The Last of Us Series Review
The things you love will be murdered before you, one at a time. You're a bigot if you don't like watching them die.
I wonder what the paid-off TV critics and YouTube media commentariat are saying about The Last of Us on HBO now that the final episode has aired. It isn't hard to guess. It "REIMAGINES THE ZENITHS OF GREATNESS." It "PAVES THE WAY FOR ALL FUTURE VIDEO GAME ADAPTATIONS." It "OOZES ORIGINALITY AND CREATIVITY WHILE BRINGING MUCH NEEDED DIVERISTY TO THE WASTELAND."
Etc.
I haven't checked. I don't intend to. My mental health isn't fortitudinous enough to bear all that right now. Having no dignity and IQs approximating the average fungal spore colony, it seems unlikely that there's anything this series could have done that wouldn't have been met with critical effulgence. One needn't look further than Part II for a clear demonstration of that. These media commentators are so vapid that one pictures their filet mignon returning from the kitchen as instead a pile of dog feces; but the waitress is pretty, and causing a scene might lead to being kicked out, and the chef isn't supposed to serve waste matter--so they eat it, good patrons that they are, and report how delicious it was to all their friends the next day, and upon returning at some later date, make sure to ask, "Can I have more of what you served last time?"
The real question isn't why they do it. It's whether or not they've convinced themselves to like it. I truly hope they haven't.
The Puppetshow
Two months ago I wrote this about this series' pilot episode:
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.
This optimistic prognosis devolved immediately the next week:
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.
...there’s nothing more to say on the series. It’s dull, it’s cliched, it’s lazy, and it’s not The Last of Us. And while it might be fun to analyze something that’s really bad, it isn’t that much fun to analyze something really lazy and boring. It just isn’t worth the time. No one will remember this garbage by next year.
I've forced myself to watch every episode since (and I do mean forced). And every week I've come home, stared at my keyboard, and wondered what there might possibly be to say that I haven't said already.
The answer is nothing.
Episode 1 was not just "the really bad one." Every prediction I made came true. The Last of Us on HBO is a boring, poorly scripted, poorly acted rip-off of the video game of the same name. While its plot is basically recreated, nothing that actually makes the game work--its characters, its themes, its setting--has been replicated. Yet these things are not independent of the plot; they are what inform it. As such the series is utterly incoherent. It makes no sense. By the time you reach the end, you won't understand Ellie and Joel's relationship. You won't feel invested. You won't care. You won't understand anyone's motivations. You'll be wondering why Joel feels the need to commit any murder at all to save Ellie after she's spent nine episodes acting like a tremendous asshole to him, relentlessly, while also having no charisma or style that might make her endearing to be around.
There will be paeans sung on how amazing this series is. I know it. They're probably out already. And I could spend tens of thousands of words explaining why these people are braindead, why you shouldn't listen to them, why they're probably on HBO's payroll--but let's face it: I've done that already. Go read my last three reviews. In them I saw clearly, right away, why the show wouldn't work. I divined that the character Joel was set up to be was not compatible with the character he would need to be by the end of the series, killing an entire hospital full of armed guards, torturing two random cannibals to death.
I was right. The plot demanded Pedro become Video Game Joel at the end, but it makes no sense in the context of the series. They did it anyway.
The same is true for Ellie. They've cut out every bit of characterization. She's left with nothing but a shovel face and bad acting.
The themes, like stray ears in the abattoir, have been butchered to pieces. In the final scene, one of the most famous in all fiction for gamers of a certain age, Mazin has strenuously avoided using the word "survivor," as he has all series.
Why? I don't know. But the end result is that, like Ellie, the thematic core of The Last of Us is left with nothing. The actors might as well be puppets on strings, performing out a stage play adaptation of the game. Its only addition to the source material is boring, pointless flashbacks that add nothing but to detract from the time we might spend with Joel and Ellie--that, and a bunch of very, very poorly scripted dialogue. I'm serious when I say that The Last of Us on HBO has some of the worst dialogue I've ever encountered in a professional TV program. Scenes are dramatically overwritten; silence is never used to progress the story; everyone blabbers endlessly, in lazy, subtext-free speech that always communicates what's happening.
To be fair, everything is so poorly done that we should be grateful. No one would have any fucking clue what was going on if the characters didn't talk constantly.
So I won't waste any more time on this series. I won't point out how lazy the confrontation with David is. I won't draw out what's different. I won't point out that everyone has spent the last two months defending the utter lack of action in this series by saying, "It wouldn't be realistic!" only for the final episode to have such absurd, Tarantino-esq over-the-top action that it's farcical. I won't identify the reasons why the ending doesn't work if the vaccine is "100% real guys," why removing all infected has basically made the need for the cure nonexistent, and I definitely won't complain about how fucked up the pacing is.
