Christmas 2025. Viv Rook is an MP, being interviewed about the continuing economic collapse. She curses again on air but gets bleeped this time. Told she can’t swear on television, she turns to the camera, saying, “You can censor me all you like. But they swear. Don’t you? All of you? When you think what the system has done to us. Don’t you swear the roof down? But what do we do? The rest of us? Normal people? What do we do?”

Edith (Jessica Hynes) watches Viv’s interview while snuggling with Lincoln (Aaron Ansari). Lee (Callum Woolford) is lost in his VR headset. (HBO)

Again, writer Russell T Davies vividly illustrates how a populist creates the illusion that they are “one of us.” Everyone knows Viv is wealthy; working-class Lyons sister Rosie even jokes about this. Still, somehow Viv’s crass manner and pedestrian tastes make her relatable to people she would turn up her nose at if she didn’t need their votes so badly.

“Well you’re a Member of Parliament, you’re supposed to have the answer,” the interviewer replies. Viv says she does indeed have the answer; she suggests an IQ test to vote. “Let the people decide. But only the clever ones.” Nobody with an IQ under 70 will be allowed to vote.

Again, it’s not something she can possibly carry out – only the emotional weight of the promise matters. An IQ below 70 would be developmentally disabled, meaning almost everyone would pass, but it would make them feel like Viv had anointed them as “smart.” It’s brilliantly conceived in its own diabolical way.

Daniel (Russell Tovey) watches Viv’s interview. (HBO)

Daniel, watching while Skyping with his deported boyfriend Viktor in Kiev, is horrified. Stephen clearly agrees but thinks “you can’t say that” on television, while Rosie and Edith are fervent supporters by now. Rosie truly supports Viv, while Edith just loves how anarchic Viv is, saying, “She’s ripping up democracy, I love it.”

Yet again, Davies doesn’t let the left off easy. Rosie reminds Daniel that he suggested IQ tests for voting after Brexit passed. It’s easy for us to wish for things we could never get, but the stark reality is something entirely different.

As we zip ahead, more banks collapse and Britain’s economy withers. French elections bring a far-right party to power, cutting off Viktor’s planned escape route into Britain. Bethany gets work for the government, sweeping the web for Russian cyberattacks. Thanks to the phone she had implanted in her skin in the previous episode, she’s uniquely employable. She befriends another young woman, Lizzie (Shannon Hayes), who also has transdermal implants.

Bethany (Lydia West) joyously shows off her transdermal phone to Lizzie, another transhuman. (HBO)

In 2026, Daniel calls Viktor, only to find local police raiding his Kiev apartment. They accuse Daniel, over Skype, of being Viktor’s boyfriend. The scene is exceptionally staged by director Simon Cellan Jones, because the intimacy that Daniel and Viktor have shared on the many Skype calls we’ve seen earlier is suddenly violated as a sneering, maliciously grinning Ukrainian cop slides into Viktor’s chair and taunts Daniel from thousands of miles away.

Daniel (Russell Tovey) calls Viktor in Kiev. (HBO)

The scene expertly shows just how fragile and tenuous the place of an outsider in the world is. Daniel may be safe, but he knows these brutal men on the other side of the screen have the power of life and death over the man he loves, so he’s as terrified as if they were right there.

Tovey expertly conveys Daniel’s desperate attempts to demonstrate he is simply Viktor’s “friend,” since Viktor is now in a place where death awaits if they are anything more. Unfortunately, he’s belied by the framed photo that Viktor has of the two of them, in which the cop recognizes Daniel. Davies horrifyingly dramatizes the absolute fear that millions of people live in even today.

Ukrainian police taunt Daniel with Viktor’s photo of them together. (HBO)

As Daniel rushes out, trying to track down Viktor, the show offhandedly throws away another moment of technological change, as he struggles to unplug his car from its charging station. Years and Years doesn’t flaunt its technology. Instead, like the best sci-fi, it treats it as banal and unremarkable, because that’s how the characters see it. It’s brilliant worldbuilding, which goes by so fast it can escape notice, but it has a huge cumulative impact.

Daniel (Russell Tovey) struggles to unplug his electric car. (HBO)

Filled with anguish, Daniel tells his siblings that Viktor fled the police and reached safety but still needs to escape Ukraine. Rosie listens but struggles to find sympathy, burdened by her own problems. It’s one of Davies’s gifts as a dramatist that he doesn’t write all four siblings with the same voice. Far from it. Rosie expresses ever increasing irritation with the attention and sympathy and financial help that Viktor’s plight demands.

