Does Ellie believe Joel?

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

But yes, backing up a bit, I like how this episode gets back to some quiet time between Joel and Ellie, who get to joke around and feed giraffes and be generally wistful about their journey together. They have obviously and fully become a surrogate father/daughter pair to each other, which is saying something, given how reluctant they were to even be in the same space back at the beginning of the series.

What did you do, Joel, and why did you do it? (credit: HBO)

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

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

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

The only way to come to the opposite conclusion is by being hopelessly sentimental about the whole thing. And Joel's actions are made even worse because, as Marlene points out, Ellie would pretty clearly be willing to sacrifice herself for that greater good.

That said, I think both the game and the show do a good job of threading the needle between not defending Joel's actions but still explaining them. By the time we get to these final scenes, we understand how and why a very broken Joel would essentially sacrifice the human race for this girl he met relatively recently. You don't have to agree with it to understand it from Joel's point of view, and I think that's an amazing narrative feat.

What wouldn't you do to protect this face? (credit: HBO)

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

But then there's those last few seconds of the season—that tight close-up on Ellie's face—where you can almost see the gears turning in her head. Does she just trust Joel so much that she just puts any doubts aside? Is she convincing herself to believe Joel for the sake of her own sanity? Or does she know Joel is lying and is just pretending to accept his story to protect their relationship?

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

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

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

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

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

Mother, victim, knife donor... (credit: HBO)

Part 2 aside, I feel like Part 1 has one of the best-presented endings in gaming, which carries over quite well here. These final scenes paper over a lot of the narrative's weaker moments. And that close-up on Ellie's face—with all the vagaries in every slight twitch of her eyes and chin—was even more impressive in a 2013 game, where motion-captured performances tended to be much broader and more over-the-top.

The show finale includes almost shot-for-shot remakes of many of the key scenes at the end of the game, right down to the music cues in many instances. But there is one subtle but important narrative change I noticed, which goes all the way back to the first episode.

Remember when that '60s talk show panelist suggested that a fungal outbreak wouldn't just be society-destroying but that a cure wouldn't even be possible?

In the game, while it's not 100 percent clear that the doctors will succeed in turning Ellie's brain into a vaccine, there's nothing explicitly suggesting it's a foolish effort. In the show, that one line at the very beginning of the first episode kind of changes the entire calculus.

If that panelist was right, then maybe Joel was (accidentally) right to save Ellie? Was that line an effort to soften Joel's decision in the end and make his actions more forgivable?

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

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

Sitting and waiting for season two... (credit: HBO)

I'm not trying to suggest Joel had arcane medical knowledge driving his decision. But in the context of a TV show, it's hard to see why the creators would throw in a line like that for any reason other than adding a bit of "maybe Ellie's death would have been in vain"-type doubt nine episodes later...

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

Joking aside, this adaptation made me think a lot of the 2009 Watchmen movie, which I think suffered from being way too faithful to the source material. Here we had just the right amount of faithfulness with (mostly) useful additions/changes for the new medium.

The source material provided a good starting point, but if they had just ended with that starting point, I think the conversion wouldn't have worked nearly as well.

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

In the games, we get a quick cut from the events of episode 6 to Ellie hunting wild game in the snow. As we take direct control of Ellie for the first time, we don't even know if the unseen Joel is alive or dead.

We also don't know anything about the mild-mannered stranger named David that Ellie stumbles upon while hunting. He even seems like a plausible Joel replacement at points during the early, amenable parts of their in-game team-up.

Seeing everything from Ellie's perspective really heightens the tension and mystery of David's whole arc, and I feel like the show kind of ruined that pacing here.

David suffers the most. It’s like the show needed to stuff him full of red flags to make sure that viewers really didn’t like him or feel bad for him, but it also makes him into a cartoon character in a show where most of the antagonists have already been a little flat.

We are in need of a more interesting characterization... (credit: HBO)

But I did not believe for even one fraction of one second that Ellie was in any danger of joining up with this creepy fundamentalist/mushroom cultist/child-hitter/cannibal guy, and it makes it weirder that the last sequence between them is framed as this big emotional showdown.

And also... this community had a lot of other people in it? Where did they go? A more organic and satisfying version might have had David’s own community seeing what a creep he is and turning on him, rather than a big dramatic one-on-one confrontation between David and Ellie in the world’s most flammable restaurant. It doesn’t sound like that’s how it goes in the games, but it also sounds like the character is just handled fundamentally differently.

Just hanging out... (credit: HBO)

Here's my main question for someone going in fresh: Did you ever feel like David was potentially just a nice guy and someone that Ellie could justifiably trust and/or let down her guard in front of? I feel like the game went to great pains to push the player in that direction for a while before the heel turn, and it just didn't work for me here. Then again, I knew some of David's dark secrets from the get-go...

