The Last of Us Episode 1: A Boring, Pointless Adaptation
Let's face it: I was never going to like this show. But I'm duty-bound to watch it anyway.
Utterly Pointless
Consider your favorite novel. In it bullets fly left and right. The protagonist traverses epic set pieces. There's drama and psychological strain at every turn. You feel as though you know the main characters. You can hear their voices in your head, though you’ve never met them before. You can almost see the events as they're described.
But forever will you be relegated to almost. A novel might be as good as a film, as compelling and engaging, but you will never, truly see what appears in your mind. You will never be able to show it to others as you could with a film.
This is why novels are adapted into cinema. Everything about the presentation of the story changes with the medium. The story remains, but the form is transformed into something different: into something that can be seen.
It probably won’t ever live up to what you saw in your head. But it can still be interesting. You can still witness, in realized detail, what you were not able to before, and you will get to experience what others did when they read that same book.
This is what it means to take prose into a visual medium.
Now consider the various formal qualities of The Last of Us on PS3. I'll list them for convenience. It has:
A story
Dramatically blocked cutscenes, complete with cinematography and lighting design
Voice acting
A strong visual component and thoroughly realized world
Sound design
Music
15-20 hour playtime
All the elements of gameplay
Contrast this with the various formal qualities of The Last of Us on HBO, which aired its first episode tonight. It has:
A story
Dramatically blocked scenes, complete with cinematography and lighting design
Voice acting
A strong visual component and thoroughly realized world
Sound design
Music
10-15 hour runtime
When prose is taken into film, the form is completely transformed. But what transformation occurs when a video game is made into a television series?
There is no transformation. The formal elements are the same. But one vital element is lost:
Gameplay.
A Naughty Dog adventure game and an HBO TV series use the same tools to tell a story, save one.
Gameplay is a very powerful storytelling device. It is a huge boon to games like The Last of Us, which wield it to effectively build empathy and develop character in a way no other medium can.
A television show has no gameplay, but adds nothing of its own to compensate. In fact I have often argued in the past that even from scene-to-scene the TV show is at a disadvantage, because it's much easier to cast the exact right people and get the exact right performances when the actors can be motion captured and do not need to perform their roles in live-action.
Ashley Johnson would have been too old to play Ellie in a live-action TV show. Can you imagine what a loss that would have been?
There is no point in taking a game and making it into a TV show, except that it makes the story accessible to people who do not play games. For those of us who do, the transition is pointless. A novelization would have been more interesting. TV adds nothing.
That's why I say The Last of Us on HBO is pointless.
Utterly Boring
A pointless show could still be entertaining. So far, The Last of Us on HBO is not. This confused and badly scripted apocalyptic blunder appears to misunderstand its source material and its own genre, and the result is predictably disastrous.
I love The Last of Us on PS3. I do not love the rest of this franchise. It is likely that there was nothing showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann could have done that would have made me completely happy. It is nevertheless shocking that what they have actually done is so far off the mark. I will explain why.
The World
While the first game started in 2013, this TV adaptation starts in 2003. This is a minor change to the setting overall, likely done for no reason but to make the series set in the current year, but it raises questions about the characters and their histories that were not necessary.
Other changes are more offensive. The first infected we meet is an old lady in a wheelchair. Upon 'turning,' the cordyceps in her brain imbues her with such strength that she maims and kills both of her caretakers.
You know, like a zombie.
Undeterred by having their throats ripped out, these two caretakers, at first seen alive and bleeding to death, soon return from the dead themselves. They then stumble into the street after Joel and his family.
“Zombies” in The Last of Us are not zombies. They are human beings infected with cordyceps fungus. They do not rise from the dead. They do not come back to life. They needn't be shot in the head. If an old lady with brittle bones is infected with cordyceps and comes after you, she should be trivially defeated, like any crazed, weak, osteoporotic, wheelchair-bound grandmother.
Yet not only are the infected now imbued with zombie strength, they twitch and fidget, blood pouring from their mouths, eating flesh, while waiting for hapless survivors to stumble by their charnel pits. Those unfamiliar with the games could be forgiven if they thought these were the same zombies that appear in The Walking Dead.
That the infected are a biological and not necromantic form of life is one of the most important thematic elements of the original game. That Part II got this wrong was but one reason among countless others why it was total shit.
This was a very bad start for this new TV series.
The production design is certainly recognizable as The Last of Us (as a franchise). The Boston QZ looks more or less like it does in the first game. The city beyond the walls is bombed out, as should be expected. At night especially, at the episode's end, it looks just like the first real gameplay environment from The Last of Us (the game).
