The Revelation of Joel: The Last of Us Midseason Check-In
The Last of Us pulls back the curtain on human nature.
We’re past the halfway point of HBO’s The Last of Us now, so it’s definitely time to talk about it in this semi-analysis, semi-review, semi-recap of the season so far. Spoilers for The Last of Us episodes one through five follow.
A series of historical, religious, and linguistic mishaps resulted in the modern definition of the English word “apocalypse.” The final book of the Bible (called Apokalypsis Ioannou in Greek, or Revelation to John) is often misinterpreted as primarily describing the end of the world, and thus the first word of its title was appropriated into English as our word for a catastrophic event bringing about the end of days. In contrast to this the original Greek term, apokalypsis, including in the Bible, actually just means a “peeling back,” “unveiling,” or “revelation.”
In both senses of the word, HBO’s The Last of Us is apocalyptic. On the surface, the show depicts a pandemic that takes down all of civilization over the course of a day followed by a story about what’s left of the world. Under the surface, however, is a message about humanity at its core told through the lens of a zombie show.
After masterfully depicting the catastrophic collapse of civilization due to a fungal outbreak in 2003, the show skips ahead 20 years, peeling back the curtain to unveil the reality of humanity’s nature. Stripped of the guardrails of society, our best and worst is all on display. The best: love, loyalty to those we love, and our desire to protect those we love at all costs. The worst: love, loyalty to those we love, and our desire to protect those we love at all costs.
We are given this revelation mostly through the life of Joel, the 56 year old man who we watch lose his daughter on the night the world fell. We see his small family race across town in a pickup truck, leaving others stranded and never looking back. We watch as he yells at his brother to speed through a crowd of people, desperate to escape Austin before it collapses. After the truck is wrecked, we see him racing on foot to carry his wounded daughter to safety, then begging a soldier for her life, and then weeping as she dies from the soldier’s gunshot.
As the show jumps ahead 20 years we are presented with a striking image to contrast the one we just saw: Joel tossing the dead body of a young child into a fire, clocking out of work, and simply asking if there are any extra jobs he can do. He’s been hardened, as everyone has. There are glimpses of something deeper, though. He is obsessed with getting in touch with his brother, who we learn disappeared somewhere in Wyoming and hasn’t been heard from in weeks.
Joel is a protector, and so despite his best efforts to avoid attachment he finds himself in situations where people near to him need protecting. His brother is the first example we get, but more significant is a young girl about the age of his deceased daughter. Saddled with the task of shuttling 14 year old Ellie across Boston in return for a car battery, Joel unleashes on a military agent when he threatens Joel’s group, effectively beating him to death. Although Joel, Ellie, and his partner, Tess, are safe for now, the episode ends with the ominous sound of 80’s rock over the radio, previously identified as signaling trouble. There’s a message in that song: something has been unlocked inside of Joel, and it may not be all good.
We find themes of love, family, loyalty, and protection throughout the four subsequent episodes. The story of Bill and Frank in episode three is a picture of two men who find more joy together in a world of destruction than they ever had before. On the darker side, in Kansas City Joel and Ellie run into an army of revolutionaries. When Joel is forced to kill a scared young man to keep Ellie safe, they become enemies of the revolutionaries led by the sweet-natured but cruel and ruthless Melanie who is hellbent on avenging her brother’s death at all costs. It turns out her brother was killed by the local FEDRA regime, handed over to them by Henry, a young man who made a deal to get his kid brother, Sam, the Leukemia drugs he needs. Even FEDRA, the militarized authoritarian government agency in charge of various quarantine safe zones across the country, is so ruthless and cruel because its goal is to protect the community at all costs.
Much like our own world, the show consists of a twisted web of intertwining connections, decisions, and consequences, but on every side of this complicated narrative there is a person who loves another person and just wants to keep them safe. This is a basic element of human nature, revealed in striking ways through a graphic depiction of a zombie apocalypse.
As co-showrunner and co-creator Craig Mazin has said, “The Last of Us is a love story, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
The best part of the show is its performances. At age 47 Pedro Pascal has become the internet’s latest obsession, and for good reason. He embodies the rough, scarred, and damaged Joel perfectly. His relationship with Ellie feels well earned, with each step of their budding connection taking place slowly and organically. Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, could easily be a typical plucky teenage kid, but has a hardened exterior combined with a childlike interest in Joel that makes her compelling. Her and Joel both make much of the fact that she’s a child of the apocalypse, an orphan raised in FEDRA school, so when we see her privately start to break down after shooting someone to save Joel, or admit to Sam in the last episode that she is “afraid all the time,” the weight of this world feels even heavier.
The two biggest weaknesses of the show are the two primary points in which it feels most video-game-y. The first is the structure of the story, adapted from a video-game, which repeatedly forces the characters against antagonists of increasing difficulty, as if they are progressing through levels. With each episode or two, the characters’ journey is interrupted as they have to stop and face off against some new threat. All good stories present their protagonists with challenges along the way, but here they feel forced at times because of the nature of the adaptation. To the show’s credit, though, it does an exceptional job of deepening those detours through character work. Instead of faceless bad guys, the antagonists here are fully fleshed out people with compelling stories.
The second weak point is the show’s action sequences. It’s in these moments that I find myself wishing for the show to slow down and give us more of the quiet character scenes between Joel and Ellie. Having never played or seen footage from the game before, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a video-game cut scene during the opening episode’s escape from Austin sequence. As it turns out, that portion of the episode was essentially a shot for shot remake of the game.
That said, episode five’s climax featuring the largest hoard of infected we’ve seen so far pouring out of the ground was a shocking joy to watch. As a viewer, you know that neither of the two main characters are going to be significantly hurt with four episodes left to go in the season, but that doesn’t do anything to diminish the stakes as you watch Ellie try to navigate her way out with only Joel’s distant sniper fire to protect her.
Yet, after the riveting cul-de-sac sequence where we saw one of the main antagonists of the last two episodes get his head ripped off by a massive super-infected person and watched the main antagonist of the last two episodes get eaten by a child, the episode takes its most shocking turn yet. As Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam shelter in an abandoned motel for the night, we get the reveal that Sam has been bitten. After a moment where we wonder if Ellie’s immune blood might be able to save him, we learn the answer is no as Ellie wakes up to Sam having turned into a monster, lunging after her.
In this moment Henry is forced to reckon with the question that Joel has had to face too many times before, first with his daughter and then with Tess in episode two: what do you do next when you fail at protecting the person you love? What happens when, as Andy Greenwald put it on the most recent episode of The Watch podcast, you make all the right choices but it gets you nowhere in this world that is “essentially over?”
Whether it’s doing everything possible to keep Sam safe including turning over a man he loved to be killed, or it’s shooting Sam’s infected body to protect Ellie, Henry made all the right choices. In this dark world, however, that means nothing, and so Henry is left with nothing and decides he can’t go on anymore.
Joel, on the other hand, has again found someone that he loves and must keep safe. As he reflects on Sam and Henry’s deaths, we see him quietly resolve to himself that what happened with Sam cannot happen with Ellie.
The name The Last of Us is interestingly multi-layered. The most obvious meaning is that it refers to the last of all of us, as a whole, as in humanity in the quantitative sense — the last humans left on earth. Another layer deeper is that it refers to the last of “us,” as in from Joel and Ellie’s perspective, they are the only two people left in the world to love and care for; the last members of the group of people that they called “us.” Deeper still is the idea that it refers to the last of us in the the qualitative sense, as in the last bit of our inner humanity that remains when everything else is stripped away. The show is making a compelling argument that, for better or worse, all that is left is love, loyalty, and commitment to protect each other.
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