Stealth missions aren’t very cinematic. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after watching The Last of Us, which in episode after episode depicts its protagonists crouching, skulking, and hiding from danger like Batman trying to take down the Penguin’s men without getting spotted in Arkham City. There’s plenty of room in action-thriller filmmaking for cat-and-mouse games of course, but it turns out it’s just a lot more exciting to watch people try to walk very quietly for minutes on end when it’s you holding the controller, and thus you at risk of getting shot by lunatics or eaten by fungus zombies. (In a philosophical sense, anyway.)
There’s really not much to summarize about this episode, which proceeds in literally linear fashion: Dina uses radio chatter to map out the location of WLF patrols and discovers all they need to do to reach the group’s hospital HQ is make it through a long unguarded building. The lack of guards of course means it’s full of infected, but since when has Ellie let that stand in her way? Especially now that the secret of her immunity is out with Dina, there’s very little holding her back from taking big risks, as long as she feels sure she’s the one in danger rather than Dina.
From there on out, the episode is basically a litany of Things Our Heroes Try To Avoid. The Wolves’ searchlights, a pack of Smart Infected, gun-toting Wolves, arrow-wielding “Scars” (Wolf slang for Seraphites), and more Wolves in another facility, where Ellie, on her own by now, encounters her quarry. Nora (Tati Gabrielle) is one of the members of Abby’s hunting party, and hearing her name on the Wolves’ walkie-talkies (the group isn’t careful about giving away names and locations because the Seraphites don’t use electronics and aren’t listening), she was able to track her down to the hospital, where she chases the woman down an elevator shaft into a sealed-off basement level.
It’s sealed for good reason. The whole long stealth level Ellie just made it through leads to a big revelation of the enemy’s latest mutation: a variety of cordyceps that enmeshes its victims in a wall of biomass, Aliens-style, and uses their lungs to aspirate spores into the air. Ellie is immune, but Nora isn’t, and Ellie takes advantage of her weakened condition to torture her the way Abby tortured Joel. According to Ellie, she knows full well the atrocity Joel perpetrated to save her all those years ago, and she doesn’t care. All of this is lit in the lurid reds of emergency lighting, like Ellie is now in a Nicholas Winding Refn show.
In a sense, she kind of is. The Drive director’s longstanding obsessions are vivid color and an examination of the psychic cost of righteous, redemptive violence. In his most brutal and uncompromising project, Too Old to Die Young, he and co-creator Ed Brubaker created a barely metaphorical world of unrelenting cruelty inhabited by violent people obsessed with punishing other, ostensibly worse violent people. The show quite explicitly links this mindset to fascism.
Does The Last of Us? The jury’s still out. I don’t think writer Craig Mazin wants us to be excited when Ellie picks up a metal pipe and starts smashing Nora’s legs with it while she’s already incapacitated. Separately, I don’t think shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are at fault for the segment of their fanbases that wanted to watch Tony and Walt kill their wives.
But — I’d say “needless to say,” but I’ve read some other reviews of this show — The Last of Us is not The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. It’s not a story of bad people occasionally tempted to do the right thing who back out for the sake of expediency, hedonism, and lust for power, the way those shows are. It’s a story of the most lovable girl in the whole wide world and the bestest dad a kid in the post-apocalypse could ever dream of having. You’re supposed to fucking love Joel and Ellie, and that colors how you’re supposed to feel about everything they do and everything that gets done to them.
These reviews have been arguing from the outset that this is a show that loves to stack the deck in favor of its main characters, and never was that more true than with Abby, Joel’s executioner. Capital punishment in a world with so few humans feels like even more of an obscenity than it does already, but fine, let’s say you accept the premise that the proper punishment for Joel’s slaughter of the Fireflies is death. Torture, which Abby promises and delivers, is a bridge too far for just about everyone — when it’s done to the big famous sexy adorable star of the show.
When it’s done to some rando we barely know, who just called that big famous sexy adorable star a “bitch” who got what was coming to him? When it’s done by the most lovable girl in the whole wide world at that? When she’s explicitly saying that she knows Joel is a mass murderer and is still torturing this woman for participating in his execution anyway?
Come on. Come on.
Mazin and Druckmann and the whole gang not only know a big segment of the audience is going to cheer, they’re counting on that segment to tune in! They’ve cultivated that segment of the audience with how they’ve written and presented Ellie, and Joel, in the past. The gruesomeness of Ellie’s actions gives the filmmmakers plausible deniability — TLoU in no way endorses blah blah blah — but the show is not constructed in such a way as to allow you to identify with or root for Nora over Ellie. Basic human empathy is the most it can reasonably expect to shield her, but it spends so much time on closeups of Ellie’s unforgiving face that it’s clear empathy is no more on the menu here than it is with Elon Musk.
To sum up: This is a sort of dull recreation of a kind of gameplay that’s a lot more exciting when you’re actually playing a game, culminating in the hero of the piece torturing a helpless woman. I can only envy you if you find this diverting.
Also, Pedro Pascal pops up in a dream or dissociation or flashback at the end, just to remind you of when he was on this show. I suppose it needs all the help it can get.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.