But something about it is rotten. The sets do not look real. The reason why has something to do with the depth-of-field and eye-melting color saturation. Every room is too small. The rain is not like real rain. The people we meet act like Hunger Games extras, not like the survivors of a zombie dystopia. Why does everything seem so cheap?
The Story
Any adaptation of The Last of Us was going to be forced to grapple with the fact that the game's first act is very messy. It is full of plot holes, because all that matters is getting Joel and Ellie together.
These are flaws. But they are small flaws, and we can forgive them in a video game.
A TV show isn't a game. It has nothing but story. Therefore its story must be changed.
Some small changes to the 2003 portion of the story are improvements. I had never understood why Tommy drove down a crowded street or how they were hit by another car when everything was so cramped. These things are adequately rectified.
But the new version of "20 Years Later," as the chapter is called in the game, is a boring plane crash of a TV pilot. While it successfully paves over some of the more obvious issues from the game, it introduces new ones while hideously prolonging the runtime.
The most notable thing about this version of The Last of Us is that the story is no longer told from Joel's point of view. We see Ellie multiple times before her introduction. We meet Marlene. We watch Tess' adventures.
The primary effect of disregarding subjectivity is that we aren't given enough time to know, learn, or care about any of the characters in detail, especially Joel. The lack of a primary narrator is a complete disruption of the game’s narrative structure. That aside, familiar as I am with The Last of Us, I saw nothing over the course of this episode's second act except changes made to close minor plot holes.
In the first game, this is what we play through:
Tess and Joel hunt Robert down because he's stolen their guns, or something. It doesn't matter, makes minimal sense, and serves no purpose except to get Joel and Marlene together as quickly as possible. Marlene has been injured during the recent crackdown on Fireflies; she bumps into Joel somewhat coincidentally at Robert's, but realizes soon enough that Joel is just the person she needs to help her smuggle Ellie out of the city--she can no longer do it herself due to her injuries. She takes Joel to Ellie and the two are introduced. The game starts.
Contrived, yes. Full of coincidences, yes. Still good enough for a TV show? Maybe. I would have tried to clean this up, were I in Druckmann’s position.
But this is what he had us watch instead (take a deep breath):
Robert steals a car battery from Joel, which Joel has been trying to get into his truck, because he wants to head to Wyoming in search of Tommy (for a heretofore unexplained reason). Tess is jumped by Robert's men and captured, but actually he only wants to tell her that he doesn't want to fuck with them, because he's afraid of Joel--even though he's clearly already fucked majorly with Joel by stealing his battery. The Fireflies engage in combat with FEDRA soldiers and Tess is taken prisoner, again, but she's then let free without any further conflict. She and Joel then hunt for Robert, looking to get their battery back, but when they get there they find that Robert and all of his men have been slaughtered brutally by Marlene--there were no prisoners taken. Meanwhile, while all of this has been happening, Ellie, a girl we know nothing about, has been chained up in a room at the Firefly HQ. Back at Robert's, it turns out this same girl Ellie is also there. For completely confounding reasons Marlene decides that this random smuggler, with whom she has no established relationship, should actually take Ellie from the QZ instead. Any references to Tommy being a Firefly are subtle, passing, and not nearly as pronounced as in the game ("His brother was a Firefly; told me I could rely on him if I were ever in trouble." That line is not present.).
This massive expansion of the time spent in Boston beyond Joel's PoV resolves two problems:
One: What did Robert actually take from Joel and Tess? Why is it important?
Two: How does Joel find Tommy later on in the story? In the game it's a coincidence (although not an especially improbable one). Here, time is spent in the first episode setting up where he'll later find his brother.
I would say the third was justifying the coincidence of Marlene's presence at Robert's at exactly the same time Joel and Tess get there, but in fact this is still a coincidence.
I can tell these small issues with the first game were things that always bothered Druckmann. They bothered him, so he set out to fix them. But there's a reason why these details aren't dwelled on extensively in the game.
They’re boring, and they DO NOT MATTER.
This first episode is incredibly dull. It's contrived and full of characters we have no reason to care about. The introduction of multiple PoVs muddies the narrative and makes the audience's brains hurt. We didn't need any of this information. It all gets in the way of the plot, and it’s all so fucking boring. Some changes could have been good, but focus is put in the wrong places. The characters are not adequately developed.
