HBO has released the first footage of the second season of The Last of Us, and it implies that things for Pedro Pascal’s Joel may be a little bit different than they are in the game. No, not that different, but it seems like he might be going to therapy.
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The brief, 24-second teaser shows a few familiar scenes originating from The Last of Us Part II. These include the dance scene in which Bella Ramsey’s Ellie kisses Dina, flashes of characters like Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac who leads the militaristic Washington Liberation Front, and a few glimpses of the Seraphites, the Seattle cult which also occupies the city. But one character seems to be someone entirely new. This person, played by Schitt’s Creek and Home Alone actor Catherine O’Hara, seems to be Joel’s therapist. She is shown asking if he hurt Ellie, which he denies. Instead, he insists he saved her.
This seems like a new take on the opening scene of The Last of Us Part II, in which Joel recounts the violent events of the first game’s finale to his brother Tommy. He finishes his story with the same line: “I saved her.” So it seems Joel might be confessing his murder of the Fireflies to someone other than family in the show when it premieres on Max in 2025. The first season played things pretty close to the original, but it did make some big changes to Bill and Frank’s relationship, and added entirely new characters of its own, like Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen.
Given that HBO plans to cover the events of Part II across multiple seasons of the show, it wouldn’t be surprising if it used all that extra time to riff on more plot points and character threads. The first season put a big focus on Joel’s anxiety, something which the games only hinted at, so the sad dad finally getting professional help seems in line with how the show’s been handling that side of him.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey will lead season two, but HBO has announced several new cast members that will play characters from The Last of Us Part II. Most notably, Kaitlyn Dever will play Abby, the co-protagonist of the sequel.
In this week’s episode, we replay Sal’s interviews with Jimmy Kimmel and Joel McHale, then Guillermo Rodriguez of Jimmy Kimmel Live! joins.
Host: Cousin Sal Guests: Jimmy Kimmel, Joel McHale, Guillermo Rodriguez Producers: Michael Szokoli, Joel Solomon, Jack Wilson, Chris Wohlers, Jonathan Frias
It’s the middle of May 2024 and that means we’re nearly halfway through the year. What has this year been like in video game news? Tons of layoffs (sad), lots of new games (glad), and some weird outliers, as usual. This week, we saw set photos and official shots from The Last of Us season two, dove back into the GameStop stock market, and asked the dude who nuked Phil Spencer in Fallout 76 about his motivations. Click through for all of this week’s best breaking news.
The trailers for Civil War, the latest film by Alex Garland, give the audience a very specific expectation of what they’re going to see. It looks like a film about a United States that is so divided politically, certain states have seceded and the country is at war. A scenario that’s, clearly, a fictionalized nightmare version of our present, where America’s Left and Right have turned to violence. And, in a way, Civil War is that. But it’s also not and that’s why it’s so damned fascinating and special.
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Written and directed by Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), Civil War is, indeed, about a United States that’s no longer united. A United States at war with itself, hence the title. But one of the main combatants in this war is the Western Forces, a group comprised of California and Texas. Now, everyone knows California and Texas are maybe the two most polar opposite states in our current political climate. So that’s the first clue Civil War isn’t a by-the-book, pro-left, anti-right Hollywood tale. It has an agenda, for sure, and that agenda is certainly more inclusive than not, but Garland very specifically makes it clear that his America is not our America. Thereby, no matter who is watching the movie or what they believe, they can very easily enjoy the story without bias.
In other words, the movie is as objective as possible which, not coincidentally, is also the primary ideology of the film’s main characters: a group of journalists. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a famous war photographer traveling the country with a fellow journalist named Joel, played by Wagner Moura. After documenting a terrifying, but all too common, act of violence in New York, Lee and Joel decide to take a trip to Washington D.C. to attempt to interview the president, played by Nick Offerman. Colleague Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) thinks it’s a bad idea, but goes along for the ride anyway, and they also pick up Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photographer who sees Lee as a hero and mentor.
Spaney and Moura.Image: A24
And so the four journalists leave New York for D.C, which is usually an uneventful four or five-hour drive. In this world though, with everything happening across the country, it becomes a much longer, more arduous trip. Certain roads are blocked off. Other areas are not safe. And soon, the group realizes no matter which way they go, there is danger and terror at every turn.
Civil War is Alex Garland’s most mature movie to date. As he sets his characters off on this road trip, you can almost feel him not pushing the agenda one way or the other. An energy permeates the film, as if Garland wants to say something but is shaking and buzzing to hold it back. Much as the journalist heroes continue to preach objectivity and the importance of reporting the facts, no matter the circumstance, Garland too unfurls his narrative accordingly. Lee, Joel, and the crew approach each situation the same way: from a place of care and kindness. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t. Often, the most dangerous things we see aren’t in the center of the frame. A burning building here. A pile of bodies there. And while Joel and Lee’s distaste for the president certainly codes them as sympathetic to the WF, the film never really says what the WF stands for. We’re left to wonder, is it more Texas? Or more California?
That the film avoids ever defining the root of the conflict is one of the best things about the movie. Contrarily, one of the worst things is as the characters make the trek from New York to D.C. things can get a little repetitive. They drive, encounter an obstacle, learn something, and move on. Then they drive, encounter an obstacle, learn something, and move on again. The pattern repeats itself a few times and while each of those obstacles unfolds in a different, usually surprising way, some of the film’s momentum does falter following this structure.
Dunst and Spaeny. Image: A24
Where Civil War doesn’t falter is portraying intensity. Whenever the heroes encounter one of those obstacles, be it a booby-trapped gas station, hidden sniper, or a pink-sunglassed Jesse Plemons, the film’s tension always gets turned to 11. We are rarely sure what’s going to happen, and who is going to survive, primarily because of that objectivity. No one is treated like a hero or villain at the start. That changes scene to scene, of course, but the film, like the journalists, gives everyone an equal shot, which can be scary.
That can also make you question yourself, your biases, and more. Civil War is a film that challenges its audience to put themselves in the shoes of not just the main characters, but everyone. Partially that’s because everything in the movie seems so plausible that we see ourselves, our friends, and our neighbors in it. But it’s also because the performances are all so strong across the board that it’s easy to relate.
It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve seen Kirsten Dunst in a big, showy, starring role like this and watching Civil War, you have no idea why. Dunst gives a nuanced, powerful performance as Lee, a veteran so confident in herself that she’s almost carefree. That is until she meets Jessie. In Jessie, Lee sees a younger version of herself and it terrifies her. Lee knows Jessie, portrayed with lots of raw emotions by Spaeny, is dooming herself to danger. Choosing this life is probably the wrong thing for her. And so what should be a simple, mentor-mentee relationship is always strained. Lee sees too much of herself in Jessie, and Jessie doesn’t care.
Just another day. Image: A24
Their complex relationship, as well as the gravitas provided by Moura’s Joel and McKinley Henderson’s Sammy, come to a head in the film’s final act, which sees the team finally make it to Washington. Garland then unfurls a guttural, shocking, ground-level war in the heart of the nation’s capital, featuring views of national monuments and more that feel akin to 1996’s Independence Day. What happens in these scenes I won’t spoil, but it all builds to a final few minutes destined to be discussed and quoted for as long as movies exist. It’s that fantastic.
Ultimately, Civil War is a Rorschach test designed for maximum impact across political ideologies. You can watch it and view it however you’d like. Is not taking a side a bit of a cop-out? Should there have been a bit more of the story leaning left or right? I’d argue the fact it doesn’t have that is the authorship. Garland isn’t necessarily interested in changing anyone’s mind about anything. He wants any and everyone to consider themselves and what those differences could end up becoming. And hey, if playing it down the middle helps more people see it, that’s just a bonus.
Anyone who was on the internet around the release of The Last of Us Part II knows it was a bad time. But while we, as fans and writers, saw the vitriolic backlash unfold in real-time, it was far worse for the creative team who was directly targeted by it. Laura Bailey, who played the secret second protagonist Abby, has opened up about her experience with harassment during the game’s release cycle, and how some disgruntled fans threatened her son, who was two years old at the time, because they didn’t like her character.
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If you haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Abby kills Joel, the protagonist of the first game, as part of a years-long revenge plot for the death of her father. A subset of fans famously lashed out about this, viewing it as a “betrayal” of sorts by developer Naughty Dog. This backlash extended to the cast of the game, including Bailey. In the documentary Grounded II: The Making of The Last of Us Part II that premiered on February 2, Bailey tearfully spoke about death threats that she received.
Some of these messages were passed along to proper channels to ensure that Bailey wasn’t in any immediate danger, and among them were threats directed at her son, who was born during Part II’s development. In a segment of the documentary focused on the backlash surrounding leaked cutscenes ahead of launch, Bailey says this taught her to “keep a distance” from the public.
Bailey talked publicly about the online abuse she received around the launch of The Last of Us Part II back in 2020, and even posted screenshots of some of what was sent her way. This included one message that was directed at her son and parents. This level of harassment has become so commonplace in the video game industry, and public-facing women in the space are most often the target. Just earlier this year, Spider-Man 2 face model Stephanie Tyler Jones had to speak out against people stalking her by leaving voicemails at her day job and making her feel “unsafe.”
Seeing how people treated Bailey for playing a character she didn’t write naturally makes me worry about how The Last of Us fans will react to Kaitlyn Dever, who will play Abby in the HBO Max live-action adaptation, once the golf club comes down. A lot of people have jokingly said she needs to get off social media now, but looking at how awful the response was to Bailey, maybe it’s worthwhile advice.
The Grounded II documentary presents a behind-the-scenes look at The Last of Us Part II’s development and includes a soft confirmation that Naughty Dog has a concept in mind for a third game.
Two weeks ago, news broke that actor Kaitlyn Dever was joining the cast for the second season of HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series—which is still floating along without a release date, with “some time in 2025” the best anybody in TV land can guess. But despite that mild ambiguity, Dever’s casting kicked off a small firestorm of speculation, because it was revealed that she’d be playing a character named Abby Anderson when she joined the Emmy-winning video-game adaptation’s second season—which means The Last Of Us is almost certainly diving whole hog into the story of 2020’s The Last Of Us Part II. And that means things are about to get … messy.
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[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for 2020 video gameThe Last Of Us Part II—and, likely, for at least some of the plot elements of the still-filming second season of HBO’s The Last Of UsTV show.]
Because while the critical consensus on Part II has mostly calmed down in the four years since its release—give or take some moderate consternation lately at the fact that Sony has already rolled out a “remastered” version of the hardly retro game, out last week–the game was something of a lightning rod when it first came out. Some of that wasn’t developer Naughty Dog’s fault. (A high-profile leak from the game’s development, showcasing several cutscenes and character models, fired up the kinds of chuds who get angry when female video-game characters aren’t “feminine” enough, to pick one of the more vitriolic examples.) But some of it was in direct to response to the game’s big narrative swings, which were, depending on who you asked, either “bold” or “super-aggressive and kind of manipulative.”
Many of which, we have to assume, will now be inherited by its TV adaptation: Excepting its critically heralded third episode, Craig Mazin’s adaptation of the first game into the show’s first season was almost overwhelmingly faithful–down to the season’s final scene almost exactly mimicking both the dialogue, and the staging, of the game’s famous ending. With game series creative director Neil Druckmann on board for the second season, as he was for the first, it would be shocking to see the series diverge more than a few inches from established canon.
What does that all mean? A few things—all of which could make The Last Of Us’ second season a very weird run of TV.
The Pedro Pascal “issue”
Pedro Pascal, Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
Anyone hoping to avoid spoilers for either the game series, or the show’s next season, should hop off this train now, because there’s really no way to talk about either without addressing the fungus-encrusted elephant in the room: protagonist Joel Miller’s sudden death, an hour or so into The Last Of Us Part II.
Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel on the show, has, understandably, hedged a bit when asked about this plot element–because how could he not? (Nobody wants the HBO Spoiler Squad on their ass.) But The Last Of Us Part II really doesn’t function as a story without it: Joel’s sudden death, at the hands of a group of survivors who come to the almost ludicrously idyllic community where he and Ellie (Bella Ramsay) have been living out their post-apocalypse, is rooted in both the aftermath of the first game and the narrative obsessions of the second. Everything The Last Of Us Part II wants to say about humanity–and it wants to say a lot—grows out of that early moment of sudden, shocking brutality, one moment of horrifying trauma birthed directly from another.
This was controversial, to say the least, in the games, where Joel was a beloved character played by well-liked voice actor Troy Baker. Applying it to a rising/risen star like Pascal—who did so much work to build a beautiful, broken human out of some fairly stock parts with his performance as Joel in the show’s first season–might be even more disruptive. Pascal and Ramsay both came up through Game Of Thrones, of course, so neither is unfamiliar with being on a series that jettisoned its “star” at a critical early point. But seeing the show’s most marketable star go the way of Logan Roy one episode into its new season is still likely to leave fans a bit discombobulated.
