The deck is stacked from the start. As the new season of The Last of Us begins, survivors of a massacre bury their dead. They’re the Fireflies, members of a scattered network of rebels fighting the fascist government that took over in the wake of the cordyceps outbreak that killed or zombified billions. (Ah yes, those happy golden bygone days when we thought it would take an evil fungus for fascism to come to America.) The perpetrator of the massacre was no jackbooted government lackey, though. Nor was it the monstrous and powerful infected known as “clickers” for their method of echolocation. It was Joel (Pedro Pascal), our player character — ahem, our protagonist.
And what choice did the writers — sorry, the Fireflies — leave him? Either he killed them or they would kill his adoptive daughter, Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Sure, if they did so it might enable them analyze why she’s immune to infection (she was exposed to a minuscule amount of the fungus during birth), and thus find a cure for cordyceps and save the world. But a real man does whatever he has to protect his family, or something.
The whole killcrazy climax to the show’s first season was frustrating because it set up a false binary, a choice between individual and collective needs. Reality is not a zero-sum contest between you and everyone else — only fascists believe otherwise — and genre stories that make such a conflict their central moral dilemma are playing fast and loose with how morality actually works.
We’re not five minutes into the Season 2 premiere when writer-director-co-creator Craig Mazin does it again. The surviving Fireflies are led by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who’s born-again hard from the ordeal. Not only does she want to track down and kill Joel with the other survivors’ help, she wants to kill him slowly. She repeats the word for clarity and everything.
Once again, The Last of Us is not-so-subtly nudging us in the direction they want our sympathies to go. If this were a simple case of a gaggle of survivors hunting down and shooting the outlaw who gunned down their kinsfolk, we’d probably still be rooting for Joel — he’s Pedro Pascal, for god’s sake — but we’d at least sympathize with their goal. Torturing Joel to death is a bridge too far when you’ve spent a season asking us to identify with the guy, in a story based on an art form where identifying with the protagonist is baked right into the game mechanics. We can’t root for Abby now. That’s The Last of Us for you: It’s always less complex than it looks.
I reviewed the season premiere of The Last of Us for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, the last of us, TV, TV reviews