“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m chuffed at the moment.” Poor Alex utters these famous last words about halfway through “Last Night On Earth,” the penultimate episode of Youth season one, and you can probably guess how long it is before her good mood is spoiled. What’s more surprising is that Alex is kind of the architect of her own doom here. For a brief time, she does seem to have it all—the hot boyfriend, the great job, the loving son. She’s so giddy about Patrick on this fourth* go-round that she’s withdrawn a bit from the rest of the world, judging by the 347 notifications that greet her when she unlocks her phone in the opening moments of tonight’s episode.

Alex and Patrick have been in their own little bubble. Things are so good between them that he waxes eloquent about removing her old estrogen patch: “There is no finer symptom of love than the picking off of dried-in estrogen patch glue.” I assumed Alex would press him on his use of “love,” but maybe in the time that’s passed since “Desperate Measures,” they’ve already said the words to each other or she’s finally learned to trust him. She definitely seems to be prioritizing their reforged romance over her work, so much so that she’s ignoring emails and calls from her boss Sam—who, yes, is her friend, but is also her boss. Instead of taking time off to canoodle with Patrick, Alex is pretending to work from home. Patrick acknowledges they’re both slacking off, but that just makes Alex defensive. She complains about Sam not trusting her, and being weird about her having sold Yafa’s book (which seems debatable, given that he’s not her client). 

When she finally does answer one of Sam’s calls, Alex learns that one of her authors, Jessie Findlay—whose book is being shopped around to studios—has been nominated for a Women’s Lit award, and Charlotte’s up for a lifetime achievement award. Alex is so thrilled that Sam’s passive-aggressiveness slides right off her back. She marvels to Patrick: “Am I having it all right now? I mean, I have never had it all before. Like, it’s usually, like, having some. Or none.” Alex’s glee is infectious and hard-won. She hasn’t navigated all of the events of season one perfectly, but she’s been supportive of her son, helped out with her parents, tried to set Sam’s mind at ease about this new chapter in her life, and attempted to keep an open mind about her own. The mistakes Alex has made along the way say as much about the character as her triumphs, and “Last Night On Earth” underscores just how often those mistakes pertain to her relationship with Patrick.

In hindsight, Alex hasn’t had the best track record at work either but she’s really half-assing things this week. When she eventually drags herself into the office, we learn that the frenzy of emails from Swift PR were about Charlotte’s recent podcast interview, where she said that her books are her only children. (That’s news to her daughter Livonia, who’s been taking care of her for decades.) She steals Sam’s thunder at a poignant moment and has to be reminded again to call Jessie about the nomination. Then when Jessie shows up at the office, she tries to hide from her because she’d rather flirt with Patrick. But Alex really stoops low when she uses her mom as an excuse for not doing her job.

This is more than just “harried working single mom” stuff. Alex shouldn’t be this easily distracted by a new-old relationship, right? She wasn’t exactly playing it cool before this, practically issuing an ultimatum in the second episode (“It has to be the right time, ’cause another time’s gonna be too late,” walking past Patrick’s place to try to bump into him on purpose by accident, trying to make him jealous instead of just telling him she wants to be exclusive. But whether it’s the pressure to get things right the fourth time around or something else, Alex doesn’t really seem to be handling the boyfriend part of “having it all,” which is the one she’s been most focused on recently, all that well. I would say she’s trying to rub her good fortune in Sam’s face a bit when she expresses relief over Sam actually being annoyed with Frank instead of her for having “the partner, the happy kid, the job.” Sam seems genuinely confused by Alex’s admission, though, the more I see of their relationship, “I don’t know her”-ing Alex’s happiness also seems like something she’d do to get at her friend.

Alex’s smugness here is forgivable, or at least tolerable, because there’s a brittleness to it. Peace comes and goes on Youth; just last week, Alex cycled through ecstasy and despair in just a couple of days. She’s all in on her relationship with Patrick, and he seems tantalizingly close to being right there with her if he’s tossing around “love” in conversation. But it’s been so long since she got it all right—so long, in fact, that Ruairi tells Plum the last time he saw Alex looking this happy was when he was eight. And we don’t know how long it’ll be till he sees that look on her face again, given that it takes her less than a day to upend things with Patrick for, oh, the third time this season?