The absolute brutality of Ellie Williams
Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
If the above paragraphs didn’t clue you in, The Last Of Us Part II is an aggressively grim game. Even its genuine moments of love or levity come with the unavoidable knowledge that something truly awful is right around the corner—and rarely in the form of something as simple as a rampaging fungus monster. That goes doubly true for the character of Ellie, who came of age in the first game/season—and who spends the second game having her last few shreds of innocence sliced off of her piece by piece.
And really, we’re looking forward to seeing what Ramsay, who was excellent in the first season, will do with this material, as Ellie becomes harder and harder, and harder and harder to root for, the further into her need for vengeance she descends. But it’s going to be a lot for audiences, even by the standards of HBO: We’ll be curious to see if the TV show stays true to the moment that would, in a less ugly narrative, be Ellie’s rock bottom—i.e., the confrontation with Mel, for game players—or if it’ll back away from quite that level of character-alienating horror. But either way, we’ll likely depart the show’s second season with very little idea of who, if anyone, we want to see getting what they want out of this broken and miserable world.
A question of perspective
Pedro Pascal, Bella RamsayPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
There’s also a question of structure to be addressed here, requiring us to spoil The Last Of Us Part II’s other big twist: the fact that only about half of the game is played from Ellie’s perspective, with the game rewinding at a major turning point to show what its three violent days in Seattle have been like for Joel’s killer, Abby.
On the one hand, this might actually be easier for the TV show to handle than the game; one of The Last Of Us franchise’s big tricks is adapting techniques from film and media, where they’re less familiar, to the medium of games, and this kind of perspective flip is far closer to old hat for television. That being said, the parts of the game where you play as Abby constitute a huge portion of the game, introducing new characters, stories, motivations, and problems, all to drill in for players that she’s just as much a person, a “protagonist,” as Ellie herself. A 24-hour-long video game can take that kind of time to make its points—a nine-hour TV series, not so much. It’s key to Druckmann’s vision of The Last Of Us Part II that Abby feel as “real” to the player/viewer as Joel or Ellie did. Building that kind of identification, without feeling repetitive or digressive, is going to be a fascinating struggle for the show to handle in a fraction of the time.
Is there room for another “Long, Long Time”?
Nick Offerman, Murray BartlettPhoto: Liane Hentscher/HBO
As we noted above, the first season of The Last Of Us deviated from the game’s plot in only one serious regard—and was rewarded powerfully for it, with critics and viewers alike holding up that digression point, “Long, Long Time” as a series highlight. With Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett moving mountains to flesh out characters who were, in the game, an asshole and a corpse, respectively, the episode served as a necessary antidote to the grimness of the rest of the season, reminding viewers that there was still the possibility of life, even for “the last of us.”
Mazin, and writer Peter Hoar, could fit that material into the series in part because they were adapting a largely episodic narrative: The first Last Of Us plays out as a series of vignettes as much as it is a more cohesive story, and it was fairly simple to swap out the running and shooting of the game’s “Bill’s Town” segment for something with considerably more heart. Just as importantly, it demonstrated at least some justification for the entire show, dialing into quieter, more human moments, at a distance from Joel and Ellie’s story.
The Last Of Us Part II is a much tighter narrative ship, though, with a big chunk of its power coming from the way it buries you in first Ellie and then Abby’s head. And so it remains to be seen where Mazin and his team can find room for a bit of light to shine through. (Even if you zoom out of the Ellie-Abby conflict, the game’s background plot is about a brutal inter-clan war waged between military despots on the one hand and transphobic religious zealots on the other; there’s not a lot of room for gentler shading there.) We suspect that the Abby material will have to stand in for that kind of digression, but her story is so married and mirrored to Ellie’s that it’ll be difficult to get meaningful breathing room out of it.
All that being said: It’s worth stepping back and remembering that we’re talking about a TV show that hasn’t even been filmed at this point, let alone aired. Speculation can only go so far before it just becomes fortune-telling and just as useful. But The Last Of Us’ nature as an adaptation—and one especially beholden to its source material—invites these kinds of questions. The Last Of Us Part II landed like a bomb in 2020, detonating video-game discourse for months around it. We can only imagine what its adaptation to television will do when it arrives some time next year.
Johnny is joined this week by television icon Joel McHale, creator and host of The Soup, star of Community,and—most recently—host of House of Villains. They talk about how Joel got his start in comedy, what it was like to host House of Villains with so many insane reality television stars around, and much more, before getting into all the drama from Episode 7.
Host: Johnny Bananas Guest: Joel McHale Producer: Sasha Ashall Engineer: Christian Porrello
A Death Stranding player just discovered that if you don’t put up enough of a fight in its climactic boss battle, antagonist Higgs will pull a Mike Tyson and bite your character’s ear off. It’s not just an attack animation, either. Once bitten, a good chunk of Sam’s ear is gone for good.
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On Sunday, Twitter user naven0m uploaded a Death Stranding clip of themself uncovering the hidden gameplay detail in its final climatic boss fight. In the clip, protagonist Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) is facing villain Higgs Monaghan (Troy Baker) in a knock-down, drag-out battle of fisticuffs. The sequence even has Tekken-like health bars that appear above the characters, making the walking simulator’s climactic face-off feel like something out of a genuine fighting game. It’s kinda wild, but then, it is a Kojima game, after all.
However, if you refuse to jab Higgs in his very punchable face while blocking his attacks, he’ll eventually guard-break Bridges and chomp the tip of his right ear clean off. The presentation and horrifying energy of it all is weirdly reminiscent of what clickers often do to Joel, also played by Troy Baker, when you get killed in The Last Of Us.
In a follow-up post, naven0m posted screenshots of Bridges’ ear post-boss fight, revealing that a sizable chunk of it remains missing. You can check out the gnarly clip below.
According to GamesRadar, the event will only be triggered by players blocking every one of Higgs’ blows and never countering him when prompted. Most players would never stumble upon this, since the game clearly expects you to fight back, and since Higgs is such a dastardly scamp who can’t keep getting away with more demonic acts of terrorism.
Last December, director Hideo Kojima revealed his next project was a direct sequel to Death Stranding titled Death Stranding 2, and he showcased a typically bizarre trailer featuring a noticeably older Bridges, with Léa Seydoux also reprising her role as Fragile. While the game doesn’t have a release date, it’ll be neat to discover if there’s a unique Bridges character model reflecting the possible outcome that players got Sam’s ear noshed off by Higgs.
When it comes to incredible cosplay, San Diego Comic-Con always delivers, and this year was no exception. The event, which ran from July 20 to July 23 and took place at the famed San Diego Convention Center, brought fun panels, cool interactive experiences, and almost provided us with an unofficial GTA: San Andreas restaurant before Rockstar’s lawyers shut it down. But what about the cosplay?
The video and photos brought to you today were all provided, as usual, by Minerablu (you can check out way more of his stuff on his Instagram page or on his YouTube channel). Click through to see The Fifth Element cosplays, The Last of Us looks, and much, much more.
What is there to say about Pedro Pascal that hasn’t been said already? The star has been around for over two decades now, but there’s been a recent fervent love burning in the hearts of millions across the globe for The Mandalorian. There are currently 885,000 videos on TikTok under the sound “Hey Sexy Lady” by Shaggy – with half of those videos dedicated to slo-mo Pedro in his new shows.
And yes, you’ve heard of White Boy Of The Month, but let’s introduce you to Daddy Of The Year. Pedro Pascal made a name for himself as Oberlyn Martell in Game of Thrones and Javier Peña in Narcos, but his roles as the titular character in Disney+’s The Mandalorian and Joel in HBO Max’s wildly popular The Last Of Us have catapulted him into full-blown stardom.
The Last Of Us is just another cog in HBO’s mega-famous show machine. It joins shows like Euphoria and Succession, breaking streaming records and garnering a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. It follows Joel (Pascal) in an apocalyptic post-pandemic world in which he’s in charge of smuggling a young girl across the country.
It’s a role that isn’t technically unfamiliar to Pascal, who also plays a father figure in The Mandalorian. It’s why so many of his fans have cheekily nicknamed him “Daddy,” a playful jest at his character arcs as well as his good looks and exciting fashion sense. He’s the reluctant father on your screen, and the handsome, funny star on the red carpet. Fans eat him up.
But what fans love most about Pascal is that he fully embraces this new obsession with his every move. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he even says, “Daddy is a state of mind, you know? I’m your Daddy.” But that’s not all, the people’s heartthrob took to the red carpet to reiterate his sentiments. He tells Entertainment Tonight in all seriousness, “I’m your cool, slutty daddy.”
And it’s not just his quick wit in interviews, but his style. Pedro Pascal has quickly emerged as a style icon for us all, thanks to stylist Julie Ragolia. We’ve watched him devour looks from a yellow Gucci cardigan wrapped around his shoulders or a crochet sweater paired with red trouser pants. He’s become a case study for style, humility, and personality among celebrities.
The world can’t get enough of Pedro Pascal, and neither can we. Here are our favorite red carpet looks to keep the fire lit.
Pedro In Gucci
Pedro Pascal
John Salangsang/Shutterstock
There’s something so fatherly about this look, yet it still includes a few elevated features to make it less frumpy and more fashion. Starting with the oversized gray tailored suit pants, fitted just enough to cinch at the waist. But the star of the show is the yellow button-down paired with a monochromatic cardigan thrown effortlessly over his shoulders like he’s attending brunch at the golf club. It’s rich, elegant, and just polished enough.
All Hail The Cardigan
Pedro Pascal
David Fisher/Shutterstock
I love how Julie Ragolia incorporates color into Pedro’s wardrobe. A pop of red with the trouser pant – again, oversized – and the brown crochet cardi make for an easy look that still stands out. For Pascal, his looks blend comfort with relevant trends like knitwear. They’re also easy looks for any man to recreate, and not too out-of-the-box.
The Two-Toned SSBD
Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal
Scott Kirkland/PictureGroup for The Game Awards/Shutterstock
Every man needs a good SSBD – short sleeve button down – but not all men have them. Sure, the Hawaiian shirt is overdone and often a bit tacky, but this chaotically patterned ensemble somehow works with Pascal. The rest of the look is simple: black slacks and black-rimmed glasses. Let the shirt do the talking.
Monochrome Moments
Pedro Pascal
Marion Curtis/StarPix for Lionsgate/Shutterstock
Reminiscent of prom in the 80’s, the white tuxedo is something most men consider at one point in their lives. This opalescent white tux on Pedro paired with an off-white loafer with black accents is the way to go. It’s simple, yet elegant.
Pascal spent time in Calgary and across the province filming the hit Crave series, including the Alberta legislature, the Bow River, the Ranchland Inn in Nanton, the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), Canmore Engine Bridge and Waterton Lakes National Park.
Travel Alberta sharing The Last of Us locations online
In fact, in episode 1, When You’re Lost in the Darkness, Calgary’s downtown is used as a stand-in for Boston, and a specially designed set situated in the industrial area behind the Calgary Stampede grounds serves at the show’s Boston Quarantine Zone (QZ.)
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Pascal has also spoken about his love for Alberta, like exploring the mountains and seeing the northern lights.
‘The Last of Us’ premiere draws excitement, momentum for Alberta film industry
As of 8 a.m. Monday, March 20, the petition had about 4,700 names.
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.
Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.
To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.
The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show
Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.
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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.
The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.
What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?
Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.
Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.
The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.
After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.
What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?
Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.
HBO Max
Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.
Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.
For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.
Image: Naughty Dog
The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part IIfocuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.
In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.
Well, friends. We’ve come to the end of the road, at least for now. Episode nine of HBO’s The Last of Us is the season finale, bringing us to the end of the story told in the first game. Even the episode’s title, “Look for the Light,” neatly closes the loop opened by that of the first episode, “When You’re Lost In the Darkness.” Deeply faithful to the game’s provocative, morally ambiguous ending and other famous story beats in its final chapter, the episode nonetheless departs from the source material in a few key ways, starting with its opening. Let’s start with the beginning of the end.
Ashley Johnson as Ellie’s mother Anna
Notably, this is the first entry since episode two that begins with a cold-open prologue rather than the title sequence. After the first two episodes, I actually thought this was something the show might be committed to in the long term, with each episode kicking off with a different, relevant glimpse of life before the pandemic or some other thread that could inform our understanding of what was to come. But no, the device fell away early on, only to make one last return for the season finale, with a flashback that doesn’t exist in the game and that gives us a new perspective on two key characters: Marlene, and Anna, Ellie’s mother.
A few days ago, Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the game The Last of Us and one of the showrunners of HBO’s prediction, tweeted this:
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The image here is not a reference to a real thing that exists in our world. Rather, it’s a fictional comic book referenced in Uncharted 4, the final game in Naughty Dog’s other big franchise of the past 15+ years. But it speaks to the idea that Anna, Ellie’s mother, is a character who the writers of the game (and now the show) have thought a lot about, even if, until now, she’s never actually been seen. Players of the game will know that she and Marlene were friends, that Marlene promised Anna she’d look after Ellie, and that Anna was alongside Marlene in the fight for a better world, but this is her first actual appearance in official The Last of Us media, and the actor playing her is none other than Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie in the games.