The first scene where David and Ellie meet, on the other hand—I could see it! David (played by Scott Shepherd, a fairly prolific character actor who has one of those “what have I seen him in?” faces) has a certain reassuring avuncular charisma to him. Unfortunately, we’ve already seen too many Bad Guy markers from him, even before you find out that he’s been reading To Serve Man.

That gun looks a bit heavy, Ellie... (credit: HBO)

And you’re right that Ellie’s butchering of David at the end of the episode goes on just a bit too long for comfort. I’m just not sure what to make of it. Surely Ellie has been traumatized as much as she could possibly need to be for story purposes. It’s not as though David was close enough to her to really betray her. Between the two of them, Joel and Ellie do enough violence this episode to sour their tearful reunion a bit. Which is not really where I wanted to be heading into the season finale of a show I have otherwise mostly liked.

Who doesn't love a good stealth section? (credit: HBO)

All that death has been building toward the big finale, though. Without getting too spoilery, I wonder if you even remember what Joel and Ellie are trekking for/toward at this point, and if you have any big predictions for the final episode?

Oh yeah, Troy Baker is here, too. (credit: HBO)

I would love to be pleasantly surprised! Maybe the show has settled into this predictable rhythm to make it especially mind-blowing next week when all the scientists end up being super chill and professional.

The arcade scene in episode 7 of The Last of Us.

Part of me tried to hold out hope that they might change that fate for the show—they've changed a lot of other stuff about the narrative, including a lot about Henry and Sam themselves. But really that was probably just wishful thinking born out of a deep connection with the characters. The specifics might change, but this plot beat needed to stay in there, precisely because it's so emotionally raw.

I'd say "Nice knowing ya" but... well... it wasn't that nice?

So, you say lots of details of the Henry-Sam story are different than in the games, and you said last week that this Kansas City story and the characters in it were different from the games. Without knowing what's coming in the next few episodes, what purpose do the changes serve? Just reformatting things to be more workable on TV or something else?

By contrast, one thing the show managed to establish quickly was the friendship between Ellie and Sam. We've talked about her "tough girl" exterior here before, but the thing this story hammers home so well is that, deep down, she's just a lonely kid who's quickly realizing that everyone she grows close to could leave her.

We'll open the cans of food later, buddy...

Someone give this kid a comic book, stat!

The point of this disease is to mindlessly spread itself at all costs, and these mushroom guys don't really have a capacity for thought or reason or strategy. With that in mind, I am not sure what the evolutionary imperative is for a "tanky" character class that rips people's heads off instead of infecting them.

I get the point of that character in a video game, and it's because sometimes you need some enemies to be bigger/harder/scarier to break up the flow of gameplay. In a TV show, the moment just played a little silly to me. The best things about this episode were subtle, and that moment was the precise opposite of subtle.

I can almost picture the story meetings where the game guys were like, 'We have to get a bloater in here somewhere!' and 'Is now the time when we can show a bloater?' and the TV people just giving up and saying 'Fine, you can have 60 seconds during the underground Infected riot!'

That's just the way he talks...

Anything that did surprise you in this episode, as someone who basically knows where all of this is going?

Time for another combat tutorial.

But yes, put me down as "generally uninterested in flashbacks that show us things we could have assumed given already-available information."

Only the youngest members of the cast can crouch like this for extended periods.

You can almost hear the f-bombs to come.

Andrew: I have never played the game! Which is why I am here, obviously. I haven't been avoiding it on purpose, it's just that I play maybe half a dozen games a year at this point, and the vast majority of them are either Nintendo-hard 2D action-platformers or games about catching pocketable monsters. Every six months or so, when they release a new remastered version of The Last Of Us, I think, "Maybe this time," but it just hasn't happened.

I have a broad-strokes, Wikipedia-level familiarity with the major plot beats. I also have a few touchpoints for pandemic- or contagion-adjacent apocalypse fiction (top of mind: HBO's Station Eleven show but not the book, Max Brooks' World War Z book but not the movie) that I think are going to serve me well here.

A behind-the-scenes look at some Infected-centric direction.

Kyle: No, that part was completely new actually, but I liked how it set things up. Probably useful given how much more "pandemic aware" we all are now compared to 2013, when the game came out. I was referring to the whole outbreak sequence leading up to Sarah's death. While they stretched things out and fleshed out some characters a bit, I was really struck by how familiar some of the key moments were. That's not just dialogue from the games, but even the camera angles and background items were eerily familiar at many points. Even these days, I feel like there aren't too many video game cut scenes that could make the transition to "prestige TV" so intact.

