Season one of The Last of Us has now been released in its entirety, and I can tell you that . . .
I think it might be a perfect show. Standing at the center are two also possibly perfect
performances — by Pedro Pascal as Joel, and Bella Ramsey as Ellie. For nine episodes we watch Pascal
and Ramsey as they breathe life into these two characters, who grow throughout the series to
trust, love, and depend upon each other. And as they do, we grow to love them, as well.
It’s no mystery why we fall in love with Ellie — she’s a smart, resourceful, foul-mouthed kid who
dreams of being an astronaut but had the bad luck to be born into a post-apocalyptic world
where there are no more astronauts. She’s known heartbreak and loss, been forced to endure and
to do terrible things in order to survive, and yet she has survived and is determined to keep
surviving. And, she carries around a book of brain-meltingly bad puns from which she quotes
frequently and gleefully — I hate kids, but she is the perfect child. Of course we love her.
But Joel . . . Joel is more complicated.
He’s a likable guy in many ways, and like Ellie he has a lot of pain and loss in his past that
render him extremely sympathetic. But, Joel’s also . . . kind of a murderer? We’re told — repeatedly,
by multiple characters — that Joel has done some pretty bad things since the cordyceps outbreak
began. And more importantly, we see him doing some pretty bad things during the course of the
series. He kills people. He tortures people. And the targets of Joel’s violence aren’t the faceless
canon fodder we often see in survival horror or action/adventure shows like this one — The Last
of Us goes out of its way to show us that the people Joel kills are human beings, with their
own understandable motivations, who have friends and family who love them and grieve their deaths.
Joel doesn’t kill these people because he’s evil or because he necessarily wants to — despite how
frequently we see him employing lethal violence, when left to his own devices, Joel doesn’t seem
like an inherently violent person at all. He kills as often as he does because he lives in
a world that regularly puts him in situations where killing someone else is the only option
if he wants to survive, or to protect the people he cares about, specifically Ellie.
But, the people who Joel kills are living in the same world. They aren’t evil,
either. They don’t deserve to die. They, like Joel, are just trying to survive.
That being the case, why do we love Joel? We do love Joel, right? That certainly seems to
be the case for most of us who have watched the show. I know I love him, that’s for sure.
I even love when he kills people! The creators and writers of The Last of Us — Craig Mazin,
who also created and wrote the 2019 Chernobyl series, and Neil Druckmann, who was also the
writer of the video game from which this series was adapted — do a great job of maintaining a tone
of challenging complexity, repeatedly denying us the reassuring comfort of moral simplicity.
And yet, I can’t help it — when Joel has to do some killin’,
I’m over here cheering him on. Get ‘em, Joel! Mess ‘em up good!
Despite how consistent — and artful — the show is about reminding us of the
complexities beneath what we’re watching, I think there’s a fairly simple explanation for why we
love Joel despite all the ugly, violent things we see him do: we’re on his side.
We’re on Joel’s side in part because he’s the protagonist of the story,
but that in and of itself isn’t enough. If Joel was some remorseless, sadistic serial killer
who murdered people for no reason other than that he wanted to, most of us probably wouldn’t be on
his side even if he was still the story’s primary point of view character. Imagine if Anton Chigurh
was the protagonist of No Country for Old Men — we’d probably still find him compelling,
we might even gain a degree of understanding of him, but odds are we wouldn’t be rooting for him.
We root for Joel not only because he’s the protagonist, but because the show
allows us to get to know Joel well enough that we can comprehend and sympathize with
his motivations. Yes, what he does is often extremely brutal, but we see why he does it.
The world Joel inhabits after the fungal outbreak is a world of stark choices. You can live under
the heavy-handed authoritarian rule of FEDRA in one of the surviving quarantine zones, or
you can take your chances in the wild. The first choice offers relative safety from the outbreak,
but at the price of living with a boot always on your neck. The second choice offers freedom,
but at the price of constant danger from not only cordyceps infected zombies,
but parties of armed raiders who comb the ruins of our civilization looking for supplies. It’s a
kill-or-be-killed world where in many situations the most dangerous thing you can do is hesitate.
Ruthlessness is a necessary tool for survival in this world, and Joel isn’t just fighting for
his own survival — he’s also protecting people he cares about — primarily Ellie,
but also his partner Tess in the early episodes of the series. Because of that,
and because we understand who Joel is and why he does what he does, we’re able to
remain on his side even as we’re troubled or repulsed by the bloody deeds he carries out.
I think that’s true even of Joel’s most extreme and protracted act of violence,
the rampage he embarks on to rescue Ellie from the hospital in the season finale.
In the season’s ninth and final episode, Joel and Ellie have finally completed their long
and perilous trek across the country from Boston to Salt Lake City. They encounter
the group of Fireflies — organized rebels who operate in defiance of and opposition
to the rule of FEDRA — and Joel meets with Marlene, the Firefly leader who entrusted
Ellie to Joel’s care in the first place, who has also traveled all the way from Boston in
the hopes of using Ellie’s immunity to cordyceps infection to develop a cure.
The good news is, the doctor is optimistic that a cure can be created. The bad news is, obtaining
the material needed to make the cure will require brain surgery — which Ellie will not survive.
That doesn’t work for Joel. Marlene tells him, this could save the world — Ellie’s sacrifice
could end this twenty-year nightmare of infection and allow humanity to finally start rebuilding.
But it doesn’t matter. Joel refuses to go along with it. Marlene orders her guards
to take Joel away and drop him off on the road somewhere outside the city.
Joel surprises the guards on the way out of the building, helps himself to their guns,
and proceeds to shoot his way to the operating room where Ellie is being prepped for surgery,
killing everyone he sees along the way. When he reaches the operating room, Joel kills the doctor,
scoops the unconscious Ellie into his arms, and walks out. In the parking garage, Joel encounters
Marlene again and kills her, too, then drives away with Ellie in one of the Fireflies’ vehicles.
