The aggravation I felt while watching the 59-minute long second episode of The Last of US on HBO will be hard to convey in text. In my review last week, I departed on a positive note, writing that, at worst, the series will merely be mediocre. Not offensive and maybe not even boring (going forward); just mediocre. I didn't think it would get any worse than that.
How naïve I was. Everything about this night'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.
Not a high school stage play, as I suggested last week. Outright parody. Almost like a practical joke. Except this joke isn't funny.
The Flashbacks & The World
Anyone with any understanding of the first game's narrative structure will be screaming at his TV during this episode's introduction. Like last week, the first five or so minutes are a flashback--this time to the world of 2003, when an Indonesian fungal scientist first was made aware of Cordyceps' leap to humanity.
The change from 2013 to 2003 was irritating last week. But it's a minor detail, in the abstract, to modify the date of the apocalypse. Thus I didn't complain about it too much.
Returning to 2003 is going way too far. It feels like a slap in the face of the fans. That outbreak day was in 2013 was of massive importance in the first and even the second games. You'll notice, if you go play The Last of Us: Part II again, that many of the houses have PlayStations in them--PlayStation 3s. Time has been taken to replicate the world as it was in that year. It's one of those small things that makes me smile whenever I play either game.
Getting this so wrong feels like an intentional deviation to frustrate fans. A good adaptation would not make these pointless changes.
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 its lead characters: Joel and Ellie. Everything else, even the rest of the cast, serves only to aid their journey. Joel and Ellie are what the game is about.
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 ruined civilization. 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.
It doesn't matter. What matters is Joel and Ellie.
Perhaps, one might say in response to my criticisms last week on adaptational purpose, what the TV show is doing to justify its existence is expanding the world. Making changes. Explaining things away that didn't quite make sense in the game. That's why there's a shift in focus.
Except it's pointless, because when you really get down into it, nothing about the setting of The Last of Us makes sense anyway.
In the game, the Cordyceps infection spreads either through bite or spores that linger in the air. That's all we need to know. The infected thus become their own organisms, with their own lifecycle, all designed to prolong their existences...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 provides the answer--humans. They're cannibals. But how exactly is it that hordes of infected grow, when any interaction between humans and infected leaves one or the other dead? Cannibalism and parasitism are mutually exclusive systems of proliferation.
This is a massive flaw in The Last of Us' world. The Cordyceps infection as a take on zombies that are living and realistic is actually nonsensical. How hasn't the pandemic wiped itself out after 20 years? How are these clickers surviving in a random basement for decades?
It makes no sense. But it doesn't matter, because the game isn't about that--it's about Joel and Ellie. All else is a backdrop.
But the TV series wants to dwell on these details. Mazin and Druckmann have invented an entire new lore to explain how and why the infected operate 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, with pointless flashbacks that eat into runtime that could instead be spent developing relationships, is that more attention is drawn to how little sense everything makes.
Can you see the problem?
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 give each other kisses on the lips when they're feeling lonely. Now, rather than the infected being a marginal threat dealt with fairly effectively by FEDRA (at the cost of all liberty), Cordyceps grows under the earth, connecting different hordes of infected together, who can commune with far-off places 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.
No. That's really in this 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.
I hope I don't need to explain--for the third time--why this is completely wrong for The Last of Us. It's too close to supernaturality. It dispels 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. This insane bit of lore is so stupid and out of place that it seems like something from a video game--until you realize, wait, that wasn't in the game at all!
I know why spores are no longer spread through the air, though. I figured it out. I don't know why they thought fungal psychic powers were a good idea, but I do know why the characters couldn't (briefly) 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 in The Last of Us was changed.
I hope you're happy this prick is playing Joel. He's the one to blame.
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 Law 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 firearm 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 Joel 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 waves around an AR-15.
If you needed more proof that Mazin and Druckmann have no understanding of the first game, there it is. On the most foundational thematic level they have this story completely wrong. They did not know what they were doing. Not only are the characters ten lightyears off-base, they've lost track of every single theme.
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 there to Tess and Joel? 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. But you'll get 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 twenty-seven minutes. I timed it on my phone.
The clickers are eventually defeated after an hour of floundering, despite Joel being armed with a fully automatic assault rifle. Herein Tess is infected, like the game; as in the game, her infection occurs in a museum of the Revolutionary War.
Remember back to the game. Remember 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 bit, 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 thing before. They are survivors. This isn't their first rodeo. Unfortunately, for Tess, it ends up being her last.
But still. We're well aware of how cool she is by the time she makes her exit.
Nothing of the sort is present in the TV show. In the HBO series, 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 beat-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? To me, looking at the show as a self-contained story, my only deduction is that these characters are fucking terrible at what they do.
Because Mazin is a fucking idiot who didn't want his M-rated game adaption to be violent, the very first time we see our lead characters in action, they come off as massively inept. The fight scene in the museum is horribly done. Who is Joel? He should be a survivor. Actually, he's a fucking idiot who can't even kill two clickers with a FULLY AUTOMATIC, FULLY LOADED AR-15 IN HIS HANDS.
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 clusterfuck, where they do everything wrong and get killed. How a character is introduced is very important, and this introduction is 100% wrong.
We had to see these characters be badass before we saw them die. But we didn't. Thus Tess deserves what she gets; she's a fucking idiot. Same for Joel. He tells Ellie early in the episode that he's killed dozens of infected, but that was a fucking lie. He, like Tess, is actually incompetent. Together they form the shittiest team of smugglers in human history. God knows 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 the 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 never is there any development of Joel and Ellie and Tess.