Environmental storytelling.

Andrew: So that raises a question I am going to ask you a bunch of times, I think—how much of that opening sequence is gameplay, and how much of it is cinematic? To what extent is the show adapting the actual game-y parts of The Last of Us, and to what extent are we watching actors play out scripted cutscenes? There were definitely one or two moments in the show where a character says something like, "We have to go find a car battery, and then go to this location," that made me feel like I should see some kind of list of objectives pop up on my TV screen, but those mostly come later.

Kyle: To the first part, most of the game up until Sarah's death is just cut scene or minimally interactive (i.e., walk around and/or look at some stuff). It also goes by much more quickly in the game, hitting the key beats and then getting to the time jump more quickly. The car battery thing also had me thinking "Objectives List," even though The Last of Us isn't really that kind of open-world game (there's a different plot MacGuffin driving Joel and Tess' movement toward Ellie in the game). You can definitely still see the game narrative's tendency toward, "We need some excuse to get the characters moving (which will lead them through shooty sections with lots of infected)" even though the shooty bits are largely missing here.

Anybody down there?

Andrew: What hit me about the opening sequence was that it did traffic pretty heavily in genre tropes, things like Hearing About Something Going Wrong on the News and Then Tuning It Out, The Animals Always Know First, Too Many People Are Trying to Run Away at Once, and Plane Full of Infected Goes Down. Fungal infection or virus, the active "zombies" we do see are recognizably 28 Days Later-y. Leaning on tropes isn't inherently bad! Predictable tropes, ably executed, is something I really liked about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds last year, to bring a wholly unrelated property into the conversation.

Kyle: As a game player, I don't know if I'm getting more out of the show, but I do get some added dramatic irony of knowing what's going to happen to the major players. I also keep comparing the characterizations to the game—for Ellie, especially, they changed her backstory and her relationship with the Fireflies and Marlene quite a bit. I'm wondering what you thought of Ellie in particular and the (somewhat unsubtle) slow reveal of what makes Ellie special...

Andrew: Yeah, that little blink-and-you-miss-it reveal at the end, when three other things were also happening, was maybe not as artful as it could have been—I think the show could have held off on that particular mystery for an episode or two and given it more room to breathe. I am curious to see more about her and who she is and what she can do. In Station Eleven, we see what happens to a young plucky girl when "normality" is stripped away and she's forced to adapt to a rapidly changing post-collapse society; the show's timeline means Ellie has never known anything other than the world the way it is now, and I hope the show explores that aspect of her character now that we know she's a smart and potty-mouthed kid who has Seen Some Stuff.

Dramatic lighting is almost its own character in the premiere.

Kyle: The generation gap between pre-crisis Joel and post-crisis Ellie is definitely a Big Theme in the game, and I'm looking forward to the show having even more space to dig into that. Ellie's smartness and smart mouth definitely won me over in the game, but I probably loved her even more because she was the computer-controlled NPC who frequently saved my butt or distracted an infected in a key combat moment.

Andrew: Yes! So much of what makes a game's story work is the element of self-insertion, or the dopamine hit you get because you made the story progress instead of watching it progress. A show can't get me as invested in a helpful side character who finds me items, partly because a helpful side character who is constantly handing things to the main character would be... weird in a show. (Sorry, now I'm imagining a BioShock TV show where we watch the main character stand at an ammo vending machine for 15 minutes every episode.)

Has the show changed anything else to help passive viewers get as invested in these characters as game players seem to be?

Kyle: So far the changes have mainly been taking the time to flesh out backstories and editing things to work without constant "you shoot a bunch of people/infected" breaks. The main story beats happen much quicker in the game, too, like they're eager to get players back to the action. In the TV show, they have more luxury to slowly explore what motivates these characters. At this point in the game and the show, though, it's mainly just been establishing the world and the characters (which both mediums do with a really efficient minimum of exposition). I'm looking forward to moments I know are coming that establish the relationships that make you care about these characters.

For an action-packed apocalyptic dystopia, there are quite a few quiet, almost domestic scenes.

It's gonna be OK, Ellie.

Andrew: Honestly, that was the part that felt the most generically video-game-y to me. These kinds of apocalypse games need to include either fascists or terrorists or both so that you can occasionally shoot at something other than a zombie. The show pretty clearly leans in the direction of the Fireflies, both because we're always supposed to root for the Rebel Alliance stand-in and because it's an Army guy who shoots Joel's young daughter dead in his arms. But if they factor heavily into future episodes, I'm going to need to know more about what they're fighting for, exactly.