This is not only Joel’s most violent act in the series, it’s also his most morally questionable.
Actually, from the perspective of anyone other than Joel it’s not even morally
questionable — it’s wrong. It’s wrong what he does. What the Firefly doctors were going
to do to Ellie is also wrong, but given the potential upside of it — creating a cure for
the cordyceps infection — I don’t think it’s as wrong as what Joel does. But . . . I don’t know
about you — when I’m watching Joel shoot his way through the hospital to get to Ellie, when I’m
watching him kill who even knows how many people, there’s never a moment when I’m not on his side.
Why does Joel do what he does? To save Ellie. Why is saving Ellie more important to him than
creating a cure for the infection that has toppled human civilization? Because Joel
is on Ellie’s side. And we get why Joel is on Ellie’s side, because we’re on Ellie’s side, too!
Those people in the hospital weren’t evil. They were trying to do something good — one of the best
things that anyone in this crumbling world could do, in fact. But in order to do that good thing,
Ellie would have to die. If Joel hadn’t killed them, they would have killed Ellie. The massacre
at the hospital is horrifying, chilling, but . . . what else was Joel supposed to do?
If you were Joel, what would you have done? I think maybe that’s a question the creators of
The Last of Us are trying to get us to ask — however we might feel about what Joel does on
a moral or philosophical level, if we were him, would we do the same things he does? Or rather,
would we make the same choices Joel does — chances are we wouldn’t be as good at it as Joel is,
since for all his insecurity about being too old, too slow, and too deaf, he’s kind of a badass.
Like all great zombie stories — and despite the hair-splitting done by some fans who insist the
infected aren’t technically zombies, this is a zombie story — The Last of Us isn’t really about
the zombies — it’s about us. Ordinary human beings are the heroes and the villains of this story,
and the decisions they are forced to make are the same ones we might have to make ourselves
if we were in their places. They struggle, they climb, they slip and fall, they fight to survive,
they live, they die, they make their choices, and they choose their sides — because whether
you like it or not, whether you want to or not, in life, that’s what you do:
you choose a side. And the side you choose says something about who you are.
I was talking about Joel recently with my best friend Jason Harding,
with whom I co-host the movie review podcast Late Seating, and Jason observed that Joel has a lot
in common with the character of William Munny in Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece of a western,
Unforgiven. Like Munny, Joel’s life has been defined by violence. Like Munny,
we see that Joel inspires fear in people who have heard of him. Both characters are haunted
by the past death of a loved one — for Munny, his wife Claudia; for Joel, his daughter Sarah. Both
characters’ stories climax with them picking up a gun and killing almost everything that moves.
There are important differences between the two: in Unforgiven, Munny seems deeply ashamed of his
history of violence, while Joel regards what he has done with cold pragmatism — he did what he
had to do. Munny seems to have been an inherently vicious and violent person prior to his reform,
whereas Joel is driven to violence by his circumstances. Munny’s violent ways are
long in the past when we meet him in Unforgiven, and he doesn’t fully return to those ways until
near the end of the film, while Joel kills people throughout the entire season of The Last of Us.
And, Munny’s mass-shooting at the end of Unforgiven is an act of retribution — he
takes revenge on the people responsible for the death of his friend Ned Logan. Joel’s rampage
at the hospital, on the other hand, is a rescue mission — he kills to prevent the death of Ellie.
The most significant thing Joel and Munny have in common, I think, is that in both cases,
despite the fact that they are ruthless, fearsome murderers, we’re on their side.
In Munny’s case it’s because the people he’s killing have it coming — they killed Ned,
Munny’s come to kill them back, and that’s that. In Joel’s case it’s because we want Ellie to be
safe just as much as he does and if those Firefly shitheads are fool enough to stand in the way,
oh well, I guess they have it coming, too! Both Unforgiven and The Last of Us compel us
to sympathize with violent people as they do violent things, in stories that don’t
glorify or sensationalize the violence they depict. We see the heroes do unheroic things,
unpleasant things, and we’re still asked to take their side — and we do.
When we watch a movie, or read a story in a book, we’re usually — not always,
but almost always — asked to choose a side. Typically, it’s the side of the protagonist.
We see the story through their perspective, and grow to sympathize with that perspective. Video
games do this in a much more overt way than other art forms, since they require us to experience the
story through a particular character in an active sense, where we’re not only seeing through their
eyes but controlling them, making them do the things the story of the game requires them to do.
There’s not necessarily anything profound about that — it’s just the way video games
work. But in this case, I do think it’s meaningful, and helpful in understanding
why we stay on Joel’s side despite all the questionable and sometimes upsettingly awful
things he does. In the game — and full disclosure, I’ve never played the game,
this is my understanding based on talking to people who have — you make Joel kill not only
zombies but also ordinary people who stand between him and his goals. You make Joel shoot his way
through the hospital to rescue Ellie. You make Joel kill the doctor who is preparing to operate
on Ellie to obtain the cure for infection. You don’t make Joel do this because you’re a violent,
bloodthirsty person. You make Joel do this because you won’t be able to finish the game if you don’t.
You make Joel do this . . . because it’s what you have to do.
That same insight applies to the TV series, only we’re not controlling
Joel — we’re watching him — watching him do what he has to do. And as we watch him,
we’re on his side — despite the brutality, despite the moral conflict we feel, despite the knowledge
that the people he’s hurting are human beings trying to survive the same way Joel is, despite
all of that we’re on his side, because whether we’ve played the video game or not, we know
that if we were Joel, we’d have to do those things, too.