We see Anna running through a forest, pursued by shrieking infected. As if that weren’t tough enough, she’s pregnant and going into labor. She emerges into a vast clearing dominated by a farmhouse, the Firefly insignia emblazoned on the nearby grain silo.
Racing to the top of the house, Anna barricades the door with a chair and draws a familiar-looking switchblade. Tragically, the determined infected busts through, and though Anna plunges the switchblade into its neck, it’s not before she’s bitten, sealing her fate. Ellie is born, and Anna cuts the umbilical cord. It must be something about the timing of all this that resulted in Ellie’s immunity.
Anna takes a moment to bond with her daughter, as we watch, knowing she has a few hours at best to spend with the child. And the credits roll.
One lie comes before another
Night falls, and three lights cut through the darkness, a possible visual nod to the Firefly slogan. Marlene and two men find Anna still in that room, quietly singing to baby Ellie. The song she’s singing is “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” by A-ha. It’s a song we know Ellie hears later in life, as she has a cassette tape of A-ha’s greatest hits in episode seven, which makes use of the band’s “Take On Me” at one point. (Interestingly, though “Take On Me” was a bigger hit in the U.S., “The Sun Always Shines On T.V.” outperformed it in the UK.)
Screenshot: HBO
Marlene immediately sees the bite on Anna’s leg, and here’s where something extraordinary happens: Anna says she cut Ellie’s umbilical cord before she was bitten. Of course it’s perfectly understandable. She did cut it only moments after, and whatever survival instinct she may have once had for herself has likely now transferred onto her daughter. She wants to give her daughter a chance. But as a thematic device, it’s significant because it bookends this final episode with lies. Ellie’s life begins with a lie, and later, it’s changed by one, both from people who, in their own ways and for their own reasons, are very invested in keeping her alive.
Anna, reminding Marlene that they’ve been friends for their whole lives, tells Marlene to kill her and to take care of Ellie, and to give her the switchblade. Marlene protests that she can’t, she can’t do any of those things, she especially can’t kill her friend, but then she musters the strength to do so. She is no stranger to gritting her teeth and doing what must be done in the struggle for a better world. You can tell it eats her up inside, but the world of The Last of Us offers little alternative for one who is truly, deeply committed to making a difference.
Outside Salt Lake City
Now the show leaps into its approximation of the game’s final chapter. In both, Joel is uncharacteristically chatty, his bond with Ellie no longer in doubt after all they’ve been through together and especially after the harrowing events of episode eight. Ellie, by contrast, is preoccupied, remote, distracted perhaps by the magnitude of what their arrival in Salt Lake City could mean. While the Joel of the game talks about what a beautiful day it is, TV Joel excitedly shows Ellie that he found a can of Chef Boyardee, calling back to their campfire meal in episode four when the good chef’s awesomeness was one of the few things they could agree on. Both Joels talk about one day teaching Ellie guitar, and though she says she’d like that, it’s clear that right now, she has other things on her mind.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
One interesting detail from the game that’s omitted from the show is a dream that Ellie tells Joel about, in which she’s on a plane and it’s going down, so she busts into the cabin only to find that there’s no captain. So she takes the controls but she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and just as the plane is about to crash, she wakes up. It’s a pretty typical anxiety dream—I actually have nightmares about plane crashes from time to time myself—and it makes sense that Ellie would feel that her life is out of control, but she remarks on the strangeness of having a dream set on a flying plane when she’s never flown on a plane in real life. She never got to experience the pre-cordyceps world, and yet the ghost of it is everywhere around her.
The famous giraffe scene
Joel and Ellie cut through a building on their way to the hospital, and in the show, for what I’m pretty sure is the first and only time, Joel does something he does repeatedly in the game: he boosts Ellie up, here so she can lower a ladder for him. However, the usually attentive Ellie is caught off guard by something and instead ends up just dropping the ladder and running off to look at something. Joel pursues her, perhaps worried at first that she’s in danger, and what follows is one of the game’s most famous moments, faithfully recreated in the show.
Screenshot: HBO
What he finds is Ellie, standing awestruck by the sight of a giraffe, peacefully munching on some leaves growing on the building. In the game, Joel encourages Ellie to pet the giraffe. In the show, he encourages her to grab some leaves and feed it a little bit, and the sight of its long tongue reaching out for that green goodness is pretty great. For Joel, though, the best sight here is the sight of Ellie enjoying this moment. You can tell, particularly in the show thanks to Pedro Pascal’s acting, that Joel is happy to be alive to witness and share in this moment with her. So often, it’s not the thing itself that matters, so much as it is the sharing of it with someone.
Perhaps part of why we’re drawn to apocalypse stories is the way they can help us focus on what really matters. There’s a line in last year’s HBO post-apocalypse prestige drama Station Eleven (based on the novel by Emily St. Mandel) from central character Jeevan who says, “Having just one person, it’s a big deal. Just one other person.” I’m reminded of that in this scene. Like Station Eleven, The Last of Us is deeply concerned with what makes our lives mean something, and in my experience, that’s always tied up in connection with others, in one way or another.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Screenshot: HBO
Moving to another spot which lets them watch the whole giraffe family walk off into the distance, Joel asks Ellie a question he asked her much earlier in the game, or, in the case of the show, way back in episode two, as they stood looking toward the capitol building in Boston. “So, is it everything you hoped for?” Ellie recalls that moment too and says it’s had its ups and downs before repeating something she said back then as well: “You can’t deny that view.” It’s a moment that makes us feel the journey they’ve been on, all the ground they’ve covered, the time that’s passed, and all the ways in which things between them have changed from that moment so much earlier, when all Ellie was to Joel was some human cargo he resented having to deal with. Coming to this moment in the game again as I replayed it for this recap, knowing what was coming, I almost wanted to linger there forever, to let them linger there forever, and spare us all the pain ahead.
Now, he doesn’t want to imagine his life without her again, and so he tells her that she doesn’t have to go through with this. In both the game and the show, her response is the same: “After all we’ve been through, everything that I’ve done, it can’t be for nothing.” She tells him that once this is done, they can go wherever he wants, but “there’s no halfway with this.” In the game, Joel looks up just in time to see the last giraffe disappear into the distance. The moment has passed. Their choice is made.
Joel confronts the past
Next, their journey to the hospital takes them through a triage camp the army set up in the days immediately following the outbreak. In both the game and the show, this is the site for a confrontation of sorts with Joel’s past, though that takes very different forms in each version.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, Joel mentions having been in a similar camp after the outbreak. When Ellie asks if it was after he lost Sarah, he says yes, and she tells him how sorry she is for his loss. Previously, Joel’s forbidden Ellie from mentioning any of his losses, from talking about Tess or his daughter, but this time, he says “That’s okay, Ellie.” A short time later, Ellie gives Joel the same photograph of himself with Sarah that he refused earlier when Tommy offered it to him. Ellie says Maria showed it to her back at the dam and she stole it. Joel, obviously moved, says, “Well, no matter how hard you try, I guess you can’t escape your past. Thank you.”
In the show, however, we return to something first teased back in episode three. At the time, Joel said that the scar on his forehead was from someone shooting at him and missing. Now, he tells Ellie that the wound is what landed him in triage, and also that “I was the guy that shot and missed.” After Sarah’s death, he “couldn’t see the point anymore,” he says, but he flinched when he pulled the trigger. “So time heals all wounds, I guess?” Ellie asks. Joel says “It wasn’t time that did it” and gives her a meaningful look.
Screenshot: HBO
After this emotionally heavy moment, Joel seeks to lighten things up by actually requesting some shitty puns. It’s a great little exchange, with Joel and Ellie disagreeing on the quality of some of the jokes—one she declares “actually good” and he calls “a zero out of ten”—but my favorite bit is when Ellie says “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” Joel at first looks scandalized but when Ellie asks, “Too soon?” Joel says, “No, it’s topical.” Joke time is soon interrupted, though, when some kind of gas grenade gets tossed their way, Ellie is dragged off, and Joel is conked on the head with a rifle.
One last dance with infected before all is said and done
This episode and its differences from the game’s corresponding sequence reveal some interesting differences in how the game and the show approach pacing and combat. In the show, episode eight was the final crucible, the peril and terror of that situation solidifying Joel and Ellie’s bond, and it likely would have been anticlimactic for the two to have another encounter with infected at this point. The dramatic purpose of such encounters has already been fulfilled. There’s really nowhere else for them to go. In the game, however, as a mainstream commercial product released in 2013, it would have been strange for there not to be one final encounter with infected. For many players, such combat is first and foremost what they come to a game like this for. So you do have one final encounter with a whole mess of infected (including multiple bloaters) in the partially flooded tunnels near the hospital. Once they’re all finished off, Joel utters Ellie’s favorite catchphrase, “Endure and survive.”
Look for the light.Screenshot: Naughty Dog
They’re not out of the woods yet, though. A bit later, Joel gets stuck in a bus that’s rapidly filling with water. Ellie (who can’t swim) attempts to rescue him, but is herself swept away. The current carries Joel toward her and he sees her, framed by light, before pulling her up out of the water and attempting to resuscitate her. This is where the Fireflies find them, and knock Joel unconscious.
Marlene and morality
Joel wakes up in a room with Marlene (Merle Dandridge in both the game and the show), who marvels at the fact that the two of them came all this way and survived, that Joel actually managed to deliver Ellie there, when the same journey cost the lives of so many of her people. “It was (all) her,” Joel says. “She fought like hell to get here.”
Screenshot: HBO
When Joel insists on seeing Ellie, Marlene tells him he can’t. “She’s being prepped for surgery.” When Joel realizes that cordyceps grows in the brain and that the surgery Marlene is describing means Ellie’s death, well, he knows what he has to do.
Notably, in the show, Marlene offers a more detailed explanation of Ellie’s immunity, and how the doctor intends to use that to create a cure. I suspect that this, along with Joel’s line back in episode six suggesting that if Marlene says they can make a cure, they can do it, are meant to deflect the fairly common response to the show’s central moral dilemma, a response I saw as recently as this past weekend on Twitter, that says “They probably wouldn’t have been able to make a cure anyway.”
My issue with this response is that I view it as a reluctance or refusal to engage with The Last of Us on its own terms. I think it’s a copout, a way to more easily justify what Joel does by saying “the stakes weren’t that big anyway” by disregarding the internal logic of the work itself. Sure, if you view The Last of Us in “realistic” terms, you can say that the odds of a vaccine being made weren’t great, but that’s not the moral dilemma we’re being asked to engage with here. The game and the show both work to establish this as a situation in which a vaccine is clearly possible.
The game does this in part through an audio diary you can find in the hospital in which the lead surgeon rattles off a bunch of whatever the medical equivalent of technobabble is, terms and phrases that are meant to sound legitimate within the fiction of the game and establish that the surgeon knows what he’s talking about. He then says, “We’re about to hit a milestone in human history equal to…the discovery of penicillin. After years of wandering in circles, we’re about to come home…All our sacrifices, and the hundreds of men and women who’ve bled for this cause, or worse, will not be in vain.” We are meant to view what Joel does as in opposition to that, as overriding all of that. That’s not to say that we can’t still conclude that Joel is right to do what he does. But we should at least consider it within the moral calculus that the game and the show actually establish.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Ten years ago, I felt that so many players’ reaction to the game’s climax was not just one of agreeing with Joel but one of cheering “Fuck yeah!” while he did what he does, of reveling in his undoing of everything the Fireflies have done, in his murder of Marlene, and I wonder if some of that isn’t just because it’s very easy to feel fully aligned with someone when you’ve spent so long walking in their shoes. But I can imagine a game focused on Marlene, one that follows her for years and years, from establishing the Fireflies, working with and then tragically losing Ellie’s mother Anna, watching over Ellie from afar while trying to undermine FEDRA and seeking a cure or some way to unfuck the world, all the while seeing her fellow passionate believers fight and die alongside her, and then coming to the heartbreaking moment where her own best friend’s daughter is the world’s last best hope. I wonder if, given the chance to experience Marlene’s struggle that way, to see things from her perspective, some people who see the ending of The Last of Us in very simple terms might find their view of it complicated.
And this was Anna’s fight as well. You can find an audio log that’s effectively Marlene speaking to Anna, to the memory of her friend, and in it she says “Here’s a chance to save us…all of us. This is what we were after…what you were after.” I don’t think any of this is at all easy for Marlene. I think she’s just learned by now how to do even the things she finds very, very hard, if she believes it supports the greater good.
None of this is simple. I’m conflicted about it myself, and I do sometimes put one life ahead of many. (It’s just a game, of course, but you’d better believe that at the end of Life Is Strange, I made the choice to save the one person I felt close to and cared about deeply over a town full of others.) And I have no problem with Joel doing what he does. As I’ve said before, I want art and media that depicts human beings doing questionable or complicated or awful things sometimes. I just want people to actually engage with that complexity, rather than acting as if feeling at all conflicted about how all this plays out is silly and that Joel does the only reasonable thing he could have done.
