The Narrative Dead End of "Last of Us 2" on HBO

With the release of Last of Us 2 Remastered and the announcement of Kaitlyn Dever as Abby for Season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us, my mind’s been (yet again) swimming in reminiscences of how outstanding LOU1/2 were. They are the gold standard for story-driven, triple-A video game properties. They are also incredibly, and arguably justifiably, violent. In their adaptation to TV in HBO’s The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin glossed-over, foreshortened, or excised many of the long-running, violent episodes from the game. I think this is a narrative mistake that has weakened the characterization of Ellie and imperiled the story mechanics of a second season (and beyond).

Spoiler/Content warning: Obviously, spoiler warnings for the first season, first game, and the second game. Also, I’ll discuss a very post-apocalyptic horror hellscape of person-to-person violence…that also includes zombies

Expand for recap of "The Last of Us Part 1" video game that establishes Ellie as a proficient killer in melee and ranged modalities

In the first game, we meet Ellie, an astoundingly lucky 16 year-old girl who might be the key for rolling back humanity’s fungi-borne end – if only she can get to the last known scientist in the last known research hospital across a dangerous wasteland of infected and desperate humans.

She’s an innocent girl, in a hellscape world.

Her shepherd is Joel, an anti-hero, a bad man, a man who once hunted others – innocents! His enforcer boss Tess even says flatly, “We’re shitty people, Joel.” In the Boston-based phases of the game, we see what a lethal threat Joel is killing whole gang squads and paramilitary police single-handedly as an enforcer. And yet Druckmann humanizes Joel. We see how the outbreak broke him; we see what was left in that shell of a man; and we see that he can’t quite seem to die, but wishes that he could. Over time, we come to understand that he needs to feel redeemed; he needs to recover his humanity for himself; and his pursuit of restoring an idealization of innocence to the world can motivate him to do anything.

In the course of their adventures, Ellie learns Joel’s full vocabulary of violence: guns, weapons, traps, and melee fighting. While it starts as necessary, two together have better odds of course, Ellie adopts the flinty Hobbesian philosophy of Joel (“There was nothing we could have done for [the hunted].” “I know.”) as well as his deadly methods.

In the “Winter” section, Ellie’s education demonstrates its mettle. Trapped with a stranger (David), Ellie and David, thanks to to their swift action and surgical aim, survive. As the DLC extension “Left Behind” shows, when Joel is injured and vulnerable, all his lessons and their practice allow her to survive infected and scabrous human alike to get him to safety. Taken prisoner and escaping into a blizzard, Ellie overhears how her reputation has filled a village with dread: “The girl is deadly.” Ultimately the player makes good on that fear, massacring dozens of grown men to a showdown of ghastly horror: amid a sexual assault with a promised murderous finish, she gets the drop on her assailant and hacks his head to bits with a machete.

Before reaching the end of the game, the player knows Ellie has fully ingested the monstrous tutelage of Joel and can rack up body counts at his level. Will she be a monster? Will the weight of her deeds sink her like it did Joel? What kind of life will she make for herself – especially given that Joel has skewed her world with one gigantic lie? These are the questions the player asks as credits roll and a long-held deep breath is let out.

Yet the show, does not inspire these questions. Show-Ellie acquires a gun by finding it in an abandoned house. Game-Ellie snatches it after it is knocked out of Joel’s hand by a bandit (and then uses it on the bandit). Show-Ellie has no memorable, tense long-running violent passages. Game-Ellie endures stressful stealth and gunfight passages that I can still vividly recall 5 years after first play. In short, Druckmann and Mazin have failed to sell that Show-Ellie is a death-dealing monster – a precondition for telling the story of The Last of Us Part 2.

I can let your animal DNA demonstrate this gap. If you played the games, or if “your” Ellie is Game-Ellie, this image as being “what’s next for Ellie” makes catastrophic sense.

Original cover to “The Last of Us Part 2”

You know it’s not her blood. And you know that seeing this face of desperation against a wall is bad for the viewer. LOU2’s motion-captured cover is a tribute to Ellie’s actor Ashley Johnson. This is a face of sneering desperation. “Sneering” because her brain is justifying why your life is worth nothing. It’s generating contempt so that she can dissociate and kill. The hard-set jaw communicates a well of hurt that’s turned to fury and need for safety, safety that the viewer is blocking. It is a truly horrible (as in inducing of shiver) work of art.

If Bella Ramsey were to be photographed in homage to this generated picture, based on what I saw in Season 1, I wouldn’t know whether the blood was hers, and I would wonder who is going to save her (yuck). Show-Ellie has simply not been given scenes to prove that she’s as ferocious as Game-Ellie. Ramsey’s acting is capable and her dialogue is solid. The plot has simply failed to drive her character to be a lethal killer. It’s a vastly weaker character. Game-Ellie pretty quickly credibly starts hunting a paramilitary squad in LOU2. The audience hasn’t been conditioned to even imagine the possibility of Show-Ellie doing that.

And this is a pity, LOU2 says something profound about the nature of revenge and obsession. It shows people throw away good, nurturing, sustaining lives owing to the pursuit of the thin gruel of revenge. And Ellie and her antagonist, through their travails and interactions, say something staggering about forgiveness and love, too. But these lessons aren’t believable and the parallels don’t echo properly unless Ellie starts that tale as a clenched-jaw dealer of death.

By eliding or taming some of showcase battle scenes in the show, Druckmann and Mazin may have made it more palatable for a wider audience, but the austere, majestic narrative the games told is in jeopardy.