You know why? Because I've done it all already. Everything in my first three reviews holds true (except the minimal optimism and praise offered; those should be considered revoked). This series is without merit. It's a worse-written, worse-performed, worse-realized version of the game. The writers and directors and actors had no understanding of the subject matter at hand and could manage nothing more than to parody it, like high schoolers who turn an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer into a stage play. Pedro and Bella are puppets on strings acting out a script loosely defined for them by the game, then poorly adapted in a handful of hours to the screen by Mazin. At no point did anyone care. At no point was any analysis offered of what makes the game work. At no point was any effort expended.
The Last of Us is lazy, pointless, and unbelievably boring. Its dialogue is excruciating. It has none of the magic of the game. It has some of the least interesting characters ever put to television. And if you disagree, my dog produced a meal this morning that I'm certain you'll find delicious.
It's in this little black bag. Here, try a bite.
Appeal Ad Astroturfum
One of my least favorite things in online discourse is when one side begins accusing the other of being "paid bots." Or "Russian shills." Or "homophobic trolls." This is Sony's favorite tactic for explaining away why their terrible games and movies are shit on all across the internet. It's very easy, and flattering, to imagine that anyone who disagrees with you is a troll or a bot or an FSB agent. Alas it's almost never true. It's almost exclusively an excuse used by idiots to justify not engaging with someone's arguments.
But I can't explain The Last of Us' acclaim any other way. I'm fully convinced that this series is the subject of an enormous astroturfing campaign. HBO and Sony have spread their tendrils throughout entertainment far and wide, like a neural fungal network that'll be introduced in Episode 2 and never mentioned again, and somehow convinced more or less every media commentator to praise what's in the doggy bag non-stop.
It's certainly laid bare the gangrenous rot of media criticism in 2023.
Only braindead idiots become critics, though, so it's easy to explain why they might be easily swayed toward exaggerating their praise for something so terribly constructed as this series. What makes less sense is that here, unlike for TLoU2, audiences seem to like the series also.
Or maybe they don't. I suspect most people who watch this show want some way to dull the pain of their miserable, pointless lives, and for that it serves the purpose adequately. They will forget about it on the morrow. They spend most of their viewing time on their phone, as a brave Atlantic correspondent boasted as one of the series' virtues. (No, I'm not joking. No, I won't link it. Don't read The Atlantic.) A few might like it more, a few might like it less; for the most part, they don't care.
But to go and give it 9.1/10 on IMDB? To sperg about it across every online forum, and social media? I don't believe it. I can't.
The scales tipped for me when I saw a Reddit thread after Episode 7 came out. The original posters were complaining that it followed the story of the game, but didn't capture what made it work. And to each and every one, one after another, was the same comment (downvoted, mercifully): "So you like it now, because it follows the game more closely?"
Every comment was left by a different user.
What are the odds, I ask, that eight different people will leave the same stupid comment on a single forum, for no purpose but to rehabilitate what is clearly a completely meritless television program? Slim enough for me to reach this conclusion:
Sony (and apparently HBO) learned its lesson after the online hammering Part II received. Total control of the narrative is required. You therefore do two things: astroturf the discourse to gaslight audiences into thinking the product is brilliant, and pay off every critic imaginable.
Your Facebook feed is probably similar to mine now. Every single thing in my feed, and I'm not joking, is an ad for The Last of Us. It isn't just saying when and where to watch it; it's demanding that I recognize it as THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION. There are literally hundreds of these ads, and each is filled to the brim with comments from supposedly real people saying "oNlY rIgHt WiNg CuLtUrE wArRiOrS dOnT lIkE tHiS sHoW bEcAuSe RaCiSm!!!"
It's an effective strategy. Poison the well. Create the Matrix-like illusion. Gaslight audiences into liking your piece of shit The Last of Us adaptation. It seems to have worked.
It would explain the production budget, too. This series supposedly had a budget of $15 million per episode. That makes it one of the most expensive TV shows ever produced. Where did that money go? There's no action. There are no special effects. There are hardly even sets. There's nothing to this that should cost more than a few hundred thousand dollars an episode. Marble Hornets had higher production value.
Well. I know where the money went. $15 million dollars per episode for ads, fluff pieces, bots, Colombians who will comment on articles about how brilliant the series is...yes, I think that could vacuum up all that money rather quickly.
The Last of Us on HBO is not anything close to what it's been made out to be. It's close to Velma in quality. It could hardly be worse. I found it literally unwatchable; I was clawing at my eyes whenever anyone tried delivering the horrible dialogue, and laughing whenever the story took absurd twists--like Joel and Ellie casually walking out of the village, on high alert, full of cannibals, without any conflict at all.
This is how companies do things now. They would rather gaslight you into watching their shows than actually make something good. You'd better get used to it; if it works here, it'll only get more common.
Please do not watch this series. It is a completely failed adaptation. It has nothing going for it at all. I cannot name a single thing that I liked, except that it was only nine episodes instead of ten. If you want bad apocalyptic fiction, just go watch The Walking Dead instead. It's also shit, but it's not quite as boring, and at least there are a few characters worth caring about.
That's really what makes me the most infuriated over The Last of Us on HBO. Not that they shat all over one of my favorite stories, that means so much to me, but that it actually made me nostalgic for TWD. I'll never be able to forgive Mazin for that.