Saving Ellie, dooming the world
Marlene, sensing that Joel is gonna be a problem, tries to have him escorted out of the building. However, he kills his escort, and fights his way through the hospital to save Ellie. In the game, I find this sequence quite challenging. The hospital provides your Firefly enemies with so many opportunities to flank you. The Joel in the TV show seems to have it considerably easier. (And in case anyone is wondering, yes, in the game you do get a new weapon, the assault rifle, here, just like Joel does in the show.) In any case, he kills a whole mess of dudes on his way to Ellie.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Arriving in the operating room, Joel orders the doctor to unhook her. He grabs a scalpel and stands in Joel’s way. Joel kills him, too. Yes, the doctor was about to take her life. By doing this, though, Joel has taken the life of someone who was deeply loved by somebody else. And how many of the people he killed on his way up here will also leave a void in the lives of people after today? God, what a moral mess.
Joel has one last encounter before he makes his escape, this time with Marlene. In both the show and the game, Marlene asks Joel to consider what Ellie herself would want. The look that plays across his face in both cases shows that he knows what he’s doing isn’t what she’d want.
After years and years of working tirelessly for a shot like this at a better world, after sacrificing so much, Marlene, too, is killed. “You’d just come after her,” Joel says, before pulling the trigger.
Joel’s lie near Jackson
Ellie wakes up in the back of a car, still in her hospital gown. Joel’s driving them to Jackson, and when she asks him what happened, he feeds her a lie about there being dozens of people who share her immunity, and the doctors not being able to make any use of it all, to the point that “they’ve stopped looking for a cure.” Ellie is obviously crushed.
Significantly, in the game’s short final sequence, you play as Ellie as she and Joel walk the last bit of distance toward Jackson. Joel, ready for his life with Ellie to begin in earnest, starts talking about how much he thinks Sarah would have liked him. Ellie is, of course, preoccupied, and eventually she stops Joel, and starts talking about how she lost Riley.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The point of the story, I think, is that Ellie felt left behind (sorry) by Riley’s death, that she would have rather died if it could have meant a cure than being alive, and that she suspects Joel made a choice of his own accord to save her rather than let that happen. Joel, perhaps sensing where this is going, tries to offer some of his old-fashioned wisdom about how it can be tough to come to grips with surviving but you keep finding things to live for. But she demands a straight answer, asking him to swear that everything he said about the Fireflies is true. “I swear,” he says.
Screenshot: HBO
There’s a long pause. Is she doubting him? Deciding whether she can trust him? Debating telling him that he’s full of shit? Where would any of that leave her now, in this world where everything she thought she was living and fighting for has now evaporated into nothing?
“Okay,” she says.
Final thoughts
Playing through the game again alongside watching the series gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps most of all, I thought about how, just by virtue of being an interactive experience that’s set in perhaps the most lovingly rendered vision of the post-apocalypse ever created, the game The Last of Us is much more about the haunted world than the show is. Naughty Dog clearly approached designing the locations you pass through very thoughtfully. They didn’t just design some assets and then toss them together. Quite the opposite. For every house or apartment you enter, you can tell that Naughty Dog asked themselves questions like: Who lived here? What was their cultural background? What did they do for a living? Did they have any pets? Most of us probably know the sense of emptiness a person can leave behind when they die. Closets filled with clothes they’ll never wear again. A toothbrush in the bathroom. This is a world filled with that emptiness.
On the other hand, I appreciate that the television show found a few opportunities, here and there, to remind us that even in its world, love is possible, and by extension, lives of meaning are possible. The game, with its framing of Bill and Frank’s relationship, with the tragedy of Henry and Sam, leans so relentlessly into loss and tragedy, with little dramatic counterpoint to remind us what love in this world—any kind of love, the love between a man and his adopted daughter, for instance—can even look like. Of course episode three—the Bill and Frank episode—was the most radical instance of the show departing from the game to offer an image of love, but it wasn’t the only one. Marlon and Florence in episode six got so little screen time, but there, too, thanks to the two wonderful actors cast in those roles, we got a sense of a real, lived-in relationship, people being there for each other across decades.
All of this is to say that I appreciate that the creative team behind the HBO show approached this undertaking as an adaptation, not merely a retelling or recreation. Now the wait begins for the show’s next season, when I look forward to finding out how they continue to not just re-tell the exact same story we’ve already experienced, but adapt it for a new medium.
10 years ago, The Last of Us’ unexpected and morally divisive ending made history. Choosing to land in a place of uncertainty, the conclusion bucked what many other games chose to do, and often still do: present a straightforward, neat, conventionally satisfying end where the good guys are the good guys and the bad guys have been vanquished. Lines between protagonist and antagonist blur over the course of its 15-hour campaign, and the ending refuses to give us a neat takeaway, to sharpen the focal point on a clear statement or outcome, but instead has its main character arguably doom the world and then lie about it. When I first reached that ending 10 years ago, it left me pacing anxiously back and forth, desperate for someone to talk to about its startling ambiguities and contradictions, and I was hardly the only one. To this day, it remains perhaps the most provocative, talked-about, hotly debated ending in game history.
It should go without saying, but this piece will dive into some spoilery territory, covering the conclusion of the original game and the premise of its sequel.
The Last of Us first arrived on the PlayStation 3 in 2013 as a gritty trial of perseverance in a doomed world, albeit one where perhaps there’s a sliver of hope on the horizon: Maybe Ellie’s immunity can be used to create a cure for a world-ending plague. The game was notable for many things: the traumatic deaths of various characters; a slow grind of gameplay focused on stealth, desperate crafting, and brutal violence; but perhaps most of all for its strikingly ambiguous and challenging ending. Rather than doing the obvious and wrapping everything up with a neat bow, the conclusion throws the player headfirst into a liminal space. The world isn’t restored, yet the heroes live; but at what cost? Told that Ellie will be killed in pursuit of the possible vaccine, Joel intervenes, stopping the surgery and killing everyone who stands in his way, leaving the world to persist in its state of ruin. He then lies to her about what he did with an unconvincing tale. Ellie, clearly in a place of uncertainty about what she’s hearing, presses him to assure her that everything he just said is true. “I swear,” Joel lies. Roll credits.
It’s not a clean resolution. In the last 10 years, the choice to end the game with one character lying to another has left many to arrive at cynical conclusions about Joel as a character or the game’s narrative entirely, with some critics feeling that The Last of Us is ultimately a vacuous display of gore or a tale without much of redeeming value to say.
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A conventional story unconventionally told
For all that The Last of Us did differently, however, observations at the time highlighted just how much the game shared in common with others. Reviewing the game for Polygon at the time, Philip Kollar noted that it was built on “the same post-apocalyptic scenario as dozens of other games.” Kollar adds, however, that “its approach is starkly its own.” That’s likely why the conclusion hits so hard. So much feels similar to what we know from other games, or even works in other mediums. But TLoU took a different approach, one intimately focused on its central relationship, with a fairly conventional, linear narrative structure that might’ve given the impression that it would also resolve itself in a conventional way.
Narrative choice in 2013 was something many came to value in video games, but as Adam Sessler noted in his review of the game, TLoU has a specific story to tell, without your input save for a few moments of choice over just how brutal you can be in the game’s ending. A lack of choice was something Sessler characterized, at the time, as “old-fashioned.” (Indeed, much conversation at the time of release was rooted in how uncomfortable some players were with Joel killing certain characters he arguably didn’t need to kill, the tension between the player wanting to do one thing and the character demanding to do something else. Whether this is a flaw or part of the game’s power is just one more fascinating thing to consider.) And perhaps that “old-fashioned” approach was what led many to expect a more traditional conclusion. There’s a lot that is conventional and old-fashioned in TLoU, but its approach betrays a reliable trust you would ordinarily place in such a rigidly constructed narrative.
Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku
That “approach” Kollar highlighted is felt, perhaps, most saliently at the game’s conclusion, which is especially where it mostly clearly pulls away from “the same post-apocalyptic scenario” as other games. Examples of more conventional endings in this genre would include those in games like Gears of War 3 or the Resistance series of shooters on PlayStation 3, both of which end with near deus-ex-machina solutions to the world’s problems.
In other games with similar high stakes and fallen world scenarios, there is often some gift of sci-fi mumbo jumbo utilized, often right at the end, to set everything right; and if not, like in the more recent zombie drama Days Gone, there’s virtually zero ambiguity as to who did the right thing. iIf the good guys don’t get their way, it’s an unfortunate act of god, but you still have the good guy protagonist to still place your trust in.
The Last of Us wasn’t having any of that. And it also wasn’t concerned with “several plot twists and the bending of all the laws of physics,” as Paul Tassi noted for Forbesin comparison to the conclusion of 2013’s BioShock Infinite. Tassi continues, “the ending of The Last of Us isn’t quite so mind-boggling.” It’s a sad ending to a sad game, one that takes place at a decidedly human scale, not a grand cosmic one.
The ending of The Last of Us didn’t wish to dazzle you with its impressive world-building or wow you with clever fantasy epidemiology. You don’t get the “lore dive” that many games attempt to do, and you don’t get a clear indication that the right things were done. Rather, the game says the opposite. The world isn’t saved, and the good guys were stopped not by the antagonist, but by you, the “protagonist.”
As Tassi notes, that’s not necessarily a surprise revelation at the end. It’s not a sudden plot twist. But, rather, it’s the end point of a game that’s slowly telling you that you’re potentially on the wrong side, and that’s somewhat unexpected, even for games that do flip the script on you at the end by revealing the protagonist’s desires to be suspect. To its depressing end, TLoU’s grind challenges you to think about who you’ve been the whole time. “Just because you’re playing as someone in a game,” Tassi writes, “that doesn’t make you the good guy. In fact, the clues are scattered all over [The Last of Us] that you’re really not a good guy at all.”
Returning to Kollar’s analysis of the game, the sentiment that you’re the bad guy all along was and still is a popular one; and the ending doesn’t change that, it just reinforces it. “By the end,” Kollar writes, “I was pausing because I felt like a bad person doing bad things. It’s a seemingly intentional choice, but the game struggles to justify it with the same ease that Joel justifies murder […] I couldn’t find any deeper meaning in the horrible events in The Last of Us.”
But where others have since criticized Joel, or even the game, for the brutality on display, others have taken different stances. For Kotaku, writer Tina Amini expressed as much when it comes to putting yourself in the shoes of a person who stands to lose the closest thing you have to family in a world that’s already taken it from you:
“Had Ellie been my daughter, or someone who had grown to become my daughter figure, I would never sacrifice her life even to save the lives of millions of others. Sorry, guys. Nothing comes in the way of family.”
Many might be quick to regard that as selfish. But as Amini discussed, there are some critical details in the conclusion that shouldn’t just be swept aside because Joel perhaps acted too swiftly and suddenly. Amini writes:
Let’s recap. The Fireflies hit Joel over the head while he attempts to save Ellie’s life. Then, he wakes up in a hospital and is told that no, you can’t see Ellie and sorry, she’s going to die whether you like that or not. No discussions. No questions. Just shut up and take it. After you went above and beyond the deal you made with Marlene, after you almost get yourself killed spending a year tracking these bastards down, and after they still don’t give you the supply of guns promised in exchange for Ellie’s delivery, the least they could have done was offer the courtesy of a conversation. With Ellie present in the room, prepared to make her own decision. That seems like the fair thing to do. But it’s nowhere near what happened.
With a lack of clear certainty as to what could happen with Ellie’s surgery, and a rapid dissolution of traditional ways of wrapping up a narrative, like Amini, I too looked at the end of TLoU and asked, “what if this were my daughter?” Or in my case, “what if this were me?”
Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku
The sentiment of “no discussions. No questions. Just shut up and take it,” reminds me of my own experience having been hospitalized under a misdiagnosis at roughly the same age that Ellie was in the first game. Forcibly given drugs by people who claimed they knew what they were doing by swiftly locking me up in a series of white halls and keeping me sedated, without conversation or concern for my consent to such a thing, I remember the terror of sitting with the thought that maybe I’d never see home again. And unlike Joel, though I wouldn’t have wanted them to massacre a hospital of people (we’re also not living in a zombie apocalypse), those close to me chose to just let it happen. It would take a week before the doctors realized “whoops, you don’t have what we thought you had, sorry for the childhood trauma, but good on you all for listening to the experts.”
The morally ambiguous nature of The Last of Us’ ending meant that when Marlene tried to assure Joel that everything would be fine, I was free to not buy it—because I remember what it’s like when people in charge of your autonomy and life take bold, restrictive actions and others just stand by and accept it. Joel’s aggression, in many ways, was my own catharsis for how I was wronged in a hospital some 20-plus years ago.
