{"id":614088,"date":"2026-09-28T07:20:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T07:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/614088\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T07:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T07:20:10","slug":"youth-season-1-episode-3-recap-the-problem-with-ruairi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/614088\/","title":{"rendered":"Youth season 1 episode 3 recap: The problem with Ruairi"},"content":{"rendered":"

We need to talk about Ruairi, Alex\u2019s alternatively boisterous and withdrawn teenage son. He was introduced as someone who couldn\u2019t wait to chart his own path, opting to close out his time in high school by protesting on stage about the \u201cwolves\u201d and \u201cpigs\u201d 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\u2019s turned inward, dropping out of school and taking refuge in Mitch Hedberg clips (who among us hasn\u2019t?) 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<\/a>, Alex was expecting that he\u2019d 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\u2019s roster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As played by Aran Murphy, Ruairi seems like more than just the latest in TV\u2019s long line of sullen and\/or annoying teens<\/a>. 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\u2019s not until this week\u2019s episode, \u201cWelcome To The Rat\u2019s Nest,\u201d that we really get a sense of who Ruairi is and how that informs what he\u2019s been struggling with.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In its third episode, Youth doesn\u2019t fully venture into Adolescence<\/a> territory but, amid some very funny \u201cpublishing professionals gone wild\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014she\u2019s afraid to leave Ruairi home alone but she\u2019s also aware that bringing her son on a work trip will make her a pariah among her colleagues who can\u2019t 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\u2019t care to help and her parents need help taking care of themselves. Alex can\u2019t call on her support network because she is the support network\u2014for everyone but herself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even as she underscores Alex\u2019s lack of backup, Horgan never comes across as self-pitying or a martyr. As an actor and a writer, she\u2019s committed to tapping into the honesty and the humor in any situation, whether that\u2019s 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\u2019s episode proves, there\u2019s all kinds of fun to be had at the Frankfurt Book Fair (which is a real event<\/a>, but I wasn\u2019t able to verify if there is a William Morris Endeavor party and if it includes a chocolate fountain).\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a single working mom, Alex\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s what the crowds at Frankfurter Buchmesse require).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Alex muddles through, working a Swedish connection to try to place an unfinished book by an unknown author she believes in, enduring Livonia\u2019s haughtiness and rival agent Grayson Cole\u2019s (Freddie Fox) bitchiness, and helping Sam keep it together even as they\u2019re 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\u2019s gotten the impression (from her) that she doesn\u2019t think he\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2014Alex 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\u2019s book on publishers and also tries to hook up with Lars, only to have the \u201cforest fairy\u201d 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 H\u00f8gsted), 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\u2019s 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\u2019re never too old to make mistakes\u2014or to learn from them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t mean that, after receiving some disturbing texts from her son, she can\u2019t 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 \u201cworst case scenarios.\u201d 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 \u201cforget it,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It says a lot about Horgan and Murphy\u2019s bond that Ruairi\u2019s 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\u2019ve seen so far, Ruairi\u2019s been a jerk to his mom, and even the specter of The Incident doesn\u2019t justify it. But it\u2019s not just that he feared some kind of punishment\u2014after what happened with Bridget and Mia, he worries there\u2019s something wrong with him. He sobs about the \u201cnoise in his head,\u201d all the internal doubt and the external pressures (wonder what else he\u2019s been watching on his phone). \u201cIt\u2019s too hard, mum,\u201d he says. \u201cI just want to be a kid in my room.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stray observations<\/p>\n

\u2022 Whether or not Alex wants Malcolm as a client, Sam makes it clear that she\u2019s going to need to win him back. With his swagger and incidental insights into womanhood, Malcolm kind of gives off \u201cJack Nicholson in Something\u2019s Gotta Give<\/a>\u201d vibes. Given how they started, could a fling between him and Alex be in the works? I\u2019m neither for or against, just thinking out loud.\u00a0
\n\u2022 \u201cIt was like that film, Up In The Air<\/a>. Just fun, lightly degrading sex.\u201d If that\u2019s her takeaway, I\u2019m not sure Alex finished watching that movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We need to talk about Ruairi, Alex\u2019s alternatively boisterous and withdrawn teenage son. He was introduced as someone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":["post-614088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}