THE LAST OF US: Feel Her Love

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Without mentioning the title of that show that The Last of Us will always be compared to, the inherent problem of trying to write characters in a serialized drama set in a post-apocalyptic setting is that you’re going to have to make them occasionally very stupid in order to further the plot. It’s one of the reasons we stopped watching that show. Twenty-six years into a zombie apocalypse, anyone still alive is either going to be in possession of some fairly impressive tracking, hunting and survival skills or they’re smart enough to avoid situations in which they need to call upon those skills. That’s the theory, anyway.

Additionally, any adaptation of an existing work is going to suffer from the problem of characters surviving impossible situations because the original story requires them to be somewhere else later on. Plot armor, as the kids call it. Ellie and Dina can’t die in this episode because at this point, the story is entirely about their quest. But episodic television requires drama and conflict in order to keep the audience coming back to it. The result of this tension is inevitably an episode like this one, where the two leads act like idiots for reasons that make no sense, but survive impossible situations because they still have things to do in the story further down the line. It’s an issue with this kind of story that The Last of Us has largely avoided until now, which is partially why the show has been so critically acclaimed. It’s avoided cliches and it doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence – not normally, anyway.

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To be fair, we can’t say we’re literally insulted; just mildly annoyed at having to watch Dina and Ellie act like two suburban kids after being told repeatedly what badasses they are. The show’s been very clear that the two of them are unusually well-trained and able to take care of themselves in dangerous situations, but we had to watch them make one stupid decision after another in this episode. We get that Ellie’s need for vengeance is supposed to be overriding her common sense, but that would be easier to accept if she and Dina weren’t having calm, reasonable conversations about how reckless they’re being and then simply shrugging about it. Certainly, the entire mission into Seattle is a huge mistake on their parts, but we can accept why they’d take it on. It’s a lot harder to accept or understand less important details like why, for instance, Ellie would turn on the lights inside the theater while they’re surrounded by WLF members looking for them, or why they’d enter a large building in enemy territory without any idea of what’s inside it, or why Dina would spend hours triangulating maps and then just leave them behind for someone else to find.

Still, while it was annoying watching the two leads suddenly get dumber, it was in service to some incredibly tense action scenes as they got the lay of the land in Seattle and realized that they’re in far more danger than they originally assumed. Not only is the WLF larger and more well-organized than they thought, there’s also the deeply disturbing Seraphites to consider, the revelation of the “smart” Infected, and the potential game-changing (okay,yes; that pun is intentional) news that the cordyceps infection is now airborne. Any one of these points would be reason enough for the girls to turn around and head back, but they’re too far into their vengeance quest to suddenly decide to end it. Dina made it clear in recounting her origin story that literally everyone left in the world is traumatized and had to do some terrible shit in order to survive. It’s offered as a reason for why they’re so hellbent on this cycle of destruction, but it doesn’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny. If everyone alive is so traumatized that it makes them do terrible or stupid things, why did everyone else in Jackson immediately understand that going to Seattle would be a mistake? Aren’t they all traumatized people too?

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The story would be better served if  they didn’t try so hard to explain why Dina and Ellie are acting this way. They loved Joel and that’s reason enough. If you include scenes of them calmly discussing how fucked-up this course of action is, and then having them continue on it, it makes it harder for the viewer to accept what they’re doing. As dumb as Ellie was for chasing Nora all through that hospital while screaming that she was going to kill her, that final scene of her succumbing to her rage and brutality did more to explain why they’re on this mission than any of the conversations about how reckless they’re being.

This was the first episode of the show to frustrate us; the first time that it felt like the writing was taking the audience for granted a little. We can chalk it up to a minor bobble in a long line of strong scripts or we can look at it as a sign that the story might be going off the rails. But that final revelation that Ellie always knew what happened in Salt Lake City (we thought that was pretty obvious, but the show treated it like a surprise) makes it clear that, in the end, stories of vengeance are never as interesting as the love stories that inspire that vengeance. We’re looking forward to a much-needed Joel flashback.

[Photo Credit: Liane Hentscher/HBO]

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