A tough act to follow
But even for those who weren’t as cynical or pessimistic about TLoU’s ending or greater narrative, the impact of the ambiguous ending was so harrowing and had defied so much of what many had expected, that some felt it didn’t warrant a return trip by way of a sequel. Those who found displeasure in TLoU’s story could cease paying attention to it, but even for those who did enjoy where the game went, there was a clear desire for it not to go anywhere else. Lightning rarely strikes twice; and a sequel would be too conventional. Speaking to that very sentiment in 2013, former Kotaku writer Kirk Hamilton said:
I don’t feel like I need to return to this particular post-apocalyptic world. I don’t need to hear any more stories from it. I don’t need to see what Joel and Ellie get up to now that they’re safe at Joel’s brother’s wilderness retreat. I certainly don’t need to fight off another clicker, or make my way through another hunter camp.
Screenshot: Sony / Kotaku
Expressing a lack of desire for a sequel to TLoU wasn’t just about this singular game, but also stems from a paranoia over media, particularly video games, to franchise things to death. What even would a sequel do? Would it just be vignettes of fan service? I guess we’ll see Ellie learn to play guitar? Maybe Joel will finally get his coffee? Or would it just be more of an industrial desire to mine a popular property under the guise of “more stories,” efforts which typically diminish what magic remains of the initial game that caught everyone’s attention?
Those who loved the ending and the game certainly wouldn’t want that; this world deserved better. And those who were turned off by it definitely wouldn’t want that; they had had enough of this place. To perpetuate this story felt like it would cut against what made it so unique, as Hamilton wrote in 2013, there’s “too much resolution in video games these days, and [we] could do with a bit less surety.”
But The Last of Us marched on with an expanded story DLC that explores the death of Ellie’s childhood friend, and then a sequel with even more death. Part II meditates entirely on Joel’s actions, with justice (or baseless revenge, depending on your point of view) served for his reckless damnation of the world by the daughter of a man he killed years ago.
Part II is an incredibly long game. In fact, given that you play half the game as an entirely new character, it’s almost two games in one. Conversation about it upon release was also muddied by childish, aggressive reactions and harassment campaigns from those upset by the presence of queer people, trans people, and women whose bodies were deemed by some insufficiently feminine and desirable; it’s a firestorm that still burns to this day. Outside of conversations about the game with other critics, I often feel like I still need to wade through such nonsense.
Discussing whether or not TLoU Part II makes the most of its opportunity as a sequel to do something worthwhile with the ambiguity of the original’s ending would require a long conversation about a very long game. But I think the fact that the sequel uses Joel’s actions to set the stage for another exploration of how and when violence perpetuates itself makes the case for it as a worthy follow up—even if I, much like others, would’ve been more than happy with a one-and-done trip into this world.
The latest episode of HBO’s The Last of Us is full of standout scenes. While episode 8, “When We Are In Need,” is full of tension, drama, and even a bit more action than the show typically gets into, the moment that has viewers in a chokehold right now is one of its quietest: when Pedro Pascal’s Joel calls Bella Ramsey’s Ellie “baby girl.” It’s just one line, but in the overarching story of The Last of Us,it means everything.
Why it matters that Joel called Ellie “baby girl”
In both HBO’s show and Naughty Dog’s game, the relationship Joel and Ellie have fostered throughout their cross-country odyssey doesn’t culminate until winter sets in. At long last they’ve finally moved past their initial grievances about traveling together, and have started to really open up about their pasts and their hopes for the future. While the specifics of when and where differ between the show and game, Joel and Ellie have talked about grief, shared the things they wish they could have done in a world not overtaken by the cordyceps fungus, and openly shown care for each other. They’ve fought and survived together for a long time, but now seem able to drop their guard. Ellie finds the companionship she’s been missing in this desecrated world, and Joel opens himself up to care for someone in a way he hasn’t in 20 years.
He finally acknowledges this with words when he calls Ellie “baby girl,” which was a term of endearment he used for his daughter Sarah before she was killed by the military during the initial cordyceps outbreak, as seen in the first episode. Before this week, The Last of Us made several references big and small that suggested Joel’s initially guarded attitude toward Ellie was deeply rooted in his own grief. Consider his occasional glances at his broken watch, which Sarah gave to him the night she died.
While Joel and Ellie shared some brief moments of connection before, Joel’s already loved and taken care of a young girl once in his life, only to have her ripped away in the most traumatic way possible. The show made this explicit in episode six by having Joel and his brother Tommy discuss how his growing attachment to Ellie made him fearful for her life and his ability to protect her. This was to the point where Joel was ready to leave her in his brother’s care because he feared he would fail Ellie the way he feels he failed Sarah.
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By the time we get to the final scene of this week’s episode eight, Ellie has protected Joel in the same way he protected her. The gap between them has been fully bridged, and Ellie has had to survive the traumatic events of fighting through a group of cannibals and predators without Joel’s help. So when Joel finds her bloody and scared in the winter cold, he holds her and calls her “baby girl.” In a simple nickname, Joel and Ellie’s burgeoning relationship becomes indelible.
The fan reaction to Joel calling Ellie “baby girl”
Meanwhile, fans are having a moment about it.
And who could blame them? Pascal and Ramsey put their entire The Last of Ussy into that scene. They both sold that shit. Now that all The Last of Us newcomers watching are properly invested in Joel and Ellie’s relationship, I’m excited to see how these fans feel about the events of next week’s finale, which I’m sure will be universally accepted and not at all divisive.
With just one episode to go, we’re nearing the end of Joel and Ellie’s long journey together. This week’s entry, “When We Are in Need,” corresponds with the game’s winter section, though the HBO adaptation isn’t using the same seasonal structure of the game, and here in TV land, it’s been winter for a while.
When I first played The Last of Us ten years ago, in some ways the winter chapter felt to me like overkill, the game leaning hard into desperation and depravity just to be as gritty and bleak as it could, in order to help sell itself as a “mature,” serious game. “Enough, I get it. Humanity is awful and given half a chance, we’ll all do grotesque, morally reprehensible things.” Replaying the game now alongside the show, the purpose of the chapter within the narrative is clearer to me. Of course it’s common for stories to put characters at their most hopeless and desperate points right before the resolution, but the way The Last of Us does it, separating the characters while both are in dire straits, drives home the importance of their bond to each other. It also, importantly, illustrates that while Joel may have started out as Ellie’s protector on this journey, he now needs her at least as much as she needs him. Let’s take a closer look at this week’s episode, and its similarities to the same stretch of the game.
Ellie meets David in the show vs. the game
This chapter has its own villain in the form of David, a preacher and a predator whose flock reside in the resort town of Silver Lake and are suffering through a particularly harsh winter. In terms of dialogue, it’s one of the show’s more faithful episodes. In fact, it’s almost as if writer Craig Mazin’s screenplay for the episode just took this section of the game, cut out most of the combat sequences, and from there, sought to embellish the dialogue and build on what the game reveals to us about David and his congregation. It continues to be interesting to me how, in the game, combat is perhaps prioritized as the most important element, while in adapting the game to a series, it becomes the least important.
Screenshot: HBO
The winter chapter immediately distinguishes itself from the rest of the game by having you play as Ellie for the first time. (Today, playing through the story in order, you’d play the Left Behind DLC before this, but when the game came out in 2013, this was a surprising shift in perspective.) Desperate for food, Ellie hunts a deer she spots in the woods with her bow and arrows. Nicked and bleeding from multiple arrows, the deer runs, ultimately collapsing, but when Ellie finds it, two others, David and James, have seen it too. Just as in the game, David (voiced here by Nolan North, who plays Nathan Drake in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted games) makes a deal with Ellie: penicillin for some of the deer meat.
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Screenshot: Naughty Dog
What’s unique to the game is that while waiting for James to return with the medicine, you have a multi-stage combat encounter fighting alongside David, involving a few standoffs against multiple waves of infected and a climactic battle with a bloater. Through it all, you might think that David is actually a new friend. He seems genuinely concerned for your welfare, and fighting alongside someone can be an experience that develops trust. Naughty Dog knows how to use combat as a tool for relationship-building, and here, they build up your trust in David a bit just to pull out the rug from under you and remind you that, in this world, the trust between Joel and Ellie is a rare and precious thing.
In the show, by the time Ellie first encounters David (played here by actor Scott Shepherd), we already have our reasons to be suspicious of him. The episode begins with him reading scripture to his flock, in the old steakhouse he’s converted into a church and town hall of sorts, a place where the abundant food of the pre-cordyceps past is sharply contrasted with the desperate circumstances of the present. (It’s an important location in the game as well, one you come to later, and the sign reading WHEN WE ARE IN NEED HE SHALL PROVIDE is a detail straight from the game.) The faces of the congregation’s members are lean and hardened, telling us much at a glance about what a difficult winter they’re having. A grieving daughter asks when her father can be buried and David says that it’s too cold to do so now, they’ll have to wait until spring. And outside after the service, David chides James (played by Troy Baker, the voice of Joel in the games) for his “doubt,” giving off the sense of a man who very much wants to maintain control.
Screenshot: HBO
Notably, in the show, Ellie hunts the deer not with a bow and arrows but with the sniper rifle, recalling in our memories the moment toward the end of episode six when Joel tried to teach her how to use it. When she takes a moment to focus with the deer in her sights, we can sense her recalling Joel’s words and trying to draw on what he taught her.
Both the game and the show have Ellie talking tough when she sees David and James near the deer she killed, with her calling James “buddy boy” and saying that if David tries anything, she’ll “put one right between your eyes.” The show, however, foregrounds David’s role as a preacher in their first conversation far more than the game does. In fact, perhaps the only real hint David gives off in the game that he has certain rigid moral standards might come when, after Ellie swears, he absurdly says, in the midst of a life-and-death battle against waves of infected, that she should watch her language. We definitely pick up on the fact that he’s a preacher eventually, but there’s no real character development done around it.
In the show, however, Ellie asks if David’s “hunger club” is some sort of cult, and he turns on the folksy charm, saying “Well, you sorta kinda got me there,” but saying that what he preaches is “pretty standard Bible stuff.” When Ellie wonders how he can still “believe that stuff” after everything that’s happened, he tells her it was actually after the world ended that he started to believe. “Everything happens for a reason,” he says in both the show and the game, and it’s here that whatever sense of trust you might have felt for David while fighting alongside him likely evaporates. His seeming friendliness reveals itself to be a guise for something more threatening, and he tells her that a “crazy man” killed someone in their flock recently at the university. A crazy man who just happens to be traveling with a “little girl.”
Ellie now understands that David is a threat if she didn’t before, but David lets her ride off with the medicine, telling her that there’s room for her in his group, that he can protect her. It’s almost as if he has some gross designs of his own for her.
Dinnertime at the steakhouse
One of the luxuries of HBO’s adaptation has always been that it can leave the perspective of Joel and Ellie behind entirely when it wants to, and here, we get more development of David’s congregation. In the kitchen, members of the flock lament their dwindling food supplies, and when a man brings in some fresh meat, one of them asks, “What is it?” “Venison,” he replies hesitantly, in a way that may have you asking, “Is it though?” Nonetheless, they put it into the evening’s soup.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David and James haul the deer Ellie killed into the restaurant, but the room still seems quiet. Sensing what the tension is about, David tells them that yes, it’s true, “we found the girl who was with the man who took Alec from us.” Come morning, he says, they’ll track her trail, and “bring that man to justice.” The grieving girl from the opening scene raises her voice, saying they should kill both of them. David walks over and, in a moment that shows us just what kind of congregation leader he is, backhands her across the face. Things get worse still a moment later when he tells her that although she may think she doesn’t have a father anymore, “the truth is, Hannah, you always have a father. And you will show him respect when he’s speaking.” Kenneth is not wrong when he saysthe show makes David even more disturbing than he already was.
The scene ends with shots of these hungry people eating their dinners, the thought lingering in our minds that it may be Alec they’re eating.
Hungry…for vengeance!
The next morning, David’s men do indeed come a-huntin’. In both the show and the game, Ellie does the only thing she can think to do: try leading the men away from Joel, who she’s injected with penicillin but who is still hovering on the edge of consciousness. In the show, she presses a knife into his hands and tells him to kill anyone who comes into the house, though he doesn’t even look like he has the strength to sit up.
The show gives us another brief exchange between David and James, as David insists that Ellie be brought in alive. James says he doesn’t mean to question David’s “sense of mercy” but the girl would just be another mouth to feed, and that yes, she may die if left alone out here, but perhaps that’s God’s will. David simply gives him a withering look, but it’s abundantly clear that David’s interest in keeping Ellie alive has nothing to do with mercy.
Ellie rides through the neighborhood on her horse—the neighborhood which, in the game, has a small army of David’s men on the streets—and eventually, her horse is shot out from under her. In the show, it’s James who does this, and David has to stop him and some other men from killing Ellie. Carrying her off himself and ordering a few men to haul the horse carcass, he tells the remainder of his men to go door to door hunting Joel. “You’re so hungry for vengeance? Deliver it.”
