We need to talk about Ruairi, Alex’s alternatively boisterous and withdrawn teenage son. He was introduced as someone who couldn’t wait to chart his own path, opting to close out his time in high school by protesting on stage about the “wolves” and “pigs” that run and own its classrooms and hallways. It was hard to tell if he was really trying to be iconoclastic or if it was just a stunt, but since then he’s turned inward, dropping out of school and taking refuge in Mitch Hedberg clips (who among us hasn’t?) and playthroughs. There have been clues about some incident occurring in his first week at school, but if, after that visit to the dorm last week, Alex was expecting that he’d come right out and tell her what happened at Kent, well, she might have better odds of getting Malcolm Hammond (Douglas Hodge of, among many great things, Catastrophe), rejected author turned smug, self-published success, back on her agency’s roster.
As played by Aran Murphy, Ruairi seems like more than just the latest in TV’s long line of sullen and/or annoying teens. The same kid that showed off at graduation is awkward around girls, staying silent when his classmate Bridget accidentally sits on his hand and then trying to inhale the burrata he ordered at his graduation dinner to avoid making eye contact with a different girl, Mia. But it’s not until this week’s episode, “Welcome To The Rat’s Nest,” that we really get a sense of who Ruairi is and how that informs what he’s been struggling with.
In its third episode, Youth doesn’t fully venture into Adolescence territory but, amid some very funny “publishing professionals gone wild” shenanigans and spouts of what may or may not be period blood, Sharon Horgan and series director Dawn Shadforth offer a compassionate snapshot of what it’s like to be a teenage boy in a world with too few examples of positive masculinity. Alex walks on eggshells for much of the runtime—she’s afraid to leave Ruairi home alone but she’s also aware that bringing her son on a work trip will make her a pariah among her colleagues who can’t wait to let loose. But, as she makes incisively yet painfully clear to Sam, she has no other options. Lorcan, her manchild ex-husband, doesn’t care to help and her parents need help taking care of themselves. Alex can’t call on her support network because she is the support network—for everyone but herself.
Even as she underscores Alex’s lack of backup, Horgan never comes across as self-pitying or a martyr. As an actor and a writer, she’s committed to tapping into the honesty and the humor in any situation, whether that’s finding yourself with an instant family, on the precipice of divorce, or as a part of the sandwich generation, looking after aging parents while setting your kids up for lives of their own. And, as tonight’s episode proves, there’s all kinds of fun to be had at the Frankfurt Book Fair (which is a real event, but I wasn’t able to verify if there is a William Morris Endeavor party and if it includes a chocolate fountain).
As a single working mom, Alex’s personal and professional lives are always in conversation with each other, but this is the first time we see her really struggle to juggle both. She has to keep Ruairi out of trouble while also trying to find a new publisher for her client Charlotte Arbor’s latest book (which sounds like smut of the lowest order); thwart/entertain the advances of Lars (Steve Windolf), a previous hookup; cozy up to a HarperCollins shot-caller who pretends not to know her (Catherine Shepherd as Karen); and downplay what increasingly looks like the kind of mistake that could end a career. That would be turning down a romantasy pitch from Malcolm some unspecified time ago, only for him to self-publish the book and sell 200,000 copies in the first week alone. Alex’s blunder is quickly becoming common knowledge among the publishing set, her infamy as visible as her butt on a Jumbotron (which, until this gag, seemed kind of like an odd choice for a relatively small gathering, but maybe that’s what the crowds at Frankfurter Buchmesse require).
But Alex muddles through, working a Swedish connection to try to place an unfinished book by an unknown author she believes in, enduring Livonia’s haughtiness and rival agent Grayson Cole’s (Freddie Fox) bitchiness, and helping Sam keep it together even as they’re both tasked with selling Random House on a romance novel that needs 90% of its anal sex scenes cut in order to be suitable. She checks on Ruairi throughout, even reaching out to his friend Mia to ask about what happened at Kent, and also tries to rekindle the fire with Patrick, who’s gotten the impression (from her) that she doesn’t think he’s a serious person. Alex tries to reassure him until a missed call and a misdirected text suggest that she was right all along to doubt him.
All of this, plus the possible return of her period, unfolds in under two days, but, despite some minor humiliation, Alex takes it in stride. At this point, in both the show and her life, these complications and pitfalls are just par for the course—Alex would probably be more surprised if things went smoothly. Her resilience (and hotness) are rewarded with an invitation to the WME party, where she continues to push Charlotte’s book on publishers and also tries to hook up with Lars, only to have the “forest fairy” rear her red head. She returns to the hotel room prepared to wait for Ruairi to come home after what she thinks was a mixer with international teens but was in fact a beer-filled night with a falconer named Werner (Danish comedian Martin Høgsted), only for Lars to take one more overture with the aid of sanitary napkins and towels. Alex is well within her rights to worry about Ruairi, even outside of the incident at school, but it’s ironic to see her experiencing the kind of exploits most parents fear their kids will have. That contradiction is at the heart of Youth, which shows you’re never too old to make mistakes—or to learn from them.
Alex will likely need some time to figure out what lessons are to be gleaned from this particular night of gaffes, other than to avoid openly poaching authors. But that doesn’t mean that, after receiving some disturbing texts from her son, she can’t track him down and demand that he tell her what happened at school. Drunk after a night of buying beers (with the money Alex paid him to attend that mixer) and getting schooled on the Black Death, Ruairi tries to deflect but Alex insists. Until he opens up, she tells him, all she can imagine are “worst case scenarios.” And so he tells her what happened, from his point of view, at least: He and Bridget got drunk at a party and went back to her room to fool around. But they both ended up passing out, and when he came to, he saw he had his hand in her pants. She rightly freaked out, but when they talked about what happened, they both admitted they essentially blacked out. Ruairi claims Bridget was prepared to “forget it,” but word spread through the school anyway, with Mia possibly being the one to spread it because she was still hurt that Ruairi was unable to perform back when they were dating.
It says a lot about Horgan and Murphy’s bond that Ruairi’s admission feels both hard-won and like it was on the tip of his tongue. The camera circles them as Alex begs for the truth and Ruairi bites it back. For much of what we’ve seen so far, Ruairi’s been a jerk to his mom, and even the specter of The Incident doesn’t justify it. But it’s not just that he feared some kind of punishment—after what happened with Bridget and Mia, he worries there’s something wrong with him. He sobs about the “noise in his head,” all the internal doubt and the external pressures (wonder what else he’s been watching on his phone). “It’s too hard, mum,” he says. “I just want to be a kid in my room.” There might be more details to come, ones that cast his actions in a worse light, but Youth asks us to sit in this moment, of a mom who was afraid to send her son out into the world and that once-brave kid, having experienced some of it, now desperate to come back home.
Stray observations
- • Whether or not Alex wants Malcolm as a client, Sam makes it clear that she’s going to need to win him back. With his swagger and incidental insights into womanhood, Malcolm kind of gives off “Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give” vibes. Given how they started, could a fling between him and Alex be in the works? I’m neither for or against, just thinking out loud.
- • “It was like that film, Up In The Air. Just fun, lightly degrading sex.” If that’s her takeaway, I’m not sure Alex finished watching that movie.
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