On That "Last of Us" Twist
I used to recap new TV shows, mostly for The AV Club. It wasn’t my favorite gig in the world, mostly because the speed and the tone required for that beat didn’t really play to my strengths as a writer. I also dislike that, to get that sort of job, you have to be a fan primarily and then a critic since recap assignments usually go to the most obsessive (ie: nerd-proof) freelancers. I struggle when I write about anything with a presumed fanboy readership. I don’t like how much spot-checking needs to be done for recaps and/or primers and I can’t stand the standard missed-a-spot replies. And it is standard, since the amount of time most freelancers get to turn around stuff like this—as well as the sheer amount of detail that they have to pack into every recap—is usually not generous. Instead, I prefer to do Q&As since that lets me engage with the show and its creators in a way that I not only find more satisfying, but also complimentary to my strengths as a critic. My reflexes may not be quick, but my long game is good.
I think about all this as I tiptoe up to admitting that I didn’t care for last week’s game-changing twist on The Last of Us. It’s not even a twist, though, since the same thing basically happens in the original video game. Then again, I know I’m not the only one who’s watching the show without having ever played the game. I also don’t think I should have to be familiar with the game in order to object to the way that such a major event went down in the show.
Fan culture has poisoned so many wells and as somebody who grew up reading superhero comics in the ‘90s, I have to say—I don’t get why we care so much about what nerds think. For all of their ruinous and anti-creative post-’90s business decisions, comic book companies still inevitably realized that while nerds will always whine and bitch about every little thing on the Newsarama and CBR forums, they’ll still buy every alt cover, every second and third printing, and every crossover and tie-in event. So no, I do not understand nor do I particularly care for the preciousness surrounding fandom. I appreciate that writing about any given subculture demands a certain respect and care, but it shouldn’t be this hard to distinguish the line between respect and ass-kissing.
As for The Last of Us and its second season (SPOILERS BEGIN HERE)—I don’t like the way that they handled Joel’s death. I see a couple of related issues here and one of them is the creators’ dual impulse to hold viewers’ hands even as they schematically plunge a dagger into our hearts. It’s The Game of Thrones Effect, where the programmatic exploitation of sex and violence creates a simultaneously numbing and hyper-sensitive response. Here, the show’s creators ostentatiously signaled to viewers that they’re not really cruel and that there is humanity at the end of human civilization…right before they start stabbing.
I don’t really mind that they killed off the most charismatic lead actor in the show, though I am now anxious about how much time I have to spend with the other one (sorry, I think she’s a bit much). I’m more bothered by how little we know about Joel’s killers, as if the speed at which life moves in this show necessarily adds a kind of style-guide-consistent edginess to an otherwise senseless death. I also don’t care for the drawn out pace of both Joel’s execution and the post-murder wrap-up. It took me a few days to figure out why though. At first I thought that the show-runners were just taking their time to twist their proverbial knives. Now I think the buildup and comedown from Joel’s death may be even more objectionable for how much extra space it affords viewers to mourn the death of a character that, again, is killed partly out of fidelity to the video game source material and partly for shock value.
The show’s creators seem to want it both ways. They want us to take them seriously as quality TV guys—all that Directing!—but they also coddle viewers as if we necessarily must be fanboys, too. They juxtapose Joel and ol’ whatsername’s story with Maria and Tommy Miller (Rutina Wesley and Gabriel Luna), a married couple who fend off a mushroom zombie horde and then reunite with a tearful embrace at episode’s end. I liked those adrenalized scenes as I watched them, especially Tommy’s gasp-inducing showdown with a hulking mushroom berserker. Now I dislike those scenes in hindsight, mostly because they seem to pad out the episode for the sake of letting us know that some people survive, despite everything. Good people—and specifically good, socialized people—can also be survivors! Just not Joel. He dies with a sad look on his face, flat on his belly, and with his not-so-young ward screaming and fussing and reacting on our behalf. Now we must join her in carrying on, I guess.
To be fair, I don’t necessarily think that killing Joel was a bad idea. I’ve been complaining for years (and in print!) about how The Walking Dead’s fundamental problem is that it clumsily tries to hold its readers’ (and then viewers’) hands both through its clammy dialogue and tiresome dedication to keeping Rick alive. That was essentially Robert Kirkman’s mission statement when he began writing the comics—wouldn’t it be interesting to follow these characters around for as long as possible? Well, no, that removes a lot of suspense from a zombie drama. If death is literally walking around every corner, then why try so hard to keep one very dull guy alive? Surely I’m not alone in suspecting that brand maintenance is a strong motive since a fandom is more likely to invest in a single character over time than they might, say, a new one every season or trade paperback.
Days later and it now feels like The Last of Us played its audience by using an effectively nerve-wracking siege battle as the backdrop for a sad, mean sub-plot about wayward strangers who are more faithful to each other than they are to, uh, humanity? Mind you, I didn’t watch this episode until four nights after it aired. I somehow didn’t know the twist until then, but Jene already knew what was going to happen despite having never played the game. Me too, though only after Joel saved Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), his killer, right after another harrowing action scene which, like the Matango berserker showdown, feels cheap in retrospect given how it builds up to such a effects-driven twist.