In the game, however, another extended combat sequence begins, as Ellie must sneak by or kill a number of David’s men. What we get here that we don’t get so much in the show is a lot of deep dissatisfaction among the flock with David’s leadership, with many men expressing doubt in David and suggesting that soon, his role as leader be put to a vote. Despite your best efforts, though, David does eventually capture and subdue Ellie, while his own delusions of grandeur about his own benevolence continue to manifest. “I’m keeping you alive here,” he says, as he jokes the consciousness out of her.
Ellie left Joel behind
In both the show and the game, Joel finally comes back to life, as if awakened by the cosmos just in Ellie’s hour of need. The Police have a song about that called “Synchronicity I,” but I digress. In the show, some poor bearded sap enters the house where Joel is stashed in the basement. Ellie was smart and hid the door to the basement behind an old piece of furniture, but the poor bastard rolls well on his perception check and notices something’s up. It would have been better for him if he hadn’t.
As he comes down the stairs, spotting the bloody mattress Ellie’s had Joel on for days, we know Joel has finally regained awareness, and is hiding down there somewhere. Yes, it turns out Joel has regained the strength not only to move, but to stab and choke the life out of a man. That’s the Joel we know and love!
Meanwhile, Ellie wakes up in a cage—in the game, to the sight of a man butchering a human body right in front of her, though in the show, it’s just David sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. In the show, which continues working to make David more overtly disturbing than he is in the game, he tells her that she’s in a cage because “you’re a dangerous person, you’ve certainly proven that,” and there’s an unmistakable hint of amusement and even admiration to his comment.
Screenshot: HBO
Joel’s back in action
Joel, desperate to find Ellie, tortures two of David’s men to get her whereabouts. It’s a startling juxtaposition with an exchange between Ellie and David in the game. When Ellie calls David an animal, he protests that she and Joel have killed a great many people too. “They didn’t give us a choice, it’s a video game,” she says. (Well, okay, she doesn’t say that second part.) “And you think we have a choice, is that it?” David says. “You kill to survive. So do we. We have to take care of our own, by any means necessary.”
I don’t really subscribe to that logic, but his words do on some level indict Joel, I think. Some may feel that Joel and David are points of contrast, one’s violence rooted in hate and delusion, the other’s in love and necessity. I certainly don’t think Joel and David are the same, but I also don’t think there’s anything innocent or acceptable about what Joel does here. And I’m fine with that. I want characters in my media who sometimes do awful things. What’s always troubled me about the reaction to Joel, though, is just how many people who played the game seem to think that everything he does is totally justified, while recognizing that the actions of others in the world aren’t. It’s as if we don’t want to closely interrogate the actions of the person we play as, the one we most closely identify with.
This may be a conversation for next week’s finale, but it seems clear to me that the game, and the show, at least want us to think about the lengths Joel goes to here, lengths that include brutally murdering one man after he tells Joel what he wanted to know, and then killing the other, too. When the second man declares that he won’t tell Joel anything, both the game and the show give us the chilling and memorable line in which Joel, referring to the man he just killed, says “That’s okay, I believe him.”
Cordyceps showed David the light
The show expands significantly on David’s conversation with Ellie, and makes it much more unsettling. He speaks to her—a 14-year-old girl—as if he sees her as some kind of equal, a kindred spirit, because they both have “a violent heart.” He fought to restrain his violent heart for a long time, he says, before he was shown the light, not by God, but by cordyceps. “What does cordyceps do? Is it evil? No. It’s fruitful. It multiplies. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence, if it must. It loves.” I appreciate the expansion of David’s ideas here, because I think the notion that love and violence can overlap is at the core of The Last of Us, and while David is clearly deranged, the debate over whether Joel’s violence is a manifestation of love rages on.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
David, plainly a man who is used to having people respond to his charisma, makes the mistake of thinking that Ellie might be seduced by him as well, when, in both the game and the show, he puts his hand on the bars of the cage and makes it clearer still that his ideas about her are, to put it mildly, inappropriate. It’s a deeply sad moment to me, the realization that even in this world where society as we know it has collapsed, Ellie, like most women in our world at one time or another, in one way or another, still has to deal with the threat and the supreme bullshit of predatory men. Both versions punish David for his arrogance and delusion, as Ellie, briefly playing along, takes his hand and then snaps something in it before finally telling David her name. Tell the others, she says, that “Ellie is the little girl that broke your fucking finger!”
Here the game begins to employ the effective device of having us switch back and forth between Joel and Ellie at intervals, as Joel heads into town to find her, killing plenty of David’s men along the way while a blizzard gathers strength, raising the sense of drama and letting you pick off your prey in the low visibility. Yes, of course he’s doing it for her sake, to protect her, to help her, but by now, it also feels very much like he’s doing it because he doesn’t know what he would do without her. Of course historically, games once relied too often on putting underdeveloped women in peril and just focusing on the men who had to rescue them, but The Last of Us earns this setup by humanizing them both, by developing their connection, and by presenting their relationship as one of mutual care and benefit. By now, Ellie has taken care of Joel and saved his life about as much as he’s done for her.
The show also now switches back to Joel’s perspective, showing him heading into town and finding Ellie’s stuff, not to mention human bodies strung up on meathooks. Better hurry, Joel.
The trick up Ellie’s sleeve
In both versions, David (with James’ help, in the show) hauls Ellie out of the cage to cut her up into “little pieces,” since she didn’t take him up on his excellent offer. Just as they’re about to start cleaving, however, she announces that she’s infected, prompting David to roll up her sleeve and reveal the wound on her arm. David says it can’t be real, James says it looks pretty fucking real to him, and that’s the last thing he’ll ever say, as Ellie takes advantage of their moment of hesitation to sink a meat cleaver into James’ neck and dash out of the room.
Screenshot: HBO
Here, the game becomes a kind of boss fight, as Ellie must sneak around the restaurant and stealthily attack David while a fire begins to spread. In the show, his ego more evidently implodes as the restaurant, his church, burns down around him. It’s a breakdown on multiple levels, with this deluded, awful, terrifying man shouting “You don’t know how good I am!” In both cases, it’s up to Ellie to protect herself, to defeat this supremely shitty, predatory man, whose intentions to inflict sexual violence on Ellie, implied but still clear in the game, are made much more explicit in the show. And in both cases, it’s immensely cathartic and satisfying to see her finally kill him, and not just kill him but stab him again and again until she herself is a blood-spattered survivor, a horror movie final girl. But part of what gives the final girl trope its awful potency is that the kinds of sexualized violence these women so often fight against can’t be killed by killing just one bad man. It’s a threat we all face, all the time. Ellie survives, of course, but the stare she gives in the wake of it, the way she reacts at first when Joel approaches her, suggests that she’s forever changed by the experience. Ellie is all of us.
It’s okay, baby girl
Joel shows up just after her fight is won, and as subtle a detail as it is, the fact that in the show, just like in the game, he calls her “baby girl” in the wake of the horror she’s just endured is tender and very meaningful. It tells us that there’s no longer any pretense of division or obligation between them, of Joel doing this just as a job, of her just being cargo.
By putting both characters in such desperate circumstances, and then having them finally come back together in the end, this episode and this stretch of the game are the cementing of the connection between Joel and Ellie that the story needs before it heads into its final chapter. That’s next week, when we’ll finally settle the discourse about whether or not Joel’s actions are justified once and for all. See you then.
The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.
Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.
A tale of two malls
First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.
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Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.
This hopeless situation
In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.
He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.
She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.
Screenshot: HBO
(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)
Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.
Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.
Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II
Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.
Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspacestarring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.
We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.
Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.
What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?
After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”
In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.
After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.
Screenshot: HBO
When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.
Take on me
The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.
As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.
Just like heaven
Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.
But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”
Screenshot: HBO
Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.
Pictures of you
Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.
As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning
The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.
This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.
In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.
Screenshot: HBO
Kiss me, kill me
Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.
In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)
In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.
Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.
Love and truth in the Halloween shop
She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)
Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.
Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”
Screenshot: HBO
Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.
For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.
I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.
They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.
“I’m not letting you go”
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Screenshot: HBO
Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.
Last week’s episode of The Last of Uswas perhaps the show at its most bleak and devastating. Thankfully, episode six, entitled “Kin,” offers us a bit of a tonal reprieve, with enough scenes of hope and possibility for life in the post-cordyceps world to remind us that it is still possible to carve out lives worth living. That’s not to say that it lacks for emotional impact, however. On the contrary, it contains the scene that arguably serves as the crux for the emotional journey that Joel and Ellie go on together, and it represents the show at its most faithful to the game that inspired it, recreating the scene beat for beat and almost word for word. It’s a good thing, too, as it’s one of those moments that works so well in the game that it’s best left alone. However, the episode also departs from the game in a number of key ways, making it a particularly interesting one to compare and contrast with Naughty Dog’s original version of the tale.
Marlon and Florence
The episode begins by briefly making us re-witness the horrible tragedy that ended episode five. From there, it’s THREE MONTHS LATER, and a landscape covered in snow. Interestingly, the events of this episode correspond to the game’s fall chapter, but the show transplants them to winter. A man is bringing white rabbits he’s killed back to a cabin, perhaps a nod to the scene that opens the game’s winter section, in which a white rabbit emerges from a mound of snow only to be pierced by one of Ellie’s arrows.
At first, I wondered if this might be Joel, thinking maybe he and Ellie had found a place to wait out the harshness of winter. But no, it’s someone else, a man named Marlon, and as he enters the cabin, we see his face: it’s the great actor Graham Greene. Perhaps best known for his performance in Dances with Wolves, Greene is one of those actors who I always felt deserved a more robust and prominent career. Sadly his role here is small, but he makes the most of his screen time.
Screenshot: HBO
Waiting for him in the cabin is a woman named Florence (played by the also-fantastic Elaine Miles of Northern Exposure), who tries to tell Marlon something with her eyes. (Neither Marlon nor Florence’s names are spoken in the show, but HBO has revealed them in casting announcements.) As he sets down his bow and takes off his coat, Joel makes his presence known, stepping out with a gun and telling the man to get rid of his. But what makes this scene a pleasure is the way that neither of the cabin’s residents seem all that shaken by Joel’s presence. It’s just one more thing for the two of them to bicker over.
It’s almost comedic, how unaffected they are by Joel’s efforts to be a fairly intimidating interrogator. When Joel says he’s looking for his brother, Marlon immediately says “Well, I ain’t seen him.” When Joel asks him to point out where they are on a map, he says “If you’ve got a map, why are you lost?” When Ellie, hiding out above, asks if she can come down, Joel says no but she does it anyway, prompting Florence to look at Marlon and laugh. Yep, Joel doesn’t exactly have great control of the situation, but these are decent people.
My favorite moment in this scene comes when Joel tells Marlon that he’s found a great place to hide. Marlon says he’s been there since before Joel was born, that he came there to “get the hell away from everybody,” to which Florence volunteers that she didn’t want to, and Marlon sighs and waves his hand dismissively at her. You get a sense of the understanding these two have of each other, having shared a lifetime together. They have great “old married couple” vibes, and after the bleakness of last week’s episode, it’s a welcome reminder that there are still people, here and there, living lives of love and meaning.
They leave Joel and Ellie with a sense of foreboding, however, painting a picture of nearby towns swarming with infected, and when asked for advice on the best way west, Marlon says “go east.” In particular, he warns Joel and Ellie not to go past a nearby river. “We never seen who’s out there, but we seen the bodies they leave behind,” Florence says. “If your brother’s west of the river, he’s gone.”
A more vulnerable Joel
As Joel and Ellie leave the cabin, something alarming happens: Joel has some kind of episode, perhaps a panic attack, that finds him leaning against a post and clutching his chest. Ellie seems concerned about him but in the moment, she may be more worried about herself. “Just a reminder that if you’re dead, I’m fucked,” she says. In the game, Joel doesn’t seem susceptible to issues like this, generally seeming far more physically capable than most people in their mid-50s and only ever appearing physically distressed when he’s seriously injured (more on that later).
Screenshot: HBO
This moment works to make Joel seem more human and vulnerable to viewers, and to set up a crisis of self-confidence that he tells his brother about later. It also reminds us of just how much Ellie is relying on him to remain alive and capable, as it crystallizes just how much is at stake for Ellie later when Joel does find himself in real peril. For now, though, Joel soon brushes it off, attributing the fleeting issue to “the cold air all of a sudden,” and Ellie urges them onward in their quest to find Tommy and the Fireflies. “All we have to do is cross the River of Death,” she says.
Ellie the dream astronaut
The corresponding section of the game is just bursting with natural beauty, as Joel and Ellie make their way through a rainy autumn landscape, following a rolling river. I missed that a bit in the more spare but still striking winter landscapes we see Joel and Ellie traverse here, soon passing above what Ellie says is the River of Death Marlon warned them about. They set up camp, where Joel wraps duct tape around his boots, a moment that made me imagine a game mechanic in which you had to do this every so often or Joel would start taking damage from walking around in shoes that were falling apart. It’s not exactly something that happens in the game, but it is one of the show’s rare images of Joel using scrounged supplies as a resource.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
Ellie’s standing on a nearby rock gazing at the northern lights, leading Joel to say one of the most dad-like things he’s said to Ellie thus far: “Come down from there, you’re gonna break your neck.” And after they share a swig from Joel’s flask (I love Ellie’s little “cheers” gesture before she drinks), she poses a thought experiment: what are we gonna do if the cure works? He pushes back on “we” so fine, she asks what he would like to do. He says maybe get a ranch somewhere—some land, some sheep.
