Month: March 2023

Andrew: OK, I definitely came away from this with an entirely different lingering question! But like many episodes of The Last of Us, maybe we should cut away from the action so that we can jump back in time and then work our way back up to those questions?

In this episode, Joel and Ellie make it! They're in Reno, and they find the doctors they've been trying to find this whole time. They just need to let the doctors run a few tests, and then they can ride off into the sunset together, their surrogate father/daughter bond intact and healthy and totally great. Right?

Andrew: There are nice moments. But now that Joel is fully open to letting Ellie occupy the role of his dead daughter, there's a sort of manic, almost desperate note to his relationship with her at the episode's outset. Joel's stolid, monosyllabic veneer is gone, and now that it is, he's talking too much; he's suddenly too eager to connect.

Andrew: Yes! Yes. That's the thing.

Unlike just about every other group of people we've run into in The Last of Us universe, there doesn't seem to be anything especially sinister about the Reno Fireflies. Yes, they decide pretty quickly that the only way to study and transmit Ellie's immunity is to remove her brain (This is explained somewhat in yet another episode-opening flashback where we meet Ellie's mother and do in fact learn the incredible true story of how Ellie got her knife, a joke I made a few recaps ago that ended up coming true).

But they are not, as far as we know, a community of sadistic evangelical vigilante brain-removers. They are, to borrow a phrase, putting the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. And it's not that I don't feel deeply for Joel, who is clearly not ready or willing or able to lose another daughter. But his response to the situation...

It leads me to my question: is Joel the bad guy? Have we, the audience, been hoodwinked by Pedro Pascal's dadly charms into rooting for a monster?

Andrew: Yeah, it’s telling that the biggest problem I have with what happens gets back to your question. It’s objectively not great that Joel goes on a rampage at the expense of what could be a society-salvaging vaccine, and objectively not great that he kills not just armed Fireflies but unarmed civilians.

But getting back to your initial question, I think the most monstrous, selfish thing he does is lie about it to a girl who has huge trust issues and who relies on him for everything. Maybe you can understand why Joel is doing what he’s doing, but it’s an unfathomable betrayal of this person who he claims to care about.

Andrew: Whether she believes him or just buys into the lie to protect their relationship will have big implications for next season because it's hard to imagine this not catching up with them. If that is the question the show is wrestling with, I think that's a whole lot more interesting than saying, "Well, Joel did what he did for understandable reasons, so ultimately it's OK that he did it."

I was thinking about how this game came out in 2013 and how a decade ago we were still very much in the middle of an anti-hero era in movies and TV. I'm mostly thinking of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and their many imitators. These shows asked viewers to explore the psyches of (mostly) white (mostly) men who were doing bad things, but who could still elicit sympathy and understanding because of some combination of good writing and great, charismatic performances.

The problem was that sometimes those shows were too good at what they were doing, and at least some viewers went from understanding and sympathizing with those characters to rooting for them in ways that could be uncomfortable. Walter White was ultimately a manipulative drug kingpin, a murderer and a serial liar, a megalomaniac addicted to power and its exercise. A non-trivial portion of the show's fanbase spent most of the series upset at his wife for being "an annoying bitch" who was insufficiently supportive of his criminal enterprise.

I really liked what The Last of Us finale accomplished insofar as it subverted my expectations. I went in ready for a mostly heartwarming tale of found family in an apocalyptic setting, and the season does deliver that. But this episode's haunted, desperate Joel, too eager to project his dead daughter onto Ellie and too willing to go on a killing spree in the interest of "protecting" her, adds an uncomfortable layer on top of their dynamic.

How I feel about season two will depend on whether the show wants to acknowledge and explore that discomfort or whether it wants us to think that Joel is a flawed badass who was "right" to do what he did just because he did it for sympathetic reasons.

So that's my season-ending mini-essay. As a game player who has some idea of what's coming next, how did the finale leave you? How are you feeling about this season as a game adaptation?

Andrew: Well, there’s “not possible,” and “we don’t believe it to be possible.” Ellie’s immunity in the first place is “impossible,” if anything I think that “impossible” line is meant to make Ellie’s immunity feel more extraordinary.

This is one of the things about this season that feels too rushed. We know that “smearing Ellie’s blood on an open wound” doesn’t fix anything, but that’s also not how medicine works unless you’re a kid who doesn’t know anything about medicine. So the show’s immediate jump to “the only way to get a cure is by harvesting Ellie’s brain!” feels a bit fast, even by the standards of post-apocalypse frontier medicine.

Regardless, I’m not sure the talk show does much to redeem Joel because it seems pretty unlikely that he would be thinking of one throwaway line from one talk show that would’ve aired when he was a kid. And if we’re going off that line, are we supposed to be shouting, “This whole mission is stupid! A cure is impossible!” at our screens this whole time?

Andrew: All we know is that they made it to the Firefly doctors, and they decided within a couple of hours that they needed to scoop her brain out. I’m just saying that if the show is going to try to make us feel better about what Joel did, it needed to/will need to do a bit more lifting on the “well, the cure is impossible anyway, so it’s fine” front.

My last question for you: as a video game adaptation, do you think The Last of Us is better or worse than the current best video game adaptation, Super Mario Bros. (1993)?

Andrew: That’s a useful comparison point for any adaptation. “How faithful is this to the source material, on a scale from the Watchmen movie to the Watchmen HBO miniseries?”

I’m looking forward to season two, but I need to fire up a change dot org petition to get us back to 13 episode seasons, please and thanks.