One more point here: the word 'survivor' hasn't been used once in these first two episodes. The entire thematic basis for The Last of Us on PS3 is that Joel is a survivor. The grounding principle of Ellie's character is that she's struggling with her identity as a survivor. This is the fundamental question behind the entire story: what does it mean to survive?
It isn't present in the TV series. They don't even use the word. That is the worst travesty of all (so far).
All this is grossly offensive in the context of the game. It's also bad storytelling; no effort has been made to set up the characters and explain their motivations, abilities, and capacities for agency within the plot. I couldn't begin to tell you what themes are being explored. And unless Joel is going to continue being a bumbling idiot through the series--unlikely--then the showrunners have utterly failed to establish his character, and this episode receives an F- on the "TV writing quality scale."
But the ruining of Joel and Tess is nothing compared to what they've done to Ellie.
Last week I wrote about how bad Bella Ramsey is as Ugly Ellie. My main problem was that 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. Ugly Ellie never comes off as afraid, or nervous, or anything but ultra-brave. When Joel points his rifle at her, she snarks. When danger lurks and the way is blocked, she volunteers. Attacked by clickers? In the game, when asked if she's okay, she says, "Other than shitting my pants? Yeah. I'm fine." But in the TV show--well, she's so brave, she says, "I'm fine. It's not like I shit my pants. LOL!"
Is that a normal thing for a person to say? Does that line even make sense?
Ugly Ellie isn't Ellie. She's endlessly snarky like a generic Marvel superhero. She deadpans like a blind chef in a morgue. It's true that Ellie has wit in the game, but her sense of humor isn't raw sarcasm. She rarely quips, and when she does, it's to herself ("Stay right on my ass" "Can't miss it"). 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 these strangers. Craig Mazin's dialogue is truly awful and utterly cringe-inducing; it is nothing like Ellie from the game. He, like Ramsey, like Halley Gross and even Neil himself, has no understanding whatsoever of this character or what it is that makes her charismatic. I truly believe that no one involved in this franchise gets the magic of Ellie except Ashley Johnson (and maybe Bruce Straley). The rest have no clue what it is that makes her work, and have suicide vest-levels of determination to see to it that she's misrepresented in whatever she appears in.
Ramsey is dreadful. I never believe her on screen. She seems like a kid in an Ellie Halloween costume, but certainly nothing like Ashley Johnson--and not her own character, either. 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. It's now more like a graph of the 2023 stock market.
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: these characters cannot have arcs when their introductions are so terribly flubbed.
Joel and Tess come across as generic, uninteresting, and inept. But that's still not as bad as Ugly Ellie. She's fucking unbearable. My skin peels off when she's on screen. My thumbs start digging into my eyes. Her performance (and dialogue, too, to spread some blame around) is what makes me say that Episode 2 of this series is parody. Ellie feels like a parody of herself. She makes me physically agitated with every line. I feel personally mocked at this travesty of an adaptation of her character.
And on the dialogue, a few lines have been worked in from the game. Many others have been pointlessly changed--see above. But it's actually more jarring when lines haven't been changed, because these characters seem nothing at all like the people from the game. When Ellie and Joel look out toward the capitol and have their brief exchange, the effect is bizarre. It's some strange concoction of deja-vu and being roofied.
So you'd think 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. She says nothing, then something unnaturalistic, and carefully avoids using the words she used in the game. Clearly Mazin wanted to make that scene "his own" somehow, but he failed on every level.
A TV show should have better dialogue than a video game. The Last of Us on HBO does not have good dialogue. In fact its character writing is stilted and surreal and almost always poorly-delivered. It is significantly worse than the source material. It's the worst I've ever encountered in any big-budget TV show.
Don't just take my word for it. Like last week I watched this episode with my parents, and when I showed them the original cutscenes they both agreed that the dialogue in the game is better. More naturalistic, snappier, less idiotic, and doing far more to convey the needed information in a truthful way. This is to say nothing of performance, which is also universally better in the original; the small detail of Joel looking at his watch before crossing the plank toward the capitol? Pascal didn't think to work that one in.
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.
Nope. 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
I hate it already. I'm not having fun writing about it in the slightest, which is quite to the contrary of Part II. Even Halo was more enjoyable, to a certain point. 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. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll develop symptoms of infection by then and I won't have to write another review. But I'm not hopeful.
There are countless more nits to pick. I have pages of notes on my phone. But it's pointless. This series isn't interesting enough to dissect, which Part II certainly was; it's just bad and poorly done. The arcs for the characters have been completely misrepresented. The tone is erroneous. The acting is painful. The changes to the world are insulting. It feels like a parody of The Last of Us, not like an adaptation. Any respect for the subject matter is superficial and fleeting. As a TV series it will be forgotten within months, because without good characters there's nothing for audiences to remember.
Of course, then, it's no surprise that it has a 10/10 on IMDB.
Those people are retarded. This show is shit. Don't watch it.
By the way, now is probably a good time to mention that I've been posting my old TLoU fanfic on Royal Road this month. It started as an attempt to capture the voice of Ellie, after the end of the first game, in first person. At this I think I've done a good job, but it's not easy, and I don't have enough time to waste it on such utterly pointless projects. But I definitely do a better job at depicting Ellie than Mazin and Gross have; thus you can find it here. I hope this does something to prove that I actually understand who these characters are.