The Last of Us is rightfully considered to
be one of the greatest video games ever created, and is probably the most consistently cited
example when arguing for video games as an art form, so it was only a matter of time
before someone saw the potential in a movie or TV adaptation. Everything seemed to be falling in place,
HBO and Craig Mazin, and even the game’s original writer and director Neil Druckmann
was coming on board. But after watching all 9 episodes of the first
season, I have to say, I feel let down. I’m not here to complain about the quote
un-quote “woke agenda”, because seriously, grow up. I’m not here to talk about performances
which I think were great, or the effects, or things like cinematography, because I think
the show mostly excels in any technical sense, but I think that falls apart as a basic adaptation
of the game and mishandles some of its most important themes. If you loved it, I’m not here to try and
ruin that for you, I’ve been keeping an eye on this adaptation ever since it was first
announced and I wanted to love it as much as anyone. But I truly believe that there are some deep
issues with the series and I felt compelled to share my thoughts. To start, the story was never really about
the infected or even the end of the world, it was always about Joel and Ellie. Everything else that happens in the story,
all of the apocalyptic world-building, and even the supporting characters are all there
to serve this relationship. And it’s clear that the show understands
this, we have some truly beautiful moments between these two characters, but I don’t
think it was nearly enough. Just look at the numbers, the game takes about
20 hours to complete, even more if you explore everything or play on a harder difficulty
setting, and you are strapped into Joel’s POV for that entire time, with obvious exception
to the Winter sequence or the very beginning of the game. That’s twenty hours to see these characters
interact, to watch as they slowly become more comfortable with each other, as they start
to trust each other, and eventually will do anything for each other. But in this 9 episode season, we don’t get
all that much time with Joel and Ellie on screen together. Two episodes are almost entirely flashbacks,
the opening episode doesn’t see them meet until the very end, and even in the other
six episodes where they actually interact, half of that screen-time is given to other
supporting characters or extended cold-opens. I get that they wanted to expand the world
and tell more stories than what we see in the game, and I love that idea in theory,
but not when it comes at the expense of Joel and Ellie’s story. They chose to have 9 episodes when they could
have done more, they chose to tell the story of the first game in one season when they
could have spread it across multiple seasons, and if they were going to keep it all so short
then they at least should have kept the focus tighter on Joel and Ellie, anything to give
this relationship more time, it’s the beating heart of the entire game and I feel like it
deserved more time on the show. Because Joel is a broken man at the start
of their journey, who only grows to care for Ellie after traveling thousands of miles,
saving each other’s lives countless times and going through absolute hell together,
fighting everything from infected to FEDRA soldiers to raiders and even cannibals. This is a man who has been completely frozen
in his trauma, like his watch, he’s still stuck in that one moment, and he isn’t exactly
eager to open himself up to that kind of pain again. We see early on that Ellie reminds him of
Sarah, a subtle look at his watch instills this, but he spends the next several hours
of their journey fighting against this feeling. She’s cargo, plain and simple, he barely
even acknowledges her until Tess dies. It isn’t until after hours and hours of
following alongside their journey every step of the way that we see him start to wear down
ever so slightly, through these small moments. The game gives us so many moments like these
that slowly bring them closer together, and the reason that this is so important is because
for Joel, opening himself up is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He’s awakening a part of himself he thought
was lost forever, the part that he tried to keep buried for twenty years, and like thawing
out from the cold, regaining that feeling is painful, excruciating even, but I feel
like it all just happened too fast on the show, where they go from complete strangers
to living and dying for each other after a couple of hours on screen together. I know it would be difficult to compete with
the game in this sense, but TV is where you’re supposed to be able to take your time in telling
a story, and I truly believe this relationship needed more of it to grow organically. I think that’s even why they made some crucial
changes to many characters and scenes, like a key moment with Bill. In the game, he’s reinforcing exactly what
Joel fears. "Once upon a time, I had somebody that I cared
about, and in this world that sort of shit’s good for one thing. Getting ya killed.” In the show the sentiment is the exact opposite,
where Bill tells Joel about he was just as broken, and it was finding someone worth saving
and worth protecting, that gave him a renewed purpose. “That’s why men like you and me are here,
we have a job to do, and god help any motherf*ckers who stand in our way.” It’s clarifying to Joel, not so subtly,
that he needs to protect Ellie, because the show is essentially doing a speedrun of the
game, this is already a third of the way through the season and we’ve had maybe an hour of
Joel and Ellie together, so for the rest of the plot to work, especially in the endgame,
they needed to make sure their relationship was moving along nicely, but it just sort
