What's Left Behind For The Last Of Us?
Did you have a happy Earth Day, Earthlings! May we now please look away from Season 3 of The Mandalorian, which exists in a galaxy far, far away where apparently we don’t ever need to see Pedro Pascal show his face to prove he’s in this show, and instead turn our attention to a series here on Earth that he very much was in, and very much responsible for influencing its potential future in a parallel universe where a pandemic turned otherwise fun guys into fungi?!? Sounds very Earth Day to me, so let’s dig into it!
Lots of us loved watching The Last of Us this year on HBO, regardless of where we watched the first season, or even if we’d experienced the video game as written by Neil Druckmann before he adapted it for television a decade later with Craig Mazin.
If, for whatever reason, you haven’t caught up yet, then I shall try not to spoil essential plot points and twists.
But I have some nagging questions that remain unanswered, and none of them have to do with whether Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) will survive their cross-country adventures, and for how long?
For starters, look at the photo above.
In that episode, where did Ellie get those clothes? How long did it take her and Joel to find new shoes that fit comfortably? She lost pretty much all of her belongings before that scene. They also drove a car in that episode. I used to drive a 20-year-old car, and learned the hard way that if I didn’t run the engine sufficiently, the car’s battery would die in about a week. Not even withstanding an apocalypse. So, um, yeah.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to be a factual stickler in a show that depicts the fungi apocalypse — fungocalypse? cordycopoalypse?
In other TV shows within the post-pandemic genre, showrunners work around showing the real work of world-rebuilding by narrowing focus on a ragtag band of survivors, competing for resources with other survivors and often endangered by zombies. Because dramatic TV narratives, much like mainstream media coverage, sadly rely on conflict for ratings. Seventeen years after Al Gore’s documentary came out, trying to have a civil conversation about the threat to humanity’s continued existence on Earth remains An Inconvenient Truth. Bring on the zombies instead!
But how do we rebuild in the aftermath of whatever may befall us? That’s exactly where I want to focus, believe we need to focus. How do you keep going in a world that has fallen apart (at least for humans)?
Adapting The Last of Us from PlayStation to HBO, inadvertently or not, has necessitated answering some of these questions simply by virtue of deciding what to include in a world 20 years after its apocalypse. A video game can jump from conflict to conflict. Filling the other minutes for HBO requires more attention to the details in between.
On another HBO limited series, Station Eleven, showrunner Patrick Somerville said about the second episode: “It’s a way to show how the end of world meant that meaning fell out of everything.” In a flashback in another episode, we see a young boy rushing to download a bunch of information off of Wikipedia so his group of survivors will still have access to it. He asks his mom, what happens if he simply deleted or skipped the page on capitalism? Her reply: “We’d just invent it again.”
Over on The Last of Us, we don’t necessarily see capitalism thriving, though, do we? Two decades after the cordyceps conquered humanity, we don’t see money change hands at all, really. Instead we get glimpses of different approaches to rebuilding — from Boston, where the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) rules by martial law and where they issue colored pieces of paper as payment for workers, to Kansas City, where rebels had overthrown FEDRA and instituted their own brand of fascism, to other scattered communities ranging from communes to cannibalism.
In the “making of” featurettes for HBO, Mazin and Druckmann prove more than willing to get into the weedy nerdy details about how to realistically depict a cordyceps taking over a human face, or replicating scenes from the video game, or explaining changes they made from the game to TV. “Part of the adaptation process is trying to figure out how to take source material that was built around gameplay, and port it over to a medium that is passive,” Mazin told reporters.
Perhaps my most pressing of passive questions: What else survived 20 years later?
And I don’t mean animals or wildlife. I mean everything else that us humans consider part of life on Earth. Outside of seeing a $5 bill produced by Ellie’s friend to test out an abandoned shopping mall’s photo booth, we don’t see money. We apparently no longer write books or songs, and forget about new TV shows and movies. Anything that remains is at least 20 years old. Which is sad for anyone with an imagination or a creative spirit to think about. Is anyone truly living post-pandemic in The Last of Us?
At least the survivors in Station Eleven manage to cobble together enough creatives for a traveling Shakespearean theater troupe for whomever has settled in Michigan. Did The Walking Dead ever get around to producing community theater, or were they too busy shooting zombies and each other to form a chorus line? But TWD played within the immediate aftermath of its zombie apocalypse, where at least you knew there were millions of bullets to be found. Two decades later, over on The Last of Us, I keep wondering who’s making bullets, or anything else, for that matter?