Ellie’s stated desire is one she also voices in the game, and it explains her fascination with the starry sky: if things were different, she would have wanted to be an astronaut. The show’s writers add a nice bit of specificity to it, though, as she names a bunch of famous astronauts she read about in school before asking Joel if he knows who her favorite is. “Sally Ride,” he guesses correctly. “Sally fuckin’ Ride,” she replies. “Best astronaut name ever.” Absolutely.
Remembering Sam
Here’s another contrast between the game and the show that highlights their different approaches to Joel, and by extension, the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Dreaming of a better world in which her blood has made cordyceps a thing of the past, her thoughts turn to Sam, who she couldn’t save. “I tried, with Sam,” she tells Joel, saying that she rubbed some of her blood into Sam’s bite, hoping it would save him. Joel gives space to her feelings and, wanting to say something supportive, tells Ellie that if Marlene says the Fireflies can make a cure, they can do it.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, Ellie also brings up Sam, but Joel reacts very differently. You can stumble on a grave marked with a teddy bear, which prompts Ellie to mention that she forgot to leave a toy robot she’d picked up earlier on Sam’s grave. Joel shuts her down. Ellie protests that she wants to talk about it, which is the most understandable thing in the world. Joel forbids it, saying “Things happen and we move on.” Ellie relents, saying “You’re right, I’m sorry,” even though he’s not right at all. It’s just how Joel has coped with the suffering he’s endured, by not thinking or talking about it at all.
I think both dynamics work well for their respective mediums. In the game, we’re left aching for Joel’s facade to crack a bit, for him to finally start showing a little genuine compassion and tenderness to Ellie. In the show, Joel’s hardly warm, but he’s at least less quick to force her to deny her own feelings, which pulls us into their relationship in a different way: we’re starting to see the possibility for connection between them, which makes it that much more painful later in the episode when Joel does shun Ellie.
Welcome to Jackson
Joel and Ellie press on, at one point overlooking a dam, the show’s way of acknowledging the dam that plays prominently in this stretch of the game. Ellie says “Dam!” to which Joel responds that she’s no Will Livingston, the writer of her trusty book of puns.
Soon they walk past another river, at which point Ellie has an alarming thought: what if this is the River of Death? And sure enough, no sooner does she voice this thought than they find themselves surrounded by riders on horseback, holding them at gunpoint. There’s a harrowing moment in which a dog sniffs them both for signs of infection, and we don’t know if Ellie’s immunity also neutralizes any such signs or if the pup is about to sink his teeth into her neck, but the moment passes as the dog happily licks her face and she laughs. After Joel says that he’s looking for his brother, a woman asks Joel his name. It seems the name Joel means something to her, as they all promptly ride on horseback into the town of Jackson.
Screenshot: HBO
This is a significant departure from the game, in which the existence of Jackson is mentioned, but Joel and Ellie don’t actually enter the town. As players, we don’t get a good look at it until Part II. But here, we get to see the settlement now, a place where many families live a fairly normal life in the post-cordyceps world. It’s quite a sight, six episodes in, to see a street busy with foot traffic in a place where children frolic and people are working cooperatively. Among the people laboring on the street is Tommy, Joel’s brother, and the two share a heartfelt reunion. When Tommy asks what the fuck Joel is doing here, he says “I came here to save you,” before laughing at the absurdity of Tommy needing saving.
“We’re communists”
Joel and Ellie wolf down a meal while Tommy and the woman, whose name we learn is Maria, look on. At one moment, another girl furtively looks at Ellie, until Ellie loudly says “What?!” and scares her off. I imagine this was just a random Jackson resident, but I couldn’t help but think of Dina, a character who, in the second game, comes to play an important role in Ellie’s life. When Joel asks for a moment alone with family, Tommy tells him that Maria is family. The extremely unenthusiastic “congrats” that Joel eventually offers up is one of the funnier moments in the series.
Tommy and Maria give them a tour that covers the exposition bases, explaining how the town got started, how they stay safe from infected, and how it functions day in and day out. “Everything you see in our town—greenhouses, livestock—all shared. Collective ownership,” Tommy says. “So, uh, communism,” Joel says. “It ain’t like that,” Tommy refutes, but Maria corrects him. “It is that. Literally. This is a commune. We’re communists.” I appreciate the matter-of-factness of Maria’s statement, and the depiction of communism as a system that, when applied properly, can be beneficial to all. That’s not something you see in media very often.
Joel and Tommy, reunited
In both the show and the game, Joel and Tommy find themselves with some time to privately catch up as Maria and Ellie also spend a bit of time together. In both cases, tensions between the brothers run high, but there are some key differences as well.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, Joel’s stated hope is that Tommy will take Ellie off his hands and deliver her to his former Firefly buddies. Joel’s loss of Sarah is front and center in the scene, as Tommy says he went back down to Texas some time ago and found a photo of Joel and Sarah, which he offers to Joel. “I’m good,” Joel says, refusing the photo. The two get heated when Joel suggests Tommy owes him this favor for the things he did to keep them alive after the pandemic started, and Tommy replies that the horrendous things they did weren’t worth it, that all he has from that time is nightmares. Their argument is interrupted by an attack of marauders before anything can be settled.
Screenshot: HBO
In the show, rather than saying he wants Tommy to take Ellie off his hands, Joel says he wants Tommy to accompany him in delivering Ellie to the Fireflies. He lies to Tommy on multiple counts, both telling him that Tess is fine and that Ellie is the daughter of a high-ranking Firefly who he’s trying to reunite with her family. Here, too, Joel tries to use the violence he committed years ago as leverage. Tommy’s more forgiving here than his video game counterpart, but still remains ashamed of what they did. And as in the game, the memory of Sarah is close at hand, but not because of a photograph. Rather, Tommy tells Joel that he can’t go with him to the Firefly base in Colorado because he’s going to be a father. When Tommy says “I feel like I’d be a good dad,” Joel, obviously deep in his own feelings about Sarah, responds with a cold “I guess we’ll find out.” Tommy doesn’t take it well, and says that just because life stopped for Joel, that’s no reason it has to stop for him.
As he heads out into the cold, Joel once again clutches his chest and leans against a pole for support. He sees a woman nearby who, from behind, bears a striking resemblance to Sarah, but of course it’s not her.
Ellie learns about Sarah
In the game, we don’t witness the time Ellie and Maria spend together while Joel and Tommy are talking, but we do later find out that Maria tells Ellie about Sarah. In the show, we see how this discovery takes place.
After taking a shower and emerging to find that Maria has left her new clothes and a menstrual cup (which she finds both gross and amusing), Ellie heads across the street in search of her. She enters Maria and Tommy’s house and sees names and dates written on a chalkboard marking the lives of two people who died young: someone named Kevin, who died at the age of three shortly after Outbreak Day, and someone named Sarah, who died on Outbreak Day at 14.
Screenshot: HBO
Maria insists on giving Ellie’s hair a trim, and tells her that she’s always liked cutting hair. “Maybe it was a mom thing,” she says, before mentioning “the little memorial Tommy made” in the living room. “I’m sorry about your kids,” Ellie says, and Maria says only Kevin was hers, Sarah was Joel’s daughter. The heavy silence that follows tells Maria that Ellie didn’t know that before.
“I guess that explains him a little,” Ellie says. Maria, with a sense of cool practicality and likely a wariness of Joel based on the stories Tommy’s told her, expresses concern about Ellie being with him, but the teen remains typically testy. “Tommy [killed people] too, are you worried about him?” she asks. Maria says that Tommy was following Joel, “the way you are now,” seemingly seeing Joel as a bad influence, someone who pulls people into his orbit and leaves harm in his wake. “Be careful who you put your faith in,” she warns Ellie. “The only people who can betray us are the ones we trust.” Ellie clearly resents the advice and Maria’s distrust of Joel, perhaps because she senses there’s good reason for it and doesn’t want to admit it to herself.
The Goodbye Girl
In the town hall, Ellie joins the other youngsters at a screening of the 1977 film The Goodbye Girl. (Jackson likely has a pretty limited selection of film reels on hand.) However, despite the novelty of seeing an actual movie projected on an actual screen, Ellie remains distracted, paying more attention to Tommy and Maria talking nearby than to the wit of Neil Simon’s screenplay.
The show’s writers clearly didn’t pick The Goodbye Girl at random. The plot involves an actor, played by Richard Dreyfuss, forming a connection with a dancer and her ten-year-old daughter. The woman has a history of being abandoned by the men in her life (hence the title), and fears that the actor will do the same. Ellie herself has a history of being left as we’ll soon learn, and her fears of being abandoned by Joel are at a peak in this episode.
Screenshot: HBO
Meanwhile, Joel is alone in a workshop, struggling to repair his boots and getting immensely frustrated. Tommy comes in with a peace offering of new boots and an apology for his earlier behavior, saying “I know you’re happy for me, it’s just…it’s complicated for you.” Joel asks Tommy for more details on whether the trip to the University of Eastern Colorado where the Firefly base is located is survivable, and finally offers him the truth: Ellie is immune.
As he tells the story of his journey with Ellie thus far, he appears much more vulnerable than the Joel of the game ever does. No action hero, he admits to being far less capable of recognizing and reacting to threats than he used to be, and to sometimes being paralyzed by fear. “I’m not who I was. I’m weak,” he says, describing those moments where “the fear comes up out of nowhere and my heart feels like it’s stopped.” He’s haunted by dreams he can’t remember but that leave him with the feeling that he’s lost something.
The Joel of the game also tries to pass Ellie off onto Tommy because he’s afraid of the pain of emotional involvement, of potentially losing someone again, but he’s much more guarded about it. This Joel is more overtly shaken, riddled with self-doubt and a crippling fear of failure. He seems to honestly believe, when he says “I have to leave her,” that it would be for Ellie’s own good, that he’s incapable of being the person she needs him to be. He presents it to Tommy as a chance to make up for the awful things they both did, “to bring your kid into a better world.” I think it’s definitely a more emotionally persuasive appeal than the one Joel makes in the game, where Tommy just seems to change his mind and decide that taking Ellie on to Colorado is something he has to do.
When Tommy returns to the town hall after speaking with Joel, the look he gives Maria tells her everything, and the look she gives in response tells us everything about how she feels: That bastard Joel has done it again.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
And now we come to the scene that may be the emotional heart of both the game and the show, a crucial turning point in the central relationship. In the game, Ellie senses that Joel is abandoning her, steals a horse, and rides off to a nearby ranch. Joel and Tommy pursue her, and within the faded normalcy of the old house, she and Joel have an argument that reflects the crisis point in their relationship.
There’s no ranch here in the show, but the house in Jackson they’re staying at offers a similar backdrop of pre-pandemic life, and the conversation between them starts the same way, with Ellie reading an old diary and saying, “Is this really all they had to worry about? Boys? Movies? Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt?”
Screenshot: HBO
“If you’re gonna ditch me, ditch me,” she says, telling him that she overheard some of his conversation with Tommy in the workshop. And soon, after asking him what he’s so afraid of, she says “I’m not her, you know,” another line straight from the game and in some ways the emotional excavation of past anguish that both the game and the show have been building up to all along. It’s a scene on which so much hinges in the development of their relationship, and so it’s little surprise that it’s recreated so faithfully here.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In both cases, Ellie tells Joel that she’s sorry about his daughter but that she has lost people too, and in both cases, he says “You have no idea what loss is,” a pretty awful (and incorrect) thing for him to say. And in both, she tells him that everyone she’s ever cared about has either died or left her, “everyone—fucking except for you. So don’t tell me that I would be safer with someone else because the truth is that I would just be more scared.” Joel’s painful response: “You’re right, you’re not my daughter, and I sure as hell ain’t your dad.” Both Joels say that soon, they’re going their separate ways. Ellie’s a goodbye girl, all right.
Ellie the human cargo
The next morning, Tommy comes to collect Ellie, who sits with no display of emotion, her things packed, waiting to be carried along on her journey. It made me recall Joel’s comment to her in an earlier episode, “You’re cargo.” The feeling I got here is that this is now how Ellie feels about herself: she’s a thing that needs to be taken to a place for the good of humanity, but as a person there is nobody to whom she means anything, nobody who cares about her for her sake, only for what she might mean for humanity.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
But when they get to the stables, Joel is saddling up one of the horses. He says he got there 30 minutes ago with the intention of stealing the horse and being on his way, but now, he’s decided Ellie deserves a choice. “I still think you’d be better off with Tommy,” he starts to say before Ellie cuts him off, shoves her stuff into his arms and says “Let’s go.” In the game, Joel just decides he’s continuing on with Ellie. He says to Tommy that his wife kinda scares him and he doesn’t want her coming after him, but it’s obvious that that’s just something he’s saying, and that he’s decided that he belongs by Ellie’s side, for a little longer, at least.