of feels like they cheated it to me. We get many of the same major plot points
that develop their relationship, but we lose so much of the emotional connective tissue
between those moments that they don’t carry a fraction of the weight that we see in the
game, and it’s why scenes like this were changed to make it all easier for the audience,
but in the process they just take out all of the subtlety and complexity. One of my favorite scenes from the game is
played almost verbatim in the show, but it falls apart because of another scene with
Joel and Tommy, as he explains his fears. “You think I can still handle things, but
I’m not who I was. I’m weak.” “You want me to take her.” “I’m just gonna get her killed, I know
it, I know it. I have to leave her.” But when you compare this to the game, we
see something quite different. Joel tries to get Tommy to take Ellie the
rest of the way, laying on the guilt for all the years that he looked after him. “I got nothing but nightmares from those
years.” “You survived because of me!” “It wasn’t worth it.” Instead of this emotionally vulnerable scene
for Joel, it turns into an argument that reveals why Tommy and Joel haven’t talked for years. Why Joel was only willing to seek him out
when he needed to, Tommy hasn’t exactly forgiven Joel for all of the things he put
them through, and here we’re shown again what Joel values, survival above all else. And it takes Ellie confronting Joel to show
him that truth. “I’m not her you know.” “What?” “Maria told me about Sarah.” “Ellie! You are treading on some mighty thin ice here.” This scene is all about Joel still being paralyzed
by the fear of getting too close to someone, and it’s in this moment that Ellie makes
him realize that he’s being selfish, intentionally distancing himself from Ellie for his protection,
not hers. “So don’t tell me I’d be safer with
someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared.” And it’s why this accusation cuts so deep
for him, he’s still not ready to admit this truth to himself let alone to anyone else,
he’s still fighting like hell to keep himself closed off. But in the show, Joel is entirely aware of
his feelings, openly discussing them at length with Tommy and quick to show his affection
for Ellie. “Do you give a shit about me or not?” “Of course I do.” “Then what are you so afraid of?” But all of this means that the entire point
of this original scene is lost in the translation. Because what this scene is really doing is
showing us that he puts his own feelings above Ellie’s. This eventual instinct to protect her might
seem virtuous, but it’s really coming from a place of self preservation, and that notion
is vital to the ending of the series. So this scene that reveals Joel’s inherent
selfishness becomes a scene that paints him as a flawed guardian who wishes for her protection
above all else, even if it’s no longer him that’s doing the protecting. It is just fundamentally not the same scene
anymore, even though much of it is a word for word adaptation, and this same thing ends
up happening a lot on the show for similar reasons. Where these seemingly small changes in character
snowball into massive problems for the story. But before we properly talk about the ending,
we need to go back and discuss the game and what made it so special. Action games and shooters are probably the
single most popular genre of video game to ever exist, but Naughty Dog used this formula
to help tell a story that was a meditation on the nature of violence. As Nathan Drake, we kill more people than
Dahmer and Gacy combined within every 5 minutes of gameplay but it’s never treated as anything
other than normal. In The Last of Us, the gameplay and the story
intertwine, this indiscriminate killing is at the core of Joel’s character and ties
in to one the story’s most important themes. These aren’t just random mobs to fuel the
fun gameplay, these are real people, and we become complicit in that violence just by
picking up the controller, this is one of the few games to confront us with the harsh
reality of what violence actually looks like. Not just in the literal visual sense and all
of the horror that comes with it, but how violence just leads to more violence and it
spreads like a disease even more contagious than the cordyceps. And the game doesn’t shy away from the man
that Joel has become. The first thing we do in the game is track
down someone named Robert, kill a few dozen of his men to get to him and try and beat
some information out of him, breaking his arm before he confesses that he sold the guns
we’re looking for, so Tess kills him. I don’t think the show needed to mimic this
exactly, I agree with the showrunners that the focus absolutely should be more on the
characters than on the action, but this kind of action is not just a relic of the gameplay
that needed to be abandoned by the show, action and violence are completely interwoven into
these characters, and this change directly effects how we perceive Joel. In the show, there is no confrontation between
Joel and Robert, he’s killed offscreen by the Fireflies. The first real act of violence we see Joel
commit comes later in the first episode, as he, Tess, and Ellie are trying to escape the
QZ. This scene comes directly from the game but
they made a few key changes. After Ellie stabs the soldier when he tries
to scan her, in the game, Tess and Joel take immediate action and kill both soldiers without
hesitation, whereas in the show, Joel actively tries to defuse the situation. Hands help up high, pleading with the soldier
to let them go, when they cut back to the night Sarah was killed, mirroring the shot
so perfectly that this FEDRA soldier might as well be the same soldier who murdered his
