Season one of The Last of Us soared between the majestic and the mediocre. But reviewing its successor is a lot less complicated, with the adaptation of Neil Druckmann’s video game sequel missing far more often than hitting – especially when it comes to addressing real-world politics.
At the risk of repeating myself, I have always had a complicated relationship with the The Last of Us video games. On a technical basis, I am in love with them. The team behind the game – including co-director Bruce Straley, who has been conspicuously erased from later ‘created by’ credits – built a stunning, fully-realised ecosystem; a portrait of what a world humans (largely) left behind might look like.
Amid the crumbling grandeur of cities nature has reclaimed, The Last of Us also used a startling and original strain of natural science-fiction to breathe new life into a genre that had long gone stale: zombie survival-horror. Taking the grotesque cordyceps fungus, which famously uses chemical signals to force small insects hosting it to climb to somewhere it can spread its spores, the game embellished on reality to give us a nightmarish new spin on a threat that many gamers had (laughably) come to see as one they could easily survive.
In games like Left 4 Dead, infected foes were essentially made of paper, and could be easily dispatched with the copious ammunition players found spread across any environment. In Resident Evil, the slow-moving hordes posed little threat as long as you managed not to get yourself cornered. Both games subsequently relied heavily on boss-events to ramp up the threat, and keep players on their toes. Amid this, the extremely dull “what would you do in a zombie apocalypse” ice-breaker became prevalent, because everyone was able to convince themselves these threats weren’t all that.
But in The Last of Us, it soon becomes apparent the answer to “what would you do in a zombie apocalypse” is probably die. Every encounter becomes life-or-death because of the erratic way the cordyceps puppeteers its hosts – swerving about, lashing out with teeth, arms and legs. In some cases, the fungus grows up around the vital organs of said host to provide a layer of armour. And even if you do manage to get through the game without seeing any of its infamously gruesome death-animations (you won’t), you spend enough time to realise that the fungal spores drifting through the air of so many indoor spaces you frequent present an even more pervasive threat.
All this is underwritten by Gustavo Santaolalla’s iconic score – a masterful construction, with intricate guitars and banjos supplemented by clanging, echoing bass cords; encompassing the beauty and the menace of the world we have been shunted into. These combinations of unique infection dynamics, stunning visuals, and a sweeping soundtrack, was the heart of what made the franchise so compelling to play. It also served as a crutch for Neil Druckmann’s scripts – which are extremely limited.
On-the-rails storytelling which takes the worst of humanity as the default setting, Druckmann’s stories in both parts of The Last of Us spend hours forcing gamers to torture and kill each other – before lecturing them about the way violence can only beget more violence. These great narrative arcs might work better if Druckmann had any idea how to construct scenarios of genuine moral equivalence; but this is a writer who suggested shooting people who planned to non-consensually harvest the brainstem of unconscious child (in an operation that almost certainly would fail, and destroy the only human being alive that is immune to a lethal pathogen) as a grey area. As it is, you sit through an on-the-rails morality lecture, in which you are repeatedly guilt-tripped for choices which either seem clear cut, or which you didn’t get to make.
Public and critical reception often picked up on this – but afforded the game a pass because of the game’s technical proficiency, and the comparatively strong writing for the game’s core relationship of Joel and Ellie. Unfortunately, that’s a level of critical nuance Hollywood executives repeatedly fail to understand, when scrambling for the rights to a video game adaptation – and Druckmann’s writing has been played as central to the success of the HBO show ever since.
As such, while moving into this format could have given plentiful opportunities for adapting and improving the story, more ‘adaptation’ has gone into the actual foundations of The Last of Us’ success. Divorcing entirely from Straley – who cited his lack of creator credit in the show as an example of why unionisation is important in the video games industry – changes in season one included removing spores from the lifecycle of the cordyceps. Meanwhile, Santaolalla’s soundtrack was padded out with much more conventional ‘made for TV’ music.
In season one, there were flashes of what might have been. We are granted passing glimpses of other stories in this world which are significantly more entertaining and emotionally engaging than much of the A-plot. So, while overall the series did not live up to the hype, it wasn’t something that deserved an outright bad-review, either.
Adaptation
When I reviewed the first season of The Last of Us, I anticipated that the follow-up would probably suffer from the same problems. In many ways, things turned out to be less complicated than I expected, though.
Spoilers ahead.
Abby – the daughter of the surgeon Joel shot to prevent him tracking Ellie and trying to cut her brain out again – leads a small band of military personnel across the country to wreak vengeance on Joel. After she succeeds, Ellie decides to do the same thing in response to the loss of her mentor – resulting in a hurried expedition from Wyoming to Washington. In reality this would have taken longer than a month – but it is breezed through in a matter of minutes.