Lesser writers might be afraid to make a character “unsympathetic,” but in Davies’s skilled telling, it feels authentic to her, adding conflict within the family that feels true. Rosie is sweet and kind, and we love her no matter what, thanks as much as anything to Ruth Madeley’s winning performance. However, Rosie’s vision stops at the door to her apartment. It’s bold of Davies to write one of his major characters this way. It’s an indictment of how we all turn away from distant suffering.

Edith (Jessica Hynes) and Lincoln (Aaron Ansari) infiltrate Wytel. (HBO)

Meanwhile, Edith has the family believing she does innocuous charity fundraising, but in truth she still helps out her old radical friends. In a cleverly staged heist sequence, Edith borrows Rosie’s son Lincoln and puts bows in his hair to pass him off as a girl. They infiltrate a “Bring Your Daughter To Work Day” at Wytel, a big consulting firm. Edith steals data that proves Wytel has been selling equipment to the Syrians to build concentration camps. Hynes is exceptional here, conveying Edith’s fierce intelligence in a way we haven’t seen before.

The sequence is ingeniously imagined because it does so many things, allowing Edith to be smart and active, but also showing she’s willing to lie and take risks, even with her young nephew. And we later see the result of Edith’s action. When the data is released, Wytel collapses, and thousands lose their jobs, adding to the economic downturn. Yet again, Davies is attuned to the ripple effects of the tiniest actions.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) finds work as a bike delivery driver. (HBO)

Stephen finds himself reduced to working as a bike delivery driver with no benefits. The gig economy is unstoppably taking over. Meanwhile, Rosie finds herself fired after the school cafeteria she works at starts using self-heating artificial meat meals for the students, rendering most of the work force redundant. In both cases, Davies beautifully dramatizes the human cost of economic change.

Rosie (Ruth Madeley) examines the self-cooking meals that have made her redundant. (HBO)

The family holds a huge party for Daniel’s 37th birthday. As she cooks, Muriel comments, “D’you remember, when Hong Sha went off? We all said, oh, the whole world has changed now, things will never be the same. Hardly gets mentioned any more.” It’s a bold commentary on how events we think will be transformative quickly morph to have altogether different meanings.

After 9/11, many famously declared that it was the “Death of Irony.” The obituary was premature, but the world changed in other ways, some more insidious than others – and none of which could have been predicted in those days in the fall of 2001.

At the party, Celeste sees how comfortable her husband Stephen is around one of his coworkers, Elaine. It’s a level of comfort he hasn’t shown with her in years, and she begins to suspect an affair. Miller exquisitely conveys this simply with her eyes as she watches them together.

Celeste (T’Nia Miller) realizes Stephen is having an affair. (HBO)

Bethany and her new friend Lizzie eagerly bond over being transhumans. Again, the casting of Lydia West helps the character enormously. Bethany is filled with innocent glee when she learns Lizzie is in touch with illicit transhuman activists who could do surgery on them. It makes what could be an ominous moment instead something compelling and human. Her childish joy is momentarily infectious, until we consider exactly what she’s proposing, and she suddenly seems very much Celeste and Stephen’s little girl. The series wants us to see her both ways at this point – naively optimistic about technology but also with one foot in a future her parents are too scared to embrace.

Lizzie (Shannon Hayes) and Bethany (Lydia West) plan their adventure. (HBO)

At the party, Daniel takes the stage and announces that Viktor has escaped Ukraine. Cellan Jones stages it all beautifully. Glimpses of Viktor’s dangerous, illegal flight burst into the party, chillingly showing his terrifying journey in container trucks across Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and France (all now too right wing for him to safely stay in) and into Spain (now socialist), where he can apply for asylum. All of this is intercut with the Lyons family enjoying the warmth of their party and their friends.

Meanwhile, the epic political changes in all those countries have happened off-screen, in the blink of an eye, casually tossed off as ordinary, because in this world they are. Daniel joyfully travels to Spain, where he’s reunited with Viktor after a year apart.