daughter, and in a fit of blind rage he beats him to death, but seems appalled at his behavior. And Ellie, who in the game is shocked by the
violence, seems almost fascinated by it here. The “violent side” of Ellie that they’re
foreshadowing. “Then he commits this terrible act of violence
in front of Ellie and she’s not shocked, she’s activated. There’s something about the two of these
people, they share this thing.” But a few things fall apart because of this
scene, the audience no longer sees Joel as a man who has become desensitized to violence,
we see a man who uses it as a last resort. But that is just not the character of Joel,
and as we dig into later episodes you’ll see why this is such a major issue, but it’s
also setting up Ellie like she was destined for this path because she has a violent heart. “You have a violent heart, I should know. I’ve always had a violent heart.” When the game instead reinforces the idea
that Joel has imprinted this behavior onto Ellie. She is frequently shocked by Joel’s brutality
throughout the game, in the cutscenes and even in the gameplay itself. It’s only after traveling together on such
a long journey, leaving so many bodies in their wake that she too begins to show that
brutality, and I feel like the show misses this main point. In the game, we start off playing a fun shooter
where we just want to kill things, and then we’re given a young companion that we have
to protect. In most games this invites some of the most
frustrating game mechanics ever created, but here we find that Ellie can fend for herself,
especially after she’s proven herself enough to earn a gun. The relationship we develop with Ellie as
our in-game companion mirrors the relationship she builds with Joel. We both start out worrying that she’ll be
a nuisance like in most other escort missions, a helpless NPC we have to constantly babysit,
but she proves herself useful to us, and then we start to warm up to her until we’re eventually
grateful to have her around. This idea is reflected multiple times throughout
their journey, where she constantly seeks Joel’s praise. “You did good back there, I figured you
should know.” “I won’t let you down with this.” It’s rooting their relationship and their
bond to survival itself. For Joel, there’s obviously something much
deeper happening on an emotional level. But for Ellie, she’s learning to associate
all of this violence with validation. Their bond is built through killing infected,
killing people, and their relationship deepens the more blood they shed together. Ellie fears ending up alone most of all, and
Joel fears true human connection, so she learns to become a valuable asset to him until he
sees the utility in keeping her around, and eventually can’t help but start caring for
her. The game does this by constantly shifting
between these intense moments of violence, reinforcing just how much they both need each
other out in this world and then contrasting that action with these quiet moments of humanity,
where they can just share a moment of levity, and you need both for this story to work. We do see a few great moments in the latter
category, the joke book at the end of Episode 4 is a notable highlight, but hopefully I’ve
already argued why I think we should have had more of these moments too, but where they
really fall short is that other crucial piece of the equation. I know the showrunners were worried about
desensitizing us to the violence too early, they wanted it to carry the impact that it
needed in important scenes. But I feel like almost every other flagship
HBO series, from Band of Brothers to Game of Thrones, always found ways to pack the
emotional punch that any scene needed, regardless of how much violence we had already been saturated
with. It’s all about the emotional context, some
violence can just fade into the background, maybe it can even feel cathartic, but if it
was a character we cared about, or a scene that was meant to be gruesome, they always
found a way to make it work on that emotional level. I think if anything, the concern comes from
wanting to make Joel more likable. In a game we’re used to killing hundreds
of random people, but they were concerned that a TV audience wouldn’t be able to empathize
with that kind of character. Because frankly there is absolutely no precedent
for audiences rooting for a killer. People just can’t stand morally grey characters
or anti-heroes, and we’d never sit through a movie, let alone a multi-season TV show
with a character like that as the lead. In all seriousness I just can’t wrap my
head around this mentality, they already cast the most likable actor on the planet except
for arguably Keanu Reeves, I don’t think it would take much for people to still empathize
with Joel even if they showed him in the same light as in the game. If anything I find it a little insulting that
they assumed gamers 10 years ago could handle more complex stuff than an adult audience
watching HBO today. Especially considering they still decided
to go for the same ending. But I don’t feel like this ending, or most
of the significant moments in the show feel properly earned at all, even when they’re
lifted directly from the game. Because they lose too much of the emotional
context, and they make too many changes in the characters for these scenes to work in
the same way. The show begins softening Joel right from
the beginning, he obviously still has his violent side, so does everyone in this world,
but instead of looking for the guy who took his guns and beating him and breaking his
arm and watching Tess execute him, he’s doing everything he can to find his brother
Tommy. Instead of killing the guards without hesitation,
he desperately pleads with him, he does the same thing again when faced with the sniper
who was taking shots at them. I know they weren’t trying to make an action
