your kids. When they become adults, they leave that behind. You’re always asking for affection, rather than when it used to be there all the time. As they get older, it’s so few and far between that you get affection from them. So it’s her really needing it in that moment and him allowing her in with nothing said. When I wrote the first episode, I knew that I wanted the finale to invert that moment. It’s pure comfort that she needs, like he needed in the premiere. She’s had the worst night of her life and she just needs to feel something pure after the literal walk of shame she’s been through. And when you can connect with your kid like that, you do feel a kind of peace.
The theme tune that plays in brief in every episode, we actually get to hear the full song at the end of the finale and it is a love letter to parenthood. If you listen to the lyrics, it’s about what they give you and what you give them back. It’s all about that exchange. And when you’re making a show, there are so many elements that have to come together to capture a moment. It’s all these spinning plates and you’re just hoping they fall into place. You hope to create that moment that’s in your head and expand it, and I got to do that here, even with the TikTok audio they’re listening to at the end.
I’ve had these moments in my own life where I curl up with my daughter and she’s on TikTok and I’m like, “What the f—k is that?” It’s all these little things coming together in that last scene.
“Youth” Season 1 is streaming now on HBO Max.
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