The Last of Us: Season 1
“I was never afraid before you showed up.”
There is not a force in the cosmere quite as strong as love. This force, this… need, this drive, is the cause of all great wonders... as well as all great atrocities. Love for a partner, love for a people, love for a cause. Depending on which side of the line you stand, one person’s love can look a lot like hate, vengeance, and selfishness. These feelings – these strange distortions of reality – are what Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have brought wonderfully to life through their adaptation of 2013’s horror adventure, The Last of Us.
We follow Joel Miller through the waking nightmare that is the end of the world. After suffering a great personal tragedy, Joel takes on a job to deliver a young girl to a team of rebel researchers for reasons he’s not entirely sure of, and doesn’t entirely care to know. He’s in a bind, she’s a way out. Through the horrors of what the world has both become and always been, Joel and his young charge, Ellie, grow closer, leading to ever toughening decisions about the end of their journey.
The Last of Us is one of video-gaming's greatest narratives. I say “one of” only for wiggle room but, gun to my head, I would tell you it was #1. It’s one of the rare stories where you find yourself unsure of where you stand on the unfolding events... Mostly because you’re not sure if you would do any different were it your own life on screen even though you know that you’re objectively “wrong”. It is a poignant, dramatic, grounded, and difficult tale to experience, and a very brave one to tell. Where the narrative stands at #1 for what it is, so does the show. There has never been a better video-game adaptation ever made.
Neil Druckmann wrote the original game, and it stands as a shining example of why creators should be given artistic power over the adaptations that follow. It helps that the original narrative is so tightly written, but the show manages to add things that [mostly] don’t feel out of place, and expand upon the world in such a way that, if you didn’t know it was a video game, you wouldn’t suspect it by the end. This show is a true accomplishment in bridging two different worlds of entertainment culture together.
Featuring a stellar soundtrack from the game’s composer, Gustavo Santaolalla, incredible creatures that bring back the golden eras of monster design, and landmark performances from leads Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, the show does struggle with certain aspects of its design. Namely, its pacing.
Starting with a bang, Ep1 and 2 fire us out of a canon into the terrifying world of cordyceps, Fedra, and the Fireflies. Then we’re led through a moseying and meandering journey through the next two-and-a-half episodes where the show seems to lose all sense of flow or focus. It’s a difficult slog of hyper-myopic motivations, shallow world-building, and missed opportunities that are, unfortunately, wrapped up in some very interesting, very well-intentioned, and very empathetic characters. The series is 9-episodes long, and that’s one or two too many. There are a few other areas of the show that suffer from this as well, but the middle 3 episodes are the ones that stand out as the most egregious.
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I know that episode 3, Long, Long Time is generally either lauded as “it made me cry so hard I threw-up” or lamented as a total waste of time. I don’t feel either of those things about it specifically, but I do feel that 3, 4, and at least part of 5 could have been a single episode.
In ep3 we see someone who’s always kind of been on the fringes of society learn to find belonging at the end of the world. In ep4 we meet Kathleen Coghlan [Melanie Lynskey] who, we learn through some really lame and shallow nonsense, has had her brother taken from her by FEDRA and now she wants revenge. So, already, we have two characters who start at each other’s end: Bill starts alone, Kathleen starts with safety. One is romantic love, the other familial.
These elements are perfectly juxtaposed by the simultaneous budding of Joel and Ellie who hit a particularly stride in their relationship in ep’s 4-5 — going from obligated chauffer/ package situation to one of surrogacy for Joel and a firmer sense of purpose for Ellie. In this relationship we not only get a third kind of love — parent child — but we also see the way that Joel and Ellie represent both Bill and Kathleen: As Joel gets closer to Ellie [Bill and Frank], Ellie becomes more driven and surefooted in her sacrifice, which will lead her away from Joel [Kathleen and her brother]. Not to mention what we ultimately see between Henry and Sam.
The issue is not with any of the storytelling itself [except for Kathleen’s which was totally shallow and lame], but the runtime and completely striated way it was told. There was no reason for these tales to be spun over nearly 3-hours of runtime when we could have combined them into either a single episode, or two at most, and really shown the way this tragedy has brought some together, torn others apart, and forced even more to make horrifyingly difficult decisions.
By combining these three episodes into one, the show would have been much tighter and snappier without losing any of its weight or meaning.
All together though, The Last of Us is a great feat of television adaptation and one that I hope paves the way for follow-up productions of equal quality. This is a show that will move you, make you angry, and force you to question what love means to you, and what its boundaries are when it comes to your larger responsibilities. If you find that you’re losing your way after the first couple of episodes, I highly encourage you to stick with it as the final two are some of the best that television has to offer.
“I got you, baby girl.”