Viktor (Maxim Baldry) and Daniel (Russell Tovey) are reunited in Madrid. (HBO)

Back in Manchester, Stephen learns their estranged father has died. Kinnear masterfully captures the agony as Stephen must tell his three siblings on a conference call. Their reactions are a fascinating series of surgical portraits of how they related to their absent father. Stephen is genuinely heartbroken. As the oldest boy, it’s clear he still saw his dad as a role model and frequently mentioned him. Rosie is furious, cracking jokes, still loathing her father for leaving them and starting a new family.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) breaks the news of their father’s death. (HBO)

However, she can’t hold back tears once she’s alone with Edith, admitting that she always wondered if their dad left because of her. She blames herself, and we see where her anger really came from. It’s a deeply complex psychological portrait of a relationship, confidently tossed away again and not lingered on. It also allows Rosie and Edith to have a deeply cathartic and moving moment as they realize that if he left because of Rosie’s spina bifida, it was because of his cowardice and was not her fault.

This points up another of the show’s many bold but clever choices. One generation has been surgically and skillfully removed from the story. We focus on grandmother Muriel and the four siblings, but the parents are gone. Their mother is dead and rarely mentioned; their father is estranged and also barely mentioned. As Davies put it, “Remove the middle generation, and the family’s lacking something, which meant they felt closer, which meant they talk to each other more than perhaps a normal family does.”

The manner of their father’s death is yet another piece of social satire that’s not all that far from reality. He was knocked down by a delivery bike, much like Stephen’s. He fell, cut his hand, and got blood poisoning, and when the hospital tried antibiotics, none of them worked anymore. It’s a tiny, offhand comment on yet another huge problem that scientists have been warning about for decades, made human and immediate here.

Viv (Emma Thompson) learns the “Tragedy” dance. (HBO)

There follows one of the boldest and most slyly satirical sequences in the entire series. It’s also one that may play with more meaning in the UK than to a U.S. audience. As a general parliamentary election unfolds, the entire montage is tied together, daringly and brilliantly, by Viv Rook, now owner of her own Four Star cable channel, being taught on live TV the “Tragedy” dance. It’s an iconic, cheesy 1990s British earworm of a pop song, totally inescapable at weddings, with an equally iconic and idiotic dance that mostly consists of big, easily learned arm gestures. The song is a brilliantly chosen kitsch artifact that might best be described to Americans as a British equivalent of “Y.M.C.A.”

Davies, in a level of supreme satire that is also utterly plausible, somehow convinced Lee Latchford-Evans of Steps, which originally performed the song, to appear in the scene, as himself, teaching Viv to do the dance. As Thompson, playing this aging would-be tyrant, obscenely flails about to a ridiculous pop song, instructed by a man who is commonly known across the UK simply as “Lee from Steps,” it is one of the most bitingly critical jabs the series has taken at pop culture yet. “Lee from Steps” normalizes the rise of a dictator.

“Lee from Steps” (Lee Latchford-Evans) teaches Viv (Emma Thompson) the “Tragedy” dance. (HBO)

Meanwhile, during the montage, television star Julie Peasgood, also playing herself, sits beside Viv as the cohost of a chat show on Viv’s network, “where you can find the truth,” as Viv describes it. Julie has graduated from Viv’s celebrity game show partner, to a supporter at Viv’s rally, to a regular guest on Viv’s TV channel.

Julie watches mindlessly as Viv promises to raise funds for the government by imposing tariffs on wines from abroad, saying again that she will “let them pay,” like a certain U.S. president. This time, surrounded by her handpicked flunkies, on the echo chamber TV channel she owns, nobody challenges Viv on this lie.

Julie Peasgood sits next to Viv (Emma Thompson), surrounded by her flunkies on the Four Star Channel. (HBO)

Again, the degree to which well-known British celebrities were willing to paint themselves as part of Viv’s rise is truly breathtaking and admirable. They’re making a point Joseph Goebbels’s secretary said best, just before her death: “Those people nowadays who say they would have stood up against the Nazis – I believe they are sincere in meaning that, but believe me, most of them wouldn’t have.”

It is much easier to create a piece of drama in which a select few “evil” people do something bad, while the rest of us “good” people are made to suffer. Yet again, Davies has no interest in this. He is doing something far more complicated – showing how complicit we all are. Each of these celebrities deserves kudos for using the weight of their names to dramatize this.