We do know that some of this show’s crew thought long and hard about keeping it real. As costume designer Cynthia Ann Summers told British GQ: “Cut to 20 years after the outbreak, and if we really get to the bottom of it, what's gonna survive? What's gonna last?” says Summers. “It's going to be workwear. Denim has been around for centuries in a sense, and it's been a global staple of our lives.” Denim and flannel prevailed.
Of course, people made clothes and shoes before the Industrial Revolution, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder how Joel ever found new boots in his size. Or who, how and why FEDRA made sweat suits for recruits such as Ellie to wear during training.
I almost found a kindred critical spirit in Phillip Maciak, who wrote this in The New Republic:
But the problem isn’t that The Last of Us is an episodic, monster-of-the-week adventure. The problem is that The Last of Us is spending a disproportionate amount of energy on world-building, character work, and even political critique that it then jettisons wholesale. The show keeps us moving while teasing us with questions and complications and psychological puzzles that it never has to answer or account for. It’s both a high-wire act and a little bit of a cheat. What happens when the show you’re watching murders its most interesting ideas every week?
Maciak’s issue, though, boils down to making us care about new characters only to ditch them (often in a figurative ditch) each week?
Or when several TV recappers noted with glee when Ellie gets gifted a menstrual cup — huzzah for recognizing the plight of the female teen! — I kept wondering, who still had spare menstrual cups to give after 20 years?! It felt more believable when Ellie found an unused tampon after going the extra mile while scavenging.
How often do these folks wash their clothes, or even change clothes? Joel and Ellie travel awfully light, that’s for certain.
We see one community that’s seemingly thriving, but that’s due to farming, hooking up to abandoned hydropower, and proper fencing. Everyone else: Who knows? How much canned food did everyone in Kansas City have stockpiled before Joel and Ellie showed up? Not much, as one character explains that neighbors betrayed each other for “medicine, alcohol…f-ing apples?”
Nobody seems short on working flashlights, though. And I do suppose that since the cordyceps wiped out so much of humanity, whomever survived would be able to make the existing stockpiles of everything last a lot longer. But 20 years later, they’d need to find replacements for a lot of things, right? Are there any auto mechanics still around?
The counterargument may be that this slows down the action. But they have plenty of scenes where characters just walk and talk. And they’ve shown how they happen upon some things. Why not try to explain the bigger questions of how to rebuild? When it comes to working automobiles, Joel does take a moment to explain to Ellie (and thereby also to us) how they’ve had to adapt to starting and driving cars thanks to how gasoline decays over time. And where there is comedy in The Last of Us, it often comes from Ellie only knowing life in dystopia, within her quarantined zone. So everything outside is new to her, and yet SO old to Joel that he’s often met with a moment of nostalgia combined with an immediate decision of whether to explain concepts such as seat belts or coffee to her. The reality for anyone still living among The Last of Us is a series of decisions about what knowledge and culture to pass along.
In our very real world, we typically don’t think about how we live day-to-day, and what we’d go to lengths to carry on for future generations. And yet, some are actively fighting over it right now — what books we allow kids to read, what history we teach them.
What is the culture war itself but a battle over what parts of our history get told and passed down, and which parts of our culture are allowed to participate in the conversation?
If we’re doomed to repeat the past if we do not learn from it, then what pray tell shall happen to us if we refuse to teach the lessons we have learned from history unto our children?
Or when our cultures lose touch with their customs.
Or when we scrap physical media for digital media, only to lose the latter completely thanks to an abandoned app, a bankrupted streaming service or an outdated technology?
Andy Warhol may have eerily predicted that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, but even the biggest celebrities can hope only to maintain relevance for 80 years — if a theory by holds true.
In our world, remaining relevant for four score relies on cultural cross-referencing, as new song lyrics, or lines in TV episodes, movies or books keep iconic names, places and things alive for future generations. We know “Four Score” because American culture has elevated and continues to praise Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But how many of you know what I mean by Chocolate Rain?
On a larger scale, we’re slowly coming to realize how short of a lifespan the Internet has, what with dead links piling up as old websites get lost or cleaned out entirely.
I’m grateful I kept most of my newspaper clippings, and also have attempted to salvage online IP of mine along the way.
The Last of Us provides a great thought experiment for how this plays out at scale.
They famously say you can’t take it with you.
But all that you leave behind only matters if there’s someone to carry it on.