‘Too Old to Die Young’ Season Finale Recap: The End of the Innocents

Diana Sophia DeYoung masturbates with VR goggles on. She shaves her legs in the shower. She calls out sick from work in a bikini by her pool. She watches a public access show about UFO encounters, featuring a very skeptical hand puppet. She dances to Goldfrapp’s electro-glam song “Ooh La La,” in its entirety. Then she stares at a painting that suggests the curve of the Earth silhouetted against the moon and sun, and says this:

“Soon, violence will become erotic, torture euphoric. As the masses hail public executions, propelled by the wrath of fascism, concentration camps will be rebuilt, ignorance will be exalted, and there will be race wars, for hate will be rewarded and seen as truthful and beautiful. Faith will be reduced to venomous platitudes, a morphine-infested enslavement of thought. Perversity will be dignified. Incest, molestation, and pedophilia will all be praised. Rape will be rewarded. The few will have everything, and most will have nothing, for not all men are created equal. Narcissism will no longer be suppressed, but worshipped as a virtue. Indulging ones impulses will become instinctual. Our identities will be defined by the pain we cause. Pure unadulterated nihilism will be the only solution in the face of glorious death. In time, we will have our own religion, our own dynasty, and with it, we will wake the true fury of the world. And as man implodes in a wash of blood and silence, a new mutation will emerge. And on that day, i will declare the dawn of innocence.”

Yaritza Rojas sits in a car outside the Casita, the brothel operated by the drug cartel run by her husband and his cousin. She steps inside and speaks with Jaime, the lieutenant in charge. He offers her a drink and has one of the sex workers pour it for her. He tries making his excuses but she asks for another, insisting he pour it this time. She approaches the sex workers and asks one with a guitar next to her to sing “The High Priestess of Death,” a song about the killer of pimps and rapists who’s been stalking the cartel. The song goes like this:

“The High Priestess of Death: In men I inspire fear. Women I bless with good fortune and my face like an angel. I take unloyal men with me. An endless cycle is their prison. Pain and suffering are the ways of life. Death does nothing to heal your wounds. And when I come to take you, your sins will be your torment. All around the world I have followers who are devoted, devoted deeply to me. That’s why they sing my song, through good times and bad. I defend women when trouble finds them. I bring their enemies to their knees, soaked in blood, flesh ripped and torn. It is nothing to me, because I am formidable.”

Yaritza then shoots all of the men in the Casita to death except Jaime, whom she merely wounds. Before she kills him, he asks why she’s going to do it. She says this:

“Because I am the High Priestess of Death. The seed of destruction, born from the burning desert. An unadulterated extermination machine, eliminating all evil from the universe. And you, Jaime, are part of that evil.”

She kills him, and leaves. The women all stay where they are.

The show ends.

“The World” is the tenth, final, and shortest episode of Nicolas Winding Refn & Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young. Co-written by Halley Gross, whom Refn describes as the vital third member of the show’s creative trinity, it is fearless television, at a time when fearlessness is in short supply. I don’t say it’s unfrightened television; I think it’s honest about how frightening life feels. Therein lies the fearlessness.

Diana’s speech is nothing more or less than an anticipation of the news during the first two weeks of July 2019. Egomaniacal rapists and enablers of rapists wage war agains the rights of the un-white. They despoil children in disease-ridden political prisons. Their supporters bray righteous platitudes about faith, family, country, and the punishment of their enemies, delighting in the dismay and terror they cause. People who see this for what it is take what action they can, and then do what people do: dance, watch TV, jerk off. It’s impossible to stop every part of your life except the parts devoted to stopping the world from loosing its fury.

The fantasy represented by Diana and Yaritza, and Viggo as well, is that an equal and opposite fury is waiting to be unleashed. The rage of the truly righteous will come and burn the fascists alive. From their ashes a new world, a whole world, can emerge. They feel sure of this, because they have received what we have not and cannot: confirmation from a higher power.

The beings who steer Diana and Viggo’s purge of pedophiles, the desert goddess who has embodied herself in Yaritza—they posses certainty denied mortal humans. Which is not to say humans lack the ability to feel certain of things. Indeed, there’s one group of humans who are certain of everything, who know they are doing the exact right thing at all times, because it’s the thing they want to do and therefore it must be right. They are called fascists.

Over the course of nine endless episodes and one short one, Refn, Brubaker, Gross, and company present both the horror and the allure of fascism, by telling a story in which the thought process behind fascism is shared by heroes and villains alike. The grotesque police who squeal in favor of exterminating the underclass in between homophobic pantomimes employ the same logic as Diana and Yaritza, but with different targets on behalf of different beneficiaries. The same is true of Jesus, whose vision of the future is no less apocalyptic than theirs, and who assigns himself just as outsized, as narcissistic, a role in it as they do. Everyone involved believes they are the messiah for the elect of their choice, and that everyone else must pay in blood.

In the meantime, Yaritza is content to play his consort, choosing the path of extermination instead of using her obvious power to prevent its need. In the meantime, Diana employs Viggo, a former FBI agent who listens to radio programs that spout the same rhetoric as the fascist police. He reads it as a warning, they as a celebration, but the result is the same.

Those radio programs also echo the occultist Nazi preacher whose services Martin attends while trailing the snuff filmmakers he would go on to kill for committing sex crimes, before returning home to his underage girlfriend.

Is it hard to see, in that light, why Martin would be the show’s protagonist despite dying before the final hours? He is the living embodiment of the confused and conflicted logic of all the other characters. He is a fascist cop who despises the fascist cops. He is a pedophile who believes pedophiles should be exterminated. To preserve the sanctity of family, he destroys Jesus’s and Janey’s families. He is tortured to death in front of a woman who shares his agenda, and who, if The Beings are to believed, will one day soon forge an alliance with the woman and man who put him on the path of redemptive violence to begin with.

The mesmeric qualities of Refn’s filmmaking make taking in all of this cacophonous and terrifying information a leisurely, sensual matter. The sparse dialogue and the long stretches of silence surrounding it make the monologues outlining the fascist mindset stand out like towering obelisks of ideology. The performances of the five leading actors are masterful in their vagueness, blank screens against which we can project our own hopes, fears, and lusts. The result is a show for our time. It is perhaps the show of our time.

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 10 ("The World") on Amazon Prime