show, but the thing is The Last of Us was never just an action game, it took all of
the genre conventions of the third person shooter and directly intertwined those mechanics
with the story. The emotion and the action go hand in hand. We become accustomed to Joel’s violence
without reticence and then it turns that apathy against us, to keep us mindlessly killing
until the final moments where we want to do anything but, and it forces us to take that
action because this was always how it was going to end. We’ve seen Joel do too much to stop now,
but when Joel has been pacified for most of the season, it feels completely out of character
in the show. There’s a reason that a lot of the people
who were unfamiliar with the game have been complaining about the final episode, only
for people online to pile on saying some variation of “hey moron that’s the game ending too
so take it up with Naughty Dog” but have we learned nothing from the final season of
Game of Thrones? The problem that most had was not the ideas
themselves, but that everything felt rushed, and its worst moments felt completely out
of line for the characters we had come to know. When you cut out all of the emotional connective
tissue, when you cut out so much time for motivations to properly build, for characters
to organically change, these same plot beats don’t necessarily work anymore. I’m not inherently against making him more
sensitive or vulnerable than what we saw before, but after making so many changes that turn
him into a drastically different character, pushing him into the same ending just feels
inherently wrong. Because that’s not how storytelling works,
it’s not how life works. The choices we make, our actions shape the
direction or our lives, you can’t set a character at two different starting points
and send them on two completely different emotional journeys and expect for them to
arrive at the exact same place in the end. I think it’s why they made this significant
change with the character Henry to help the audience along. In the game, he’s just trying to get away
from FEDRA and join up with his group, but in the show, Henry reveals that he traded
information to FEDRA about the rebel leader, a man who was loved and admired by all, leading
to his torture and murder, and then clearly lays out the exact moral question the finale
will be asking. “So, still think they should take it easy
on me? Or am I the bad guy? I don’t know what you’re waiting on man. The answer’s easy, I am the bad guy because
I did a bad guy thing.” It just feels like another shortcut, instead
of taking the proper time to build these moments and force the audience to contend with these
moral ideas on their own, the show just asks and answers these questions for us, softening
the blow with Henry before Joel does something much worse. But this wasn’t the only thing that bothered
me in the final episode. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that
a ten-minute flashback at the opening of an already shorter episode was a strange choice,
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that we didn’t need a midichlorian explanation
for Ellie’s immunity, or that I’m the only who was frustrated when this guy forgot
to do the one simple thing Marlene asked him to, but there’s something much bigger at
play that started to fall apart well before the finale. There are practically zero infected to be
found anywhere in this world apparently, except for when our characters are surrounded by
rebels intent on killing them, and conveniently an entire horde of them comes in at the last
second to save the day, but most of the time you couldn’t be blamed for forgetting all
about the infected while watching the show. And I know it’s because they wanted to spend
more time on the characters, but I genuinely don’t understand why they see these as two
separate things. The action informs the character and the story. The whole point is that the infected are everywhere,
and even if you’ve cleared out a fair amount of them, you still have to worry about the
spores, something they abandoned in the series, but at every turn the game is establishing
that this world is an incredibly dangerous place. Yes, the people are the real threat, that
will always be the case in a good post-apocalyptic story, but the game makes it clear that there’s
plenty of danger to be found dealing with either people or infected, and often even
just the environment itself. But you need that feeling of constant danger,
whereas for Joel and Ellie in the series, it’s like a glorified hike with some camping,
where nothing goes wrong for hundreds of miles at a time. How many travel montages do we see, crossing
wide open landscapes without a care in the world. In the game we’re faced with an endless
gauntlet of death and desolation that when we finally get these moments to slow down
and just breathe, they feel like an oasis out in the desert. But most of their time on the show is already
a reprieve, as most of their journey seems to go pretty smoothly, and these moments lose
a lot of impact as a result, which not only shifts the tonal balance and the context of
their relationship, but the context of this world. In the game we fight through thousands of
infected along our journey, where every single encounter could lead to one single bite or
scratch or breath that ends it all. “My mask broke, don’t leave me to turn,
please.” These moments reinforce why the hope of a
cure is so significant. It feels like the single most important thing
that could help put this world back together, but in the show, where the infected are barely
ever seen and barely ever a threat, it makes a cure feel almost redundant. If people are the real problem, would a cure
even make anything better? And this question can still be considered