Riding with Ellie and Dina, as their budding relationship flourishes, could have offered up time and space to talk about different parts of their life – or how the settlement of Jackson (the democratic community without private property, described in the first season as “communist”) might be better positioned to repel threats than conventional hierarchical settlements. We’re on the rails, though, so The Last of Us rewrites that old maxim about good-filmmaking, to insist, don’t show, just tell.
At one point, for example, Dina rushes through a backstory which we could have actually seen, describing how she came to the settlement after a raider slaughtered her family. But there’s no time for that – Druckmann’s plot about cycles of violence is all anyone came for, surely. The thing is, that plot is also crying out for embellishment, that seldom manifests – and when it does, the changes double down on Druckmann’s original shortcomings.
As Ellie and Dina arrive, it transpires that their quest to mete out violence on Abby crosses paths with a different bloody conflict. Abby is part of a military community called the WLF, who are at war with a religious sect, called the Seraphites. The two communities are at war, and cynically are shown to be unclear as to who started it in the first place – the only thing they know if they are both responding to being wronged at some point in their past relations.
In the game, this is a clear and ham-fisted analogy for Israel and Palestine. I’ve noted that to multiple people, who have to various degrees scoffed. Mainstream culture doesn’t overtly do politics – and I am apparently reading too deep into the source material of something made purely as entertainment. But as much as it irritates me to have to explain that all culture does politics, even when its creators aren’t blunt or obvious about it– this time, you don’t have to take my word for it.
In 2020, Neil Druckmann told The Washington Post that parts of Part II’s storyline were inspired by his childhood growing up in an Israeli settlement, in the occupied West Bank. In particular, he spoke about an October 2000 incident in which a crowd in Ramallah lynched two Israel Defence Forces reservists who entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city. He also told GQ Magazine this incident made him feel “intense hatred for the people that committed the lynching”.
He later came to regret that, and decided to explore “the thirst for retribution” in his writing for The Last of Us: Part II – with a particular focus on the endless cycles of vengeance that intense grief can inspire. But the thing is, as we already discovered, Druckmann is not a writer gifted with nearly as much subtlety as he thinks – and moral equivalency in particular is something he struggles with.
In the game, Druckmann’s stand-in for Israel is the WLF’s walled military community, based in Seattle’s CenturyLink Field. It is a clean, identifiably modern space, with books, medicine, electricity, a complex dedicated to training adorable and not at all ominous Alsations, and a glut of highly advanced weaponry. The problem is, they have these neighbours who just keep trying to kill them for undiscernible reasons.
The shrinking Palestinian territory is represented with a lush, green island off the coast of Seattle. There is plentiful clean water, crops grow well there, and there is permanent buffer zone between the two sides – the sea. There is no electricity, or medicine, but that is apparently the choice of the Seraphites, who are religious fanatics. Their main problem is they also have neighbours who keep trying to kill them for some reason.
In this world, the WLF and Seraphites should be able to just leave each other alone, and can be shown as being virtually as bad as each other for failing to do so. But the equivalency is completely artificial. Even years before a war in which Israel continues to weaponise famine against Palestinians, representing the Gaza strip as a place of abundance would have been disingenuous to the point of absurdity. But even if you were to apply the metaphor to the West Bank, there is no clear divide of the land – there is no sea between the two countries, and Israeli settlers are continuing to expand into the region. As to why ‘modern life’ including medicine and electricity might be there, painting Palestine’s stand-ins as having rejected those things is grotesque.
I will digress here, because most of what I have to say about the game has already been better articulated by Israeli journalist Emanuel Maiberg, writing for Vice. But I will cite his main criticism of the game’s story:
“A ‘cycle of violence’ is a tempting way to interpret this conflict, or any conflict, because it signals careful nuance while quietly squashing more difficult conversations. By suggesting that since both Wolves and Scars are equally implicated and equally in pain, we are free to stop thinking about the problem. All parties include both good and bad actors. We’re all human. Both sides.
This common, centrist position on violent conflict, while better than absolute dehumanization, is not coincidentally a world view that allows conflicts to drag on forever. Suggesting moral equivalence and a symmetry in ability between sides also invites us to throw up our hands and give up on better solutions because of implied and unexamined perceptions about ‘human nature.’”
Perpetuating the cycle
This finally brings me back to the TV show. As with the first season, there were opportunities for a team of writers to work with Druckmann, and make changes for the better.