The Characters
The most surprising thing about The Last of Us on HBO is that the dialogue is cliched and poor. Early on, while Sarah is at school, hear a teacher say, "I swear you will need this later in life!" with all sincerity. While waiting for Joel and Tess to decide whether or not to agree to transporting Ellie, Marlene says something to the effect of, "Please take your time, I'm only bleeding to death over here!" The interactions with various 'NPCs' feel like nothing more than just that. What is there to that random guy Joel gives narcotics to? His dialogue sounds like any of the contextual characters you might interact with in the game; shallow, without personality, mostly uninteresting.
In a game we accept this. We understand, intuitively, the PC vs. NPC distinction. One would hope such small storytelling flaws would be resolved during the transition to a medium of pure visual storytelling.
Across the board the dialogue is less naturalistic than in the game. Countless lines have been changed to be more on the nose and less realistic. Joel has cannibalized Tess' dialogue word-for-word, bizarrely, probably because Tess isn't in enough of this episode for us to care about her. This is one reason among many why Joel no longer feels like Joel. And neither does Tess, nor Ellie, nor, surprisingly, Marlene, who looks and sounds exactly like Marlene, because she is Marlene. But she doesn't feel like the same character, because the style and content of the dialogue has been substantively changed.
To begin with: Sarah. When Outbreak Day comes, contrast the performance of this new actress with the girl we see in the first game:
The original Sarah is permanently paralyzed by fear. She has no agency, and that lack of agency is transferred onto you as a player through gameplay. When she wakes up and can't find Joel, she's scared. When she finds his phone buzzing with messages from Tommy, she's terrified. When her father kills the next-door neighbor, she's catatonic. She gets thrown into the back seat of a car and is helpless. She is a twelve-year-old girl in the apocalypse. The point is that she is powerless. She cries and withdraws and dies violently.
The new version of Sarah is a complete repudiation of her original depiction. When she hears explosions, she bravely goes out searching for Joel. When she turns on the TV and sees the message to “STAY INDOORS,” she steps outside to explore the neighborhood. She wanders into her neighbor’s house and steps in a pool of blood and still is not deterred. She literally does not stop until a zombie is trying to eat her.
Does this seem like the same person to you?
Transforming Sarah into a brave adventuress ruins her. When grown men watch her death scene after playing through the prologue, they are reduced to tears. It is an incredibly effective use of gameplay and cutscenes to tell a tragic story.
No one will ever cry when this new girl wearing Sarah’s name dies.
I have similar criticisms of “Ellie.” Bella Ramsey is dreadful as this character. This was inevitable; Ellie is Ashley Johnson. There is no way to adapt that character into a different medium. It was impossible. But some things could have carried over regardless of who was in the role.
I like that she can be angry and confrontational. This is a side of the character that was completely lost in Part II. I also like that she isn’t utterly humorless. But I don’t like anything else. “Ellie,” like the character from the first game, needed to be introduced from Joel’s PoV. The journey of the audience should mirror Joel's, as we're first apprehensive about escorting an annoying little kid across the country. Over time we grow to care about her. This is the engine of the story.
Contrast Ramsey and Johnson’s performances in the scene where Ellie’s infection is revealed to Tess and Joel. In the game, Ellie is utterly terrified. She crawls to a concrete pillar and feebly protests, “I’m not infected!” when shown the scanner’s results. She looks like she’s about to have a heart attack. She seems like a little girl, facing down two vicious criminals, who she just watched brutally murder two soldiers. In this scene, Ellie is certain she is about to be killed. She has no idea what to do. This is exactly how anyone would act in her position.
Ellie has not lived through being a video game character yet. She is terrified throughout Boston. She doesn’t know what the apocalypse is like. Joel and Tess terrify her.
“Ellie” is instantly confrontational. After watching Joel punch a soldier to death, she has no concern at all that he might turn on her. She stands up for herself. She yells at Tess! It doesn’t matter that she’s unarmed, or that these two criminals have no reason to keep her alive. She’s going to get mad!!
The dialogue in this episode is dreadful. That isn’t her fault. But the total flatness of her performance is. No little girl in her shoes would be confrontational. No human being would be at all. She is performing something that is totally unbelievable.
If this is how she acts in Episode 1, where does she have to go?
And Tess? We barely spend any time with her. What's there to say? In the game she's the brains. Joel is muscle, but Tess does business. Her death forces Joel to take the lead. But here we barely see her. We get no hint of her personality through dialogue; she doesn't feel like the same person. I have no idea who she is and no understanding of her relationship with Joel, other than that they seem to be physically intimate with each other. The scenes where she takes the lead, like where they interrogate Robert, have been cut.