As one of Sharon Horgan’s creations, Alex is a deeply flawed yet lovable person. She gets in her own way plenty, especially with Patrick, and she’s been increasingly flaky at work. But what’s balanced things out is seeing just how worthless Lorcan is as a partner and dad, and how good her instincts are as a literary agent when the pitch isn’t coming from someone as creepy as Malcolm (whose creepiness is co-signed by Plum and Freddie this week). It’s to the show’s credit that I can both see why Alex would be insecure about Patrick and still want to shake her by the shoulders for walking out the way she does at the end of the episode. 

The stage is set at Lorcan’s going-away dinner or “Last Night On Earth”—you know, because he’s going to play an alien in a sci-fi pilot and that’s why he doesn’t have time for his son, who’s been going through something? It’s another couples-plus-Ruairi event, and it doesn’t go much better than the last one. Frank and Sam are annoyed with each other, and Sam and Alex are also a bit off. They try to smooth things over by focusing on a common enemy: Theresa, who Alex mocks as Lorcan’s “hole-mate” instead of his soulmate. Theresa, of course, overhears everything and she gets her revenge back at the table when she disparages Lorcan’s first marriage as the thing that got him to the other thing, i.e., moving to Toronto and trying to start a new family with her. 

Alex is incensed—not because she thinks she’s being replaced, but because it sounds like Ruairi is. “You’re a subpar dad,” she tells Lorcan, which seems like a fair assessment. “You are father-ish at best, and now you’re gonna go again? Why? ‘Cause you wanna get it right this time?” Theresa’s announcement and Alex’s reaction cast a pall over the meal, but it wasn’t going that great to begin with—certainly not for Ruairi, who has to listen to stories about being there for Lorcan instead of the other way around. Aran Murphy does some wonderfully subtle work here, pursing his lips at Lorcan’s latest oblivious statement and tilting his head condescendingly after making a pointed observation about Lorcan’s stop-and-start career. The conspiratorial look that Ruairi and Alex share after he twists the knife again solidifies their bond, but there’s room to question just how positive a development this is. My lizard brain said “get his ass” after Ruairi snarked about things not working out for his dad—which could apply to the personal or professional front—but it almost goes against the work Alex has done to try to keep Lorcan in her son’s life. Alex has tried hard to toe the divorced parent party line of “we still love you and that will never change,” whether or not her ex deserved it. 

Still, Alex is on a high when she and Patrick arrive at his apartment, secure in the knowledge that they’re the best couple and she’s the better parent. And then she bursts her own bubble by looking through Patrick’s things, stumbling upon his Ross Geller-like list of her pros and cons. The pros—including her fantastic kid and family—clearly outnumber the cons, but the one con is enough to send Alex back out into the night, alone: “Can’t give me a family of my own.” 

Earlier in the episode, Alex sounded so sure when she told her mom and Delly that Patrick had decided having a family wasn’t for him. I initially assumed that was part of some offscreen conversation, but it sounds like she might have made a bad assumption. It’s still pretty immature of her to run off and decline his calls—a melodramatic choice befitting the youth of old age. Why not just have it out?  At this point, Alex has derailed things three times (though Patrick shared some of the blame for the mid-episode split in “Desperate Measures”), so maybe it’s not the 47-year-old man-child who’s getting cold feet. I have no idea how Youth will wrap up its first season in next week’s finale, but Horgan is just as adept with season closers as she is season openers, so I feel pretty confident that it’s going to be a doozy. 

Stray observations

• Ruairi unfortunately takes the advice of a dope with a vlog, bungling his date with Plum, but he seems relieved to know he can get hard, albeit with the help of Viagra. Someone get this kid a father figure, stat!

• Is Patrick’s list the result of being in therapy for the last two-and-a-half months, or has it really been that long since he cleaned?