In the case of both the WLF and the Seraphites, we could have been shown – rather than told – about the origins of their societies. There could have been insights into how they behave, survive, and how their environments and histories have informed their current struggles. Simple petty-minded brutality should not cut it when discussing Israel-Palestine, even in abstract terms. There are systemic factors at play, which have baked violence into the scenario.
We are treated to a five-minute vignette, showing us how the current leader of the WLF came to power – transitioning from faithful authority figure, to liberation terrorist, and (at some point, off-screen) back again. What were the social and political mechanisms that led to this transition? How do they inform the way he behaves now? This could have been an episode.
We get a minimal cut-away to a band of Seraphites attempting to leave the area all together. Before the group are slaughtered, we only learn superficial details about their society – and nothing at all about why they are trying to leave, or why that would be a problem for anyone. This should have been an episode.
In both cases, though, there is no time to flesh out any of this. Potentially because it would upset people. But equally because it would show up the superficiality of Ellie and Abby’s feud. In fact, one of the few big changes which seems to have been added into the plot seems to concede as much.
In the season two conclusion, Ellie takes a boat out to the Seraphite island. She has recently witnessed a young Seraphite being abducted to be tortured and or executed by the WLF – but prevented from helping. On the island, she is immediately lynched by a group of the people she momentarily considered aligning herself with – narrowly escaping with her life, before pointedly turning and fleeing from the island, even as a WLF attack causes it to burst into flames.
Apparently, this scene was cut from the game for the sake of flow – but Druckmann fought for its inclusion in the show. For the sake of flow, it is entirely detrimental; taking on the format reminiscent of a toddler giving a meandering re-telling of a Hollywood move (and they she went over here, and then she went back over here, and then…) and comes at the expense of a number of other scenes which could have been extended instead. But it also serves to discipline Ellie back into re-focusing on her self-centred quest for vengeance – keeping her head down and ignoring unfolding genocidal violence as a battle between “two equally wrong sides”.
As Maiberg put it, Ellie is now “free to stop thinking about the problem”. But what is most grotesque about this manoeuvre, is that 18 months into the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, we are being invited to see it the same way. We have just been presented a visual representation of the whataboutery that so many ‘liberal’ figures have deployed to try and deflect criticism of Israel. That is that LGBT+ peace activists would have their identity accepted in Israel (which brushes over a few details), but while they might criticise the violence directed at Palestinians, “if you went there, they’d probably kill you”.
In the show, Ellie is a lesbian. Having her attacked by a group of Seraphites – including a child, who cheers on the violence – exposing this character to this scene serves to utterly dehumanise the group. As she sails away from the ensuing carnage, we are being towed with her, encouraged to see the only way to address violence like this is to turn your back on it, focus on your own struggles. Don’t get bogged down in wondering about the ethics of wiping out an entire community when some of them might not be very nice.
Again, this comes after a seven-part series which steadfastly avoids asking important questions, or showing why anyone would be like this. Instead, as Maiberg said, “by masking its point of view as being even-handed, it perpetuates the very cycles of violence it’s supposedly so troubled by”.
Addressing the change, Druckmann himself has leant into this, stating:
“It was important to include this. It’s like one, it just shows, here’s another community that’s so xenophobic, that they are about to kill someone that would have fought for them moments earlier, that wanted to protect one of them. But they are not even curious to interrogate any of that. This is an outsider, and the outsider must be killed. Isn’t that right, child? And right, that the child agrees immediately.“
It is worth pointing out that even if dominant ideology in Palestine is homophobic, that does not mean there are no LGBT+ people living in the Gaza strip – and shelling them indiscriminately does nothing to liberate them. On top of this, it’s worth noting that activists from all over the world have visited Palestine over the decades, without being murdered on arrival as “outsiders”. But most bluntly of all, it is worth pointing out, someone being a bigot does not justify systemically wiping a group of people off the map.
In real life, Ellie is portrayed by Bella Ramsey, who is non-binary, uses they/them pronouns. Commendably, Ramsey has previously co-signed an open letter branding this kind of equation pink-washing. I can’t help but wonder what their thought-process must have been, going into this moment where their character – and their identity – is being so blatantly used as currency in such a reactionary allegory.
With season two concluding on this note, I am left wondering about season three (which is in actuality the second half of Part II of the video game). There was so little space for invention or elaboration in this season – save in the most deeply problematic of contexts. I know where the story goes from here; and while I long since gave up on it being any better in its attempts to handle more of Israel and Palestine, I know find myself believing it may get a whole lot worse.
This does render my relationship with The Last of Us’ HBO showa lot less complicated than with the video game, at least. I’m not minded to begrudgingly spend any more of my time on this dreck.