Tess is a very memorable character in the game. Her death creates Joel’s ultimate motivation to take Ellie on this quest, which he never would have done otherwise. If she’s never developed before her death, the whole story implodes.
That brings us to Joel. I thought Pedro Pascal would be decent as Joel, but I was wrong: his performance is the show’s worst (so far).
It isn't his fault, really. It's 100% the dialogue and direction. He has no resemblance at all to the character from the game. Where the real Joel is laconic, this character is snarky and chatty. He isn’t closed-off and takes the lead when he should defer to Tess. He isn’t awkward or weird, which is what should define his stasis; the only way Joel knows how to survive after two decades of vicious banditry is by becoming emotionally stunted.
Joel is meant to be a survivor. He will do whatever it takes to survive. In the world of The Last of Us, that means really bad stuff. In the game, after seeing him lose his daughter, we witness him brutally murdering countless people for money, then torturing their boss—also for money. He is not a nice man. That is why he is alive.
This version of Joel is a great guy, though. He doesn’t torture Robert, and he can only bring himself to maybe-kill one soldier after having a comical First Blood-esque 'Nam flashback. This character is so nice that he can only inflict violence when his PTSD is triggered!
This is supposed to be the same character from the game? Did Neil Druckmann play The Last of Us?
Things will inevitably be different in a new medium. But what does this new direction for Joel tell us about the world? The game draws attention to its violence by having Ellie react in horror when she watches Joel blow out brains and smash skulls. She says, “Jesus Christ!” and “Holy shit!” when you claim scalps. Her dialogue draws a parallel between normal people and survivors in the post-apocalypse.
No such effort has been made so far by Druckmann and Mazin.
What is ultimately worse is that his apprehension toward Ellie has been eradicated. The real version of Joel is vehemently against smuggling Ellie from Boston. The reason is obvious: he doesn't get close to little girls anymore, as anyone would expect knowing his backstory. This sets up his arc.
Nothing approximating this happens with Pedro Pascal. He has no particular aversion to Ellie. He gives her an angry look, once, as she's trying to stab him, and then never protests her presence. The masterful scene where Joel and Ellie are alone together for the first time is replicated here, but Joel seems entirely comfortable and at-ease, rather than cagey and awkward.
Presenting Joel this way makes Sarah's death pointless and entirely flattens his arc. There will be no pay-off when he learns to love her if he doesn’t hate her at the start. Could there be anything more basic in storytelling?
And Just In General
This TV show feels less cinematic than the game's cutscenes. The pace of editing is significantly faster, the blocking is less interesting, and the performances aren't as good. Compare "Your Watch is Broken" and the encounter with the soldier beyond the walls: both are translated 1:1 into live action, but the game’s versions are infinitely preferable. They're more dramatic. They feel so much realer, and more brutal, and more truthful.
I think pacing is the main reason why. The tempo of the cutscenes in the game is much slower than their TV counterparts. View "Your Watch is Broken" back-to-back with the same scene from the show to see what I mean. Why do the most important moments feel rushed, when everything else is so drawn out?
Finally I want to comment that I'm disappointed no nods to gameplay were included in this episode. They may be coming yet, and there are scenes shot to look eerily like a video game (over the shoulder), but there are no bricks, no bottles, and Joel has his revolver--instead of the Colt Defender or Browning Hi-Power that he should have at the start of the game. Ellie is in the wrong shirt, and Joel takes the beaten soldier's AR-15 right away.
I guess Joel is playing on New Game +. He shouldn't get an AR-15 until the final level!
These are small details. They matter much less than character and plot. But they are so small that one wonders why they were changed. Would it really have been too much if Joel used a brick to beat that soldier to death? Really? Could you not put Ellie in her iconic shirt? Would it have cost too much? These things suggest a lack of care for the source material.
But then, as the pointlessness would suggest, this adaptation isn’t for me. It’s for my mom.
Eight to Go
I've heard from critics who have watched the whole series that Episode 1 is merely "the really bad one." They assure the audience that this episode is slow, but the others pick up the pace, get into plot, and carry things in the right direction.
I sincerely hope they're right. But after this snooze pandemic, I'm not optimistic. At best the rest of the series will be fine--worse than the game on every level, but at least more portable and easier to show off to strangers. At worst, it will continue to be even more boring than Halo. If so, I probably won't make it to the end.