‘Too Old to Die Young’ Episode 9 Recap: A Fantasy of Violence

“Eruptions of violence. Death. But this time, there was a woman at the center of it.”

“The face of an angel. With cold eyes. Judging everyone she looked at. And when she comes…the apocalypse follows.”

Never let it be said that the characters on Too Old to Die Young lack vision.

Titled “The Empress,” presumably in reference to Yaritza though quite possibly in reference to Diana—and it seems like a lot will be riding on the answer to this riddle in the finale—the penultimate episode of Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s masterpiece of surrealist noir is less an advancement of the plot than an escalation, or the promise of one to come.

Last episode was a leisurely bloodbath, promising the capture, torture, and slaughter of Martin Jones for the killing of Magdalena Rojas and then delivering at great length and in great detail. But at the end something that wasn’t what we were promised took place. A fissure in reality opened up, and a strange silvery “being” opened its eyes while a field of crimson glowed and screeched. How did I put it in my notes? Hang on, let me see…ah yes: WHAT THE FUCK???

The Being and her red netherworld return here, in a vision had by Diana, the nemesis of rapists and pedophiles who assigns Viggo his victims. When she awakes from these glimpses, which are accompanied by hellish orange flames, she finds her eyes have turned a silver-green. She turns to a local priestess and her assistant for help; they conduct a ritual that restores her eyes, and reconnects her to “the beings,” giving her a new vision of a nude woman in the desert, marching toward her with death trailing behind. An uncharacteristically direct cut to the next scene reveals that person’s identity, if you hadn’t already guessed.

Yaritza plays an interesting role in this episode and in this series, as much for what she doesn’t do as for what she does. Her elaborate roleplay with her husband Jesus helps him reenact his incestuous relationship with his mother, a central and seemingly cherished but also very, very fraught aspect of his sexuality. Apparently, Magadalena would do his makeup before molesting him, rendering them as two of a kind. It has to be hard for a young man to imagine an outside world when a single person was his mother, his lover, his mirror, and his model for existence all rolled into one.

Mothers remain all over this thing, by the way. This fixation was especially apparent last episode: Janey recalling her mother’s suicide and then plaintively calling for her on the verge of death; Martin pretending to be an envoy from a homeless pedophile’s mother in order to get him to lower his guard for the kill; Martin talking with Viggo’s mother while she’s under the delusion that her own son has died; Jesus avenging his mother’s death by torturing and killing Martin.

This episode throws all of that into an even higher gear. Yaritza playacts Jesus’s mother. He then declares he will be both the mother and the father of his men. One of the “girls” who work for Jesus’s cartel tells the story of the time her mother met the High Priestess of Death. Viggo’s mother takes his false eye and then dies, prompting him to become a full-fledged mass murderer. The show presents mother-love as a kind of cult—an island of lugubrious sentimentality we value primarily for its impending or actual loss, which we can then use to justify all manner of transgression.

And what does a man who can’t imagine an outside world thanks to the outsize influence of his own mother do when he’s placed in charge of a large segment of that outside world? He decides to destroy it. After an extended bit of cringe comedy involving his minions, whose monthly business meeting feels like something from The Office (with an old 1950s tribute act as the musical guest for that extra awkwardness), Jesus takes charge. He demands more torture, more rape, more killings, more violence. He declares “open season” on Jews, on Arabs, on the female relatives of white-boy hipster taco truck owners.

“I’m going to turn this whole city into a theme park of pain,” Jesus proclaims, having earlier declared himself “king of kings.” “It’s time to kill everyone.” He declares himself the personification of Mexico, “the real world, the free world, the future of civilization.” He cribs liberally from Malcolm McDowell’s runaway narcissism in Caligula, declaring “I have lived under this sun since the world was born, and I will be here when the last star falls from the sky.” He announces that his goal is nothing less than total domination of America: “a time where I will rule, where all men will bow to us—a time where I will be a god.”

Sitting by him this whole time? Yaritza, serial killer of rapists, the High Priestess of Death, harbinger of the apocalypse.

And they’re not the only people with visions of armageddon dancing through their heads. Viggo listens to a disembodied voice declare that our violent impulses were put their by God, who wants us to bathe in the blood of our enemies. When his mother dies, that’s exactly what he decides to do, demanding enough targets from Diana to cause immediate, all-out mayhem. She points him to a trailer park where, presumably due to laws restricting sex criminals to residences a requisite distance away from schools and playgrounds, an entire colony of pedophiles and rapists now live. He wipes them out in highly stylized ballet of murder, with a series of 1990s music-video-style grotesques getting blown away against a black background cross-cut with slow-motion explosion footage reminiscent of Zabriskie Point.

Compared to all that, the ending is very low key, especially in light of how effectively the show builds up the desire to see these violent people go absolutely apeshit in the most Nicolas Winding Refn ways imaginable. Sitting by herself at a restaurant, Diana nervously waits to be joined by Viggo, who she worries won’t survive the trailer-park raid. She tells her waitress—the same woman Martin and his partner pulled over and harassed in the pilot—that in the original version of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf raped the girl, who came back the next day to gut and burn him.

Eventually she is joined by Viggo, who made it out alive. Her relief, and her realization of just how frightened she was for him, all but vibrates out of actor Jena Malone’s alternately emotive and placid face. As they dig into their apple pie, Diana—who earlier told Viggo that “the beings” informed her Martin is gone—says they’ll soon be joined by someone new. “I don’t know her name,” she says, “but she’s coming.” Rough beast, slouching, et cetera.

But to what purpose? Both Diana and Yaritza treasure visiting vengeance on rapists, but Yaritza is at the apex of an organization for which rape is a growth market. Yaritza killed Diana and Viggo’s associate Martin, but Martin was himself a sex criminal unbeknownst to them. Yaritza and Jesus killed Martin for killing Magadalena, but Magdalena was a sex criminal as well. The tangle of justified violence is impossible to untie in a way that leads us to a neat conclusion for any of our players. It’s a lot like real violence, in that way. The road to a fascist mass-murdering hell is paved with good intentions, and with blood.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Too Old To Die Young Episode 9 ("The Empress") on Amazon Prime