Daniel (Russell Tovey) votes in the general election. (HBO)

Obviously, the song is not arbitrarily chosen for this moment. A true “Tragedy” unfolds as the election is held. We watch as the Lyons siblings go to the polls. Many of their votes don’t match what we, or those closest to them, would expect. For all his outward conservatism, Stephen, rocked by the changes in his world, votes Labour. Celeste votes Conservative.

Muriel, in a little moment of heartbreaking reality, votes for the Four Star Party, just as Rosie cheerfully does. Edith, meanwhile, crosses out her entire ballot. Much as she loves Viv’s anarchic spirit, she has no interest in helping make it part of the machinery of power. Finally, Daniel, the most outwardly progressive of the bunch, resigns himself to what he sees as the inevitable and votes Conservative.

The Lyons siblings (L-R, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes, Rory Kinnear and Ruth Madeley) at their father’s funeral. (HBO)

The siblings head to their father’s funeral, where they discover he is not being given the cremation they expected. Instead, he’s being given an aquamation – he’ll be dissolved after the service. It’s a suitably bizarre entry into a warm, charmingly goofy sequence at his wake, where the siblings bond over saying goodbye to a father they never really knew. Edith, anarchic punk spirit intact, decides to say farewell by drinking the little vial they’re all given of his remains, in a moment that’s far more touching and sweetly goofy than it sounds.

Meanwhile, Bethany and her friend Lizzie sneak off to Liverpool. Celeste responds to a terrified call and races there, discovering the girls used Bethany’s life savings for cut-rate eye transplant surgery on a foreign-flagged ship in the harbor. Bethany backed out after it went wrong, but her poor friend Lizzie is left with a malfunctioning robotic eye implanted in her head that she cannot control properly or see out of.

Here, again, West’s casting proves crucial, because this is the first time we see her optimism in the face of technology crack. She’s legitimately terrified. The moment is doubly effective for what a contrast it is to her earlier enthusiasm.

Lizzie (Shannon Hayes) and Bethany (Lydia West) ride to the medical ship in Liverpool harbor. (HBO)

The doctor who treats Lizzie says these bootleg operations have been going on for decades. “It was face lifts in the 90s. Gender reassignment in the 2000s. Now they’ve discovered transhumans.” The ships have chains of ownership that make them untraceable, and the criminals just move on.

Yet again, as with Rosie’s discussion of fetal surgery to correct spina bifida, which the NHS can’t afford to cover, it’s made clear that medical care is being stratified into haves and have-nots. As the doctor says, looking at poor, mutilated Lizzie, “Somewhere, there’s a golden world where these things are possible. But it’s never here, is it?”

Celeste (T’Nia Miller) is horrified by what Lizzie (Shannon Hayes) has done to herself. (HBO)

Back in Manchester, the siblings return from the funeral and see the election results. In a fluke, Labour and the Conservatives roughly tie, resulting in a hung parliament, with Viv’s block of 15 Four Star Party votes leaving power in her hands. Viv boldly and brilliantly says she will not form an alliance with either party. Instead, “For every vote in the House of Commons, they can come to me. They. Can come. To me. And I will decide!” It’s a moment of triumphant victory for Viv. She has effectively taken over the country with less than 3 percent of the votes.

“They. Can come. To me!” (HBO)

Watching Viv’s victory, the siblings are overwhelmed by the changes in their lives. Stephen, at the wheel of the rental car he hired for the day, sees a bike delivery driver pass by. Something snaps in him; he imagines the bike that killed his dad and the bike he must ride every day to earn a pittance. He sees someone to blame, and exchanges a look with Edith, who silently nods assent. There’s a moment where we’re genuinely unsure if he might run the bicyclist down, and Kinnear expertly conveys the inscrutable emotions roiling within Stephen.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) decides to drive over the bike. (HBO)

As the delivery guy leaves his bike to drop off a package, Stephen calmly drives up and runs the bike over and over and over, while Daniel and Rosie sit there numb – silent children in the back seat. It’s a brilliantly daring choice, showing what we’re all capable of when cornered. A lesser writer would have worried at every moment that his characters be “likable,” but Davies allows the siblings to go to a dark place here, because it feels true to them.

Stephen seems numb as he does this; indeed, all four of them do. There’s no joy in it, just a sense of inexorable attraction toward malicious cruelty, because of tremendous anger that has been held in for too long. And all of it is directed toward an innocent – the bewildered delivery man – who shouts at them as they drive off. As Viv said in the last episode, “This is just the beginning.”