Everything about tonight’s episode is wrong. It has the tone wrong; it has the setting wrong; it has the story wrong; and worst of all, worst by far, it has the characters so, so wrong. For fans of the first game, its bizarrely-delivered dialogue and non-existent characterizations will be so maddening, so infuriating and dick-twisting, that it will seem like nothing more than parody.
Outright parody. Almost like a practical joke. Except this joke isn't funny.
The Flashbacks & The World
Like last week, the first five minutes of this episode are wasted on a flashback to 2003, when the cordyceps outbreak began. This change to the setting of the game is utterly pointless and does nothing but annoy fans of the game, but it shouldn't really matter. Whether the story is set in 2023 or 2033, the core of The Last of Us (the game) is the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Nothing else matters.
Which is why taking time away from Joel and Ellie with pointless flashbacks is such a gigantic mistake.
What The Last of Us (the game) is not about is the setting. I love cordyceps zombies as a thematic plot device. I love the aesthetic of our civilization in ruins. I love the design of clickers and the lore of the infected. But the game is not about these things. There is a reason why there are no lengthy scenes explaining how the infection was discovered or what scientific principles the writers adapted to justify the presence of zombies.
These things don’t matter. The setting is not Joel and Ellie.
Last week I argued that it was pointless to take a video game into a non-interactive medium, because what was lost outweighed what was gained. It could be said that the TV show is justifying its existence by expanding the world. The changes to the lore explain things away that didn’t quite make sense in the game. That explains the change in focus.
There are two problems with this idea:
15+ hours of relationship development between Joel and Ellie in the game have to be condensed down to a mere eleven episodes in TV format. We have no time to waste.
You can’t expand The Last of Us’ world, because it makes no sense anyway.
In the game, the cordyceps infection spreads through bites or spores. That's all we need to know. The infected thus become their own organisms, with their own lifecycles, like any other animal.
Astute players might notice something incongruous in this lifecycle. Something that doesn't quite work.
What do the infected eat?
The game’s answer is humanity. The infected become cannibals. But then how do they spread their disease? You can’t eat the thing you’re trying to infect. A parasite cannot turn you into a cannibal.
This is a massive flaw in The Last of Us' world. The cordyceps infection is meant to be a realistic take on a zombie outbreak, but it actually makes no sense. Why hasn't the pandemic wiped itself out after 20 years? How are these clickers surviving in a random basement for decades?
I’ll tell you how: it doesn’t matter. The game isn’t about that. Just don’t think about it.
The game is about Joel and Ellie.
Yet the TV series wants us to dwell on these details. Mazin and Druckmann have invented reams of lore to explain how and why the infected behave as they do. They want to smooth over gaps in the setting's logic.
Guess what? It still doesn't make any sense. The only thing we gain through shifting the focus from the characters to the world is that more attention is drawn to how little sense everything makes.
Now, there are no spores. The main method of transmission is bite. Now tendrils grow out of someone's mouth after he's infected, and zombies kiss each other on the lips. Now, rather than the infected being a marginal threat dealt with effectively by FEDRA (at the cost of all liberty), cordyceps grows under the earth, connecting different hordes of infected together, who can communicate with far-off hordes by sticking their tongue tendrils into the ground.
I'm sorry, what? Did you guys hear that? I must be making that up, right? There's no way that's real.
I’m sorry to report that this is really in the second episode. I'm not kidding. The zombies are psychically connected to each other through fungal sprouts. Like in a sci-fi B movie. Like in cheap supernatural horror. They're no longer human beings infected with a disease; they are pure Hollywood monstrosity.
This utter nonsense squanders the great advantage of cordyceps in the first place, which is that it could, conceivably, really happen, and is otherwise a scientific, rather than supernatural, explanation for the apocalypse. Why did Druckmann and Mazin decide to change the infected in this way? What were they thinking? Did they play the game? It's incomprehensible. The only explanation I can think of is that Mazin thought it would seem more “fungal,” but he clearly didn’t think through what it would look like once it was filmed. This insane bit of lore is so stupid and out of place that it seems like something from a video game. Then you realize that it wasn't in the game at all!
I know why spores are no longer spread through the air, though. I figured it out. I know why the characters couldn’t wear gasmasks.
Are you ready? Hold on...
That's right. Pedro Pascal didn't want to do another show where he had to cover his face. For that reason, and that reason alone, the entire lifecycle of the infected was changed.
The Last of Us is a Western
The Last of Us is a Western. Joel is a south-talking, six-gun slinging, horse-riding cowboy. He's a laconic Man With No Name archetype (perhaps better called The Man With No Last Name). Infected are equivalent to the hostile and unexplored wilderness. Hunters are Apaches and all other types of bandits and banditos. FEDRA is the corrupt Yankee government moving in from the East, and the Fireflies are a band of rebels, outlaws with a code of principles, fighting to keep Civilization away.