Joel and Tommy share a hug, and as in the game, Tommy tells them that there’s a place in Jackson for them.
To the University of Eastern Colorado
An amusing interlude finds Joel trying to give Ellie a lesson in using a sniper rifle. All her shots miss and she’s convinced the gun doesn’t aim right. As he talks about proper technique, she asks him if he’s trying to shoot the target or get it pregnant. Of course, he hits the target dead on, to which she says “You dick!” as he shrugs and smiles.
Joel also talks a bit about being a contractor. “The Contractor,” Ellie says in a deep voice, as if she’s imagining some kind of construction-oriented superhero. “That’s pretty cool.” “Yeah, we were cool. Everybody loved contractors,” he says. And then, mirroring a conversation from the game, we hear Joel explaining some of the basic rules of football to Ellie.
Screenshot: HBO
As they explore the campus of the fictional University of Eastern Colorado, Joel volunteers that, more than running a sheep ranch, he wanted to be a singer, but of course he refuses Ellie’s request that he sing something. (He admits this in the game as well, and without going into specifics, I will say that it becomes more than just a throwaway detail later in the series.) In another moment straight from the game, a group of monkeys scurry away from them as they approach and Ellie confirms that it’s her “first time seeing a monkey.” Soon, though, the stillness of the campus starts to feel ominous, and it’s clear things aren’t quite right.
After finding a map indicating that the Fireflies packed up and headed for Salt Lake City, they see a group of men prowling the campus and attempt to make their escape. But before they can safely leave, a man attacks Joel with a baseball bat which breaks as he strikes a tree. Joel breaks the man’s neck, but in the struggle, the sharp wooden hilt of the bat gets stuck in his abdomen. In the game, Joel is severely injured when he and an attacker go toppling over a railing and he gets impaled on a bit of rebar, leading to a sequence in which Ellie must be Joel’s protector for a time, killing attackers as he limps weakly toward the horse. Even in his injured state, he’s still Joel, though. She says that if she gets him out of this, he really owes her a song and he responds with a dry “You wish.”
Soon they’re safely free of their attackers, but Joel falls off his horse and into the snow, and for the moment at least, Ellie’s worst fear is realized, a fear she admitted to Sam at the end of the previous episode. Just as the two seem to have come to some understanding about their importance to each other, he leaves her. “I can’t fucking do this without you,” she says. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going or what the fuck I’m gonna do. Joel, please.” But she is alone, as a moody cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” plays, the song that ended the show’s first episode. That choice, the moody cover callback, struck me as a bit cliche, the show going through the motions of doing what we expect prestige TV to do, but given that much of this episode rang emotionally true, I guess I’ll allow it.
It seems I was too quick to judge HBO’s The Last of Us. While the first four episodes certainly kept my attention as well-written and delightfully-shot prestige television, I had been a little let down as the adaptive process of turning the game into a show has, so far, left out the recreation of specific, memorable action sequences from the game. Well, with “Endure and Survive,” the fifth episode of the first (but not the last) season of The Last of Us, the show has revealed that it’s more than capable of adapting the action of the video game, and in some cases, just might be doing a better job with it.
Adapted from the hit PlayStation 3 title of the same name, The Last of Us’ gripping, character-driven plot exists alongside tense, deadly, moment-by-moment combat encounters. The player, as Joel, must overcome both hostile humans and infected with a combination of stealth, firearms, and crudely improvised weapons. For its first four episodes, HBO’s adaptation has, mostly, prioritized the story elements, choosing in some cases not to recreate memorable action sequences or feature unique, crafted props of the kind we’ve seen in the game. It makes sense for television to focus on the actors and the story, but until now I’ve found the show to be missing that key action ingredient I’ve loved so well, not just from seeing the game, but from playing it.
There’s a reason The Last of Us appears on our list of the best action games you can play this year. With a slower cadence than what you find in something like Naughty Dog’s other recent series, Uncharted, and an emphasis on survival, The Last of Us as a game injects tight, intense, action sequences throughout the narrative, reminding you that, however much things might feel under your control during the narrative downtime, you’re never actually safe in its deadly world.. The action sequences are when the rug has been pulled out from under you and you must deal with a situation in the here and the now. Mess up, and someone’s dying.
Our action game list highlighted the sequel, Part II, as being a bit more flexible, with more options for how you approach and respond to various situations. But the sequel follows what the first game already did so well: Moments where, forgive the cliche, all hell breaks loose and you must respond. Immediately. It’s stress-inducing action for sure, but damn, is it a thrill.
While I would’ve certainly traded the first game’s “upside-down” shootout sequence in the “Bill’s Town” level for the beautiful story of Bill and Frank we got in episode three of the show, I was beginning to worry that HBO’s TV adaptation would continue to leave out other, more explosive sequences rather than attempt to translate the immediacy of the game’s action to the screen. But here we are with episode five’s suburban sniper sequence. This gripping scene not only translates the game’s action particularly well, but does so with a narrative revision that makes the carnage even more intense.
Just like in the game, Joel and Ellie have teamed up with Henry and Sam. But this time, Henry and Sam’s situation is a bit more urgent. Kathleen, the leader of a revolutionary force, obsessively wants to see Henry die for his role in her brother’s death. Like the game, Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam must travel down an abandoned suburban street, moving from car to car to avoid getting shot by a sniper overlooking the area.
The TV show does depart a touch from this scenario as it exists in the game. To start, Joel isn’t faced with additional hostile forces on his approach to the sniper’s nest. And it becomes clear once Joel deals with the sniper that this individual belongs to the revolutionaries in Kansas City (the game’s parallel version of these events takes place in Pittsburgh and doesn’t feature Kathleen or any of the revolutionaries introduced in episode four). This is one of the improvements the show makes over the original game, something its sequel also worked harder to achieve: lending faces, complicated motivations, and identities to the antagonists.
But we need to talk about the sound design in the sniper sequence first. Though the show has caught my ear before (a particularly unnerving-yet-satisfying ambient music swell as Joel, Ellie, and Tess ascend the stairs in episode two’s museum is one such example), I am unhealthily obsessed with the gunshots in this scene. The exacting and penetrating strike of the sniper rifle’s shot is chased by a split second of silence that could swallow the universe, followed up with a timeless whisper of air and sensually percussive hits on the bodies and windows of cars. Satisfying bangs funneled into powerful clangs, sharp shatters of glass…heavy metal bands will spend their entire careers trying to deliver something so sonically beautiful and destructive at the same time. This is bliss.
The sounds are loveable as special effects and creations on their own, but the effect really drew me in with an intimacy of the kind I’ve felt in video games—and in particular, the one this show is based on. The scene that mirrors this one in the video game is one example, but the latter half of The Last of Us Part II also has a similar sniper scenario. Cover-to-cover movement with the threat of violence pressing you back is successfully brought to life on screen. But we’re not done yet.
Screenshot: HBO
Like in the game, Joel eventually gets to the top of the sniper’s nest, eliminates the shooter and must then get behind the scope as hostile human forces march forward. In the show, the personality-less mob of foes is replaced by new-character Kathleen on her quest for revenge, with her forces in tow. Joel must make several needle-threading shots, one of which is recreated from the game: Hitting the driver of a hostile vehicle, with the camera going behind the scope of the rifle itself. And yes, like the game, that car crashes into a house…a house which has a surprise in store.
The TV show’s vehicle veers off and crashes to the right side. It crashes on the left in the game; this mirror image of recreated scenes seems to be a common element of the show. Joel and Sarah are flipped in their position on the couch in the opening episode; Joel’s “I am sure you will figure that out” line of dialogue to Ellie asking what the hell she’s supposed to do while he naps in the first episode sees the couch he lays on flipped to the other side of the room.
And while a cluster of infected does ultimately flood the street in the game as well, it’s quite different in the show. Here, the emergence of a horde of infected from underground serves as the payoff to some wonderful foreshadowing in the previous episode and earlier scenes in this one, where we learn that FEDRA had previously chased all the infected underground as a way to “fix” the problem. It’s clear that this is something that will resurface to cause a problem. And in this scene, once you see that truck fall into the house…you know what’s coming, and that the hubris that led Kathleen to go to such extremes will soon claim its price.
Screenshot: HBO
Shattering the calm insanity of Kathleen’s myopic quest for vengeance, the fallen truck and the chorus of screams and roars from the mob of infected it unleashes is a powerful release, snapping us out of the daze of trying to follow Kathleen’s justification for cruelty. We’re barely given time to digest the contours of her bloodlust as the infected’s long-buried rage drowns out all, the great equalizer that considers no one safe and needs no justification for its wrath and violence. At the end of this scene, I felt the instinctual urge to put down the controller and take a breath. Except there was no controller.
Episode five’s sniper scenario doesn’t just adapt a key action sequence of the game, it makes it better. The pacing is tighter, more intense. The narrative wrapping pulls you into what’s at stake in a far more satisfying way, and it earns its zombie mob scene. This is the kind of game sequence adaptation I’ve been waiting for in HBO’s show, and it did not disappoint. Until next time, I’m gonna go see if Whole Foods has crow on sale.
If you just finished watching episode five of HBO’s The Last of Us, you might be wondering just what that giant infected was that the show made a big deal about but didn’t actually bother to explain. Well friends, what you saw is colloquially called a bloater by characters like Joel and Ellie, and it’s a focal point of certain enemy encounters in The Last of Us games. But you wouldn’t know that based on what the show’s actually portrayed so far. So let’s talk about why these big baddies are so impactful to game fans.
What is a bloater?
A bloater is considered to be one of the end stages of infection for victims of the cordyceps fungus ravaging the world of The Last of Us. Unlike the more common clickers, people who have reached bloater stage are pretty much entirely encased in the fungus that grows from out of an infected’s head. This happens when the victim’s been infected for years and has somehow managed to “survive” that long. As Joel mentions in episode two, most infected only live around a month or so, but clickers and bloaters have been infected so long that the fungus has desecrated their eyes and they have to use echolocation to navigate. Clickers are more abundant, but if an infected lives long enough to become a bloater, its hulking frame and exploding pus sacks—oh yes, it has exploding pus sacks that it throws at Joel and Ellie—make it far more dangerous.
How do bloaters work in The Last of Us games?
Bloaters appear as mini-bosses at multiple points throughout both The Last of Us and its sequel. Originally, the enemy made its debut in Bill’s fortified town, but because the show took a very different approach to that story in episode three, the bloater didn’t debut until the Kansas City episodes. A bloater is an especially powerful enemy that, if it grabs you, will take you out in one hit. Perry’s death, in which the bloater tears his head from his body, is an homage to a death animation in the games in which a bloater can grab Joel or Ellie and do exactly that. The games do a hard cut to black before showing the extent of the damage, but still show enough to give a sense of just how gruesome the death will be. Shoutout to HBO for shooting that scene from a distance so we didn’t have to see Perry’s execution in excruciating detail.
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Unlike clickers, bloaters aren’t susceptible to a stealth kill with a shiv or Ellie’s switchblade, so you have to take them out the old-fashioned way with bullets and molotov cocktails. Both games have a few bloaters you can stealth past, though, allowing you to avoid fighting them entirely. But if you can’t manage that, you’ll inevitably use up quite a bit of your supplies taking them out.
In theory, a standard infected will either survive long enough to become a bloater, or they’ll die and the cordyceps fungus will continue to grow out of their bodies and into the environment around them. In episode one, Tess and Joel stumble upon a dead infected which was pretty much grown into the wall in the Boston quarantine zone. However, as The Last of Us Part II illustrates, environmental factors can influence how the cordyceps evolves at different stages of infection.
The Last of Us Part II takes place primarily in Seattle, and while there, Ellie faces a different variation of late-stage infection called shamblers. Similar to bloaters, these infected are covered head to toe in the cordyceps fungus, but rather than slinging fungal explosives at the player, Shamblers spray acid from their bodies and explode when killed. Though the reason for this divergence in infection is never confirmed, the player can find notes around Seattle that theorize it was due to the rain and moisture in the city. This seems reasonable enough, but shamblers also appear in Part II’s late-game Santa Barbara sections. This might just be an example of gameplay getting in the way of worldbuilding, but whatever the case, there are other possible fates for an infected beyond turning into a bloater…though we might not see them in the show until the upcoming second season.
The most advanced form of infection The Last of Us has shown was in an infamous boss fight in Part II with an entity called the Rat King. This was the culmination of multiple infected growing into each other to create one giant, vicious beast in the lower floors of a Seattle hospital, which was the city’s infection ground zero. This phenomenon has only been seen once in the series so far, and occurred in such specific circumstances that it seems incredibly rare in the world of The Last of Us.
While the bloater is a rarity in The Last of Us’ universe, every time they appear in the games it’s an impactful moment. The bloater’s first appearance in HBO’s show was pretty major, but we’ll have to wait and see if anyone actually bothers to explain why it was significant in a future episode.
