Warning: this article contains spoilers for episode one of The Last Of Us. Proceed with caution.
Oh. My. God.
The Last Of Us is the kind of show that forces you to hold your breath for far too long, nails digging tight into the arms of the sofa, muttering expletive-laden prayers to any deity that will listen, all because you’re so invested in its characters and you’re so damned desperate for them to make it. Even when, deep down, you know there’s no chance in hell they ever will.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, let’s wind it back to the beginning: a cold open, and a 1968 televised warning from John Hannah’s Dr Newman, an oddly aloof scientist, who suggests that we are all doomed to die at the hands of a…
Well, of a fungus.
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“Fungi seem harmless enough,” Dr Newman tells the host of the TV panel show he’s sitting in on. “But many species know otherwise, because there are some fungi that seek not to kill, but to control.”
It’s worth noting here that the fungus which causes The Last Of Us’ fictional zombie outbreak is based on an actual, real parasitic infection known as cordyceps, which – much as we see in the game and the series – infests and grows within a host until fungal growths erupt from the body, driving them slowly mad in the process.
“Fungi cannot survive if its host’s internal temperature is over 94 degrees, and currently there are no reasons for fungi to withstand higher temperatures,” smiles Dr Newman, safe and well in the cool climes of 1968. “But what if that were to change? What if the world were to get slightly warmer? Now, well, there is a reason to evolve…”
Climate change warning issued, he continues: “Any [fungus] could become capable of burrowing into our brains and taking control – not of millions of us, but of billions of us. Billions of puppets with poisoned minds permanently fixed on one unifying goal: spread the infection to every last human alive by any means necessary.”
He adds ominously: “There are no treatments for this, no preventatives, no cures – they don’t exist, it’s not even possible to make them. [Humankind] will lose.”
A nightmarish version of the 00s
Sarah (Nico Parker) acts as our eyes into the world, which, for the most part, looks very like the 2003 we all remember – right down to the butterfly bedsheets every single millennial girl owned at some point in their teendoms.
We wake up with her in her almost oppressively pink bedroom. We watch her whip up some eggs for her dad, Joel (Pedro Pascal), and sit down to eat breakfast with him. And, as they head out to the driveway, playfully teasing one another, we instantly get a feel for their effortlessly positive father-daughter relationship: theirs is clearly one which is built on love and mutual respect – and one made all the deeper for the fact that they are a unit of two.
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Much of the first episode belongs to Sarah. Rather than head to work with Joel, we go to school with the teenager, where we doodle in textbooks and ignore the dull entreaties of her teacher to listen to a lesson she is sure will come in handy sometime in the future (not the future we’re rapidly speeding towards, Miss!).
We hear, just as Sarah does, snatched soundbites from increasingly ