Ellie doesn’t know the backstory, of course, but she takes Joel’s words on board. “I don’t think I can forgive you for this,” she says. Yeah, no fuckin’ shit, I wrote in my notes. He perpetrated a mass shooting and doomed humanity to a second dark age like a one-man Trump administration, on behalf of a person who would rather have died for the cause. (One of TLoU’s many false binaries is the idea that the only way the Fireflies could find a cure is by killing Ellie; another is that the only way they could bring about her death is through deception, rather than by respecting her autonomy and asking her for this sacrifice.)
But then she adds “…but I would like to try.”
To quote I Think You Should Leave, you sure about that?
I think it’s perfectly okay not to forgive Joel for what he did, actually. (No matter what Druckmann says in interviews.) I think it is in fact reasonable to demand that members of society, even one being actively atomized by environmental catastrophes and authoritarian governments, consider not only their rights but their responsibilities, not only the good of them and theirs but of everyone and everyone’s. I think a common good exists, and I think it’s meet and right to shun and despise people who do their utmost to destroy it.
Like most episodes of TLoU, this one makes the most of its gorgeous natural backdrop. Druckman has a real knack for theatrical tableaux — Joel watching Ellie climb a vine-encrusted dinosaur statue, Joel and Ellie walking around a model of the solar system, Ellie and Joel and Gail and Tommy gathered around Eugene’s body. These moments, where the action slows down so both the characters and ourselves can gaze in something in awe or horror or wonderment, are one of the show’s trademarks, and maybe its strongest aesthetic weapon. And again, Mazin is a frequently clever and capable writer; that moth business is going to stick with me.
But The Last of Us has chosen to prioritize a heartwarming father-daughter reunion over, quite literally, the salvation of humankind. The world is awash with men harboring this exact paranoid fantasy, that their proprietary interest in their wives and children absolve them of their bonds to broader humanity and absolve them of any wrongdoing committed in their in-group’s name. They run our country now, as they do others, and they’ve perpetrated real horrors against real people. I’m not interested in trying to forgive them. I think it’s worth considering what this show is asking us to forgive.
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, the last of us, TV, TV reviews