in the game, there’s no guarantee that a cure is even possible let alone that it would
fix the world, but in a world so overrun by infected and the constant threat of being
turned, it’s at least a promise of hope. The whole mechanism driving the plot is Ellie’s
immunity, something not so secretly borrowed from Children of Men, where we see a dystopian
future plagued by decades of global infertility, and the one woman who becomes pregnant after
all of this time. Her very existence brings hope to a hopeless
world, and that is the same function that Ellie has for this world. The whole point being that Joel selfishly
keeps this hope for himself at the expense of every human being on the planet. His refusal to let her go, to follow what
he knows that she would have even wanted, is the ultimate act of love but also an act
of ultimate evil. And his choice loses a lot that contextual
weight if the infected are barely a problem in the first place. That’s what makes this ending so perfect
in the game, the dominoes were set in motion from the very beginning. We see how violent Joel can be without a second
thought, we see how selfish he can be, we see how terrifying this world is and how any
single misstep might be your last, and we see how this world and Joel’s influence
begins to turn Ellie into a killer, a bond formed through violence and keeping each other
alive through every kind of danger imaginable. We know how important this cure would be for
humanity, but after Joel has opened himself to loving someone again, we know that nothing
is more important than her, not even saving the world. Which doesn’t mean that we support it, but
we do understand it. But the show cuts out so many of those vital
pieces that build their relationship, it condenses all of that organic growth into such a short
period of time for the audience, that this choice feels like it betrays everything we’ve
learned about Joel. The trick that the game pulls is by starting
you off as a coldblooded killer very early on, and you watch as he slowly warms to Ellie
and shows a softer side. But in the show this is basically reversed,
as we watch a typically non-violent man become a mass murderer, and I feel like that misses
the entire point of the game. The Last of Us is not a story of a surrogate
father and daughter becoming killers together, it’s the story of a man who infects his
surrogate daughter with this disease, the violence and the rage, who does something
so selfish, so unforgivable, that has devastating and far-reaching consequences for every single
character in the story. Without going into spoilers, that’s kind
of the entire point of The Last of Us Part 2, and it gets even darker and bleaker and
far more violent than the first game, so if they were already shying away from this stuff
in the first season, I’m really worried about what to expect next. The Last of Us is one my absolute favorite
games of all time, it inspired the only gaming video that I’ve made so far, and I wanted
to love this show as much as everyone else seems to, but I feel like they got some of
the most important pieces of this story fundamentally wrong, when it had every ingredient it needed
to be the greatest video game adaptation ever made. Granted, it still is, but that was quite the
low bar to surpass, and I have to say I was expecting something much better. Which isn’t to say the show was all bad,
far from it. The two flashback episodes in particular are
beautifully done, the cast was phenomenal, and there is much else that could be said
for its merits. But to be honest, it does remind me of that
final season of Game of Thrones, and I don’t think any great performances or effects can
save bad writing, which is something I can’t believe I’m even saying, especially considering
the talent behind this show, including the guy who made the original game, but I’m
genuinely unsure of how all this happened. It almost feels like they were ashamed of
its video game origins and tried to make a pure emotional drama, but the reason The Last
of Us was so powerful was that it was both an amazing action game and an incredible emotional
drama, arguably the best in all of gaming and better than the vast majority movies or
TV. But that action, the violence, the darkness
and the ambiguity is inextricably connected to the story, and I wish the show had done
more to keep some of these aspects of the game alive, or if they were going to be bold
and make a new version of these characters and this story, then to actually commit to
that and not just retcon everything back to the game’s ending for the last few episodes. Because they can claim all they want that
they were trying to do something new, they didn’t want to make the same Joel and Ellie
that we saw in the game or to tell an identical story, but come on, let’s be honest here. As it stands it’s like a show with a split
personality, where half of the time it’s actively going in the opposite direction of
the game and its emotional core, and then the other half of the time they’re copying
it word for word, beat for beat, and it just didn’t work for me and I’m hoping I’m
not alone in that feeling, but I’d love to know what you guys think. And even if you think that I got things completely
wrong, hopefully you can see that this all does stem from a place of love for these games. I just happen to think that they are still
the far superior way to experience this story, even if you can’t play it yourself and watch
a playthrough online. I think they are both absolute masterpieces,
and tell some of the greatest stories ever told in any medium, and if you loved the show
I can promise you, you’d love the games even more. But anyways, that’s pretty much everything
I wanted to get off my chest, I appreciate you sticking to the end, and I’ll see you
next time.