The Last of Us is a Western.
One thematic element of Westerns is that the characters don't use assault rifles. Usually you'll see shotguns, revolvers, lever-guns and bolt-actions, and sometimes an automatic pistol like in The Wild Bunch and the Red Dead Redemptions. But even in a modern-day Western like No Country for Old Men you aren't likely to spot an AK-47 or AR-15, and certainly not in the hands of the protagonist.
This is why, even though the AR-15 is the most common rifle in America and would be the weapon of choice for literally everyone in the post-apocalypse, Joel does not personally pick one up until the very end of the first game. It would be thematically confounding if he had a Gamer AR with a laser sight and a red dot, and his sidearm was a GucciGlock, and his revolver was a Mateba instead of a shitty old Colt.
Obviously these things do exist in the world of The Last of Us. But Joel is a cowboy, so he doesn't use them--not until the very end of the game.
Throughout all of Episode 2 of The Last of Us on HBO, Joel uses an AR-15.
The Characters
As predicted last week, nothing about any of the characters has been clearly established in this series. The relationships are inscrutable and vague. No one has any traits except Ellie, who has been defaced beyond recognition. I have no understanding of what these people want or why they're acting the way they are, unlike in the game, in which such information is conveyed effortlessly through dialogue and performance.
What is Tess and Joel’s relationship? I don't know. They've had one scene alone together and no meaningful interaction. What is there between them and Ellie? It's a business relationship, or it should be; that's how it is in the game. There’s no sense of that here. Who even is Tess? What has Joel been doing these last 20 years? Who are the characters? Aren't they supposed to be smugglers? Why are they so bad at everything?
Let's start with Tess and Joel. The structure of Episode 2 sees all of the minor fights with infected removed, in favor of one longer, stupider confrontation between Tess and Joel and two clickers. Joel, despite now having an AR-15, decides not to use it; instead he ushers Ellie along, who is then detected, and a fight ensues.
This fight goes on for seven hours. I timed it on my phone.
The clickers are eventually defeated, despite Joel being armed with a fully automatic assault rifle. At this point Tess is infected, like the game; like the game, her infection occurs in a museum of the Revolutionary War.
Recall the game. Recall that, when Tess is finally infected, so much has gone wrong. The party is split by bad luck. FEDRA on the streets is forcing them to move quickly. Their usual smuggling routes are full of infected soldiers. It's only at the end of this series of unfortunate events that Tess is finally bitten, right as the finish line is in sight.
Oops. Her luck had to run out sometime.
We've seen how badass Tess and Joel are by this point. Tess is smart and brutal in combat. Joel is a killing machine. The two are smugglers who have done this before. They are survivors of the apocalypse. This isn't their first rodeo. Unfortunately for Tess, it ends up being her last.
But we are still well aware of how cool she is by the time she makes her exit.
Nothing of the sort is present in the TV show. Here we see Tess and Joel do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Joel has maybe-murdered one soldier, and it was in an awkward, decidedly non-badass way. Tess? What has Tess done by the time her infection comes?
Nothing. She gets beaten up by Robert, arrested by soldiers, then wanders around for a few hours before killing herself.
Maybe we're supposed to presume Tess is tough. I imagine we're supposed to presume Joel is, too. But why should we? Looking at the show as a self-contained story, my only deduction is that these characters are fucking terrible at what they do.
Presumably because Mazin hates writing action, the very first time we see our lead characters fight, they come across as massively inept. Joel cannot kill two clickers with a fully loaded, fully automatic, military-grade AR-15? Who is this loser? How did he survive twenty years of this?
It's fine to have Joel and Tess make a mistake that sees Tess killed. That's what happens in the game. It's believable, after a night of intense violence, that they might make a small slip-up with vast consequences. But what isn't fine is to have the only fight the characters get into in the entire series so far be a complete fuck-up. When this is all we know about these people, we can only draw the conclusion that they themselves are fuck-ups.
We had to see these characters be badass before we saw them die. But we didn't. Early in this episode, Joel tells Ellie that he's killed dozens of infected. That was obviously a lie. How could he have killed anyone before if this is what he’s like? He and Tess must make up the worst smuggler team in human history. I don't have any reason to be invested in them, because they're clearly not anything special.
The game uses its first two chapters to develop its characters. The series instead wastes time with bad attempts at witty dialogue that feel jarring and fake in what should be a miserable world, and shows us flashbacks to 2003, and dumps exposition on how the infected work. But there’s no development of Joel, Ellie, or Tess. They stay strangers to the audience.