It takes a moment for Joel to die and another moment for the scene to end. These are effects-driven choices and while they let out the tires slowly and with greater deliberation than, say, The Walking Dead might have, I think it gives viewers’ a little too much room to reflect on the savage pointlessness of Joel’s death. I also think the filmmakers simultaneously want to hold space for viewers and to also encourage us to revel in the sadness of the moment in a way that I find unseemly. Which is it, room to breathe or wallow? If they’re going to go there, then I really wish that they’d gone more quickly and with full confidence that the act itself will reverberate harder than any explicitly depicted build-up or in-the-moment reactions could. Otherwise, you make me wonder who this show is really for and unfortunately, the answers I’ve come up with aren’t very charitable.
The unthawing of the mushroom people and their sudden, hive-mind-driven actions are also meant to contrast with Joel’s killers unsteady, but methodical approach to killing him. These human assassins are slow and wobbly because they’re people trying to act like killing machines while the infected are all united by one mind. So one story’s adrenalized and the other is a woozy, heartache-inducing comedown. That jibes with what I understand to be the show’s M.O. of showing how even the most unsympathetic characters are still human. It’s still hard to focus on that humanity when we just met these characters and their reasons for killing Joel is presented as a twist (Remember me? Well, no, how could I?). Abby and her group might get their own backstory-heavy episode, but the effect remains the same—the rug had to be pulled out early on this season, suggesting that the effect is the main thing here, and then the humanizing, hand-holding drama. Meh.
I admittedly haven’t seen this past Sunday’s episode, which I gather addresses the girl’s grief and paves the way forward to whatever the hell comes next for the show. I also can’t stop thinking about the the disconnect between how me and Jene reacted to last week’s episode. She was gutted despite her foreknowledge. I wrote down my prediction that Joel would die in spite of the kindness he shows Abby—what a contrivance—and showed it to Jene right after Joel saved the day. At the time, I was eating a delicious slice of coffee custard pie from Four & Twenty Blackbirds and had had a mostly good, productive day, so I was in a great mood (the crust on that pie alone…). Jene was amazed that I was so unmoved by Joel’s death. I gestured to the pie, which she hadn’t really touched, and muttered happily about how good my day was. I think now I realize that I just couldn’t bring myself to care about a death that was not only foretold, but so well built up to, despite its relative sudden-ness in the show’s narrative, that it left me feeling…well, not much, really. Sorry to see Pedro Pascal go and will continue to watch as long as Jene wants to—she’s not a horror buff, but she does like the show and The Walking Dead, too—but yeah, this all seems calculated and well-packaged to the point of distraction.
It’s hard to stay focused once you know that the rest of the episode is about a Major Death. It’s harder still to hold onto the feeling that that death is meant to leave you with when so much of what surrounds this big moment feels like a way of half-preparing and half-apologizing to viewers for a major turning point in the show’s already errant trajectory. I blame fans and nerds and also the creators’ apparent desire to both please them and also be respected as sober, serious-minded dramatists. It’s one thing to be bleak and shocking and another to try this hard to have it all ways. Joel’s death felt like the quality TV version of Marilyn Manson going door to door to shock you and for no other reason than it not only played with viewers’ emotions, but also tried to give us a good long moment to join Joel and Ellie (sorry, I really couldn’t resist) in the slow-dawning realization that what video game players and jaded nerds alike knew was going to happen. The resulting scene, where Joel gets confronted, killed, and then left to die, felt both vicious and overly deferential in a way that I find very off-putting.
My friend Alan once speculated that one thing that makes music so interesting is that songs (or an album) change and evolve as you listen and relisten to them. You get a better grasp on why they work as your ears and mind traces over the same territory over and over again, discovering and appreciating new connections and ideas. I think movies and TV shows aren’t that different, only I have far less patience to rewatch quality TV shows. That’s partly a me problem since it’s essentially post-Lost burnout, something I keep thinking about as I continue to watch TV shows with Bill, my long-suffering and now former roommate. We watched Lost together back when it first aired and are still both wary of any dramatic series with a long narrative arc.
I’m also necessarily frustrated when I try to break down the dramatic structure and overall effect of individual episodes since each episode is obviously meant to be consumed and absorbed as a sustained unit that also happens to be part of a greater whole, both its season and its series. I don’t like reacting to something if I know that there’s more to come and it might explain a lot or simply clarify what was already clear from a single episode. I’m just not a recaps guy, I guess. I prefer to ramble about TV because, unless I’m breaking down, say, an episode or two of formulaic TV like Bar Rescue or Hot Ones—and I might, since that could be great fun—I don’t really see the point in trying to reduce this episode or its twist to a synecdoche. Still, the effect of that twist and the way it was presented doesn’t sit well with me, and this newsletter was designed to be a free space to rant a while. So I guess all of this is now your problem, too, oops.