One last point: the word 'survivor' hasn't been used once in these first two episodes. The theme of The Last of Us on PS3 is what it means to survive. It is a very important word that recurs throughout the game. Joel uses it every time he justifies something horrible that he’s done. You cannot tell this story without that word.
They never use it in this series.
Everything so far is bad for fans of the game. It’s also incredibly bad from the perspective of a writer. Unless Joel is going to continue being a bumbling idiot through the series, the showrunners have utterly failed to establish his character. The rest of the season, especially the ending, won’t make any sense as a result.
But ruining Joel and Tess is nothing compared to what they've done to Ellie.
Last week I wrote about my disappointment with Bella Ramsey’s performance as Ellie. She never, at any point, seemed remotely scared about the position she found herself in. She was effortlessly brave, and therefore had nowhere to go as a character.
All this has carried through to the second episode. Ellie never comes across as afraid, or nervous, or anything but heroically brave. When Joel points his rifle at her, she snarks. When danger lurks and the way is blocked, she volunteers to go first. When the party is attacked by clickers in the museum and Tess asks if she’s okay, in the game, she replies, "Other than shitting my pants? Yeah. I'm fine."
In the TV show? Ellie is so brave that she says, “I'm fine. It's not like I shit my pants!”
Mazin has gone out of his way to invert a line that shows weakness and wit from Ellie, thus removing both from her character. The new version doesn’t even make sense. Why would you mention shitting your pants if you hadn’t shat your pants?
This character is not Ellie. She's endlessly snarky like a generic Marvel superhero. She deadpans like a blind chef in a morgue. Ellie is snarky and incredibly witty in the game, but her sense of humor isn't raw sarcasm. When she quips, it’s usually to herself. Ellie will stick up for herself when she feels she's being mistreated, but she's conscientious and obedient in danger. She respects that Joel is more experienced than her. She doesn't want to stir shit for no reason. She isn't an asshole.
Here, like Fake Ellie in Part II, she is pointlessly aggressive and endlessly disobedient. She argues over nothing. She talks back to people she believes might kill her. She talks way too much, in fact, and never demonstrates any nervousness or apprehension around strangers. Craig Mazin's dialogue is utterly awful and seems to intentionally sabotage the character at every opportunity. He, like Ramsey, like Halley Gross and even Neil Druckmann himself, has no understanding of this character or what it is that makes her charismatic.
Ramsey is dreadful. I never believe her on screen. She seems like a kid in an Ellie Halloween costume. There is no truth to her performance. She is legitimately hard to watch. But even worse, by making her so courageous so early on, the parabola of her character arc has been demolished. Ellie has nowhere to go and nowhere to grow if she isn't afraid. This was the exact same criticism I had of Joel last week. You cannot learn to be a survivor if survival is easy from the start.
Joel and Tess are generic, boring, and inept. But that's still not as bad as Ellie. She's unbearable. My skin peels off when she's on screen. My thumbs start digging into my eyes. She makes me physically agitated with every line she speaks. I feel personally mocked by this travesty of an adaptation of her character.
A few lines of dialogue have been worked in from the game. Many others have been pointlessly changed and thereby ruined or made nonsensical. But it's actually more jarring when lines haven't been changed, because these characters seem nothing at all like the people they are pretending to be. When Ellie and Joel look out toward the capitol and have their brief exchange, the effect is bizarre. It’s like being bludgeoned while having deja-vu.
So you'd think that I wouldn't mind the new dialogue. Actually, it's even worse. Take Tess' death scene. You'll find other people online complaining about how shitty this version is, but that aside, Mazin--who has the sole writing credit on this episode--has opted to remove Tess' lines. When she does speak, she carefully avoids using the words she used in the game, even though those words are the only thing that makes any sense. Clearly Mazin wanted to make that scene "his own,” but he utterly failed.
A TV show should have better dialogue than a video game. The Last of Us on HBO does not have good dialogue. Its writing is significantly worse than the source material. It's the worst I've ever encountered in any big-budget TV show.
There is one detail from the game I noticed this time: Ellie's backpack. They've gone through and, presumably at immense effort, replicated it 1:1.
Her backpack. Not her shirt. Not Tess' hair. Not Joel's guns. But at least Ellie has her backpack, right?
I thought this episode would have Joel distract a clicker with a brick or a bottle. I thought he would use Listen Mode to evade infected. I thought they would place the plank themselves to climb over the gap between those two buildings. I thought something from the game would be worked in.
We aren't even granted that much. The plank they walk over is, mysteriously, already there. The only thing is Ellie's backpack. That's all.
My guess as to why? Craig Mazin didn't bother to play the game. He just watched the cutscenes on YouTube.
I Hate This Show
The Last of Us on HBO is shit. It has no redeeming qualities. I would rather have fungus tendrils in my mouth than endure the next episode. But I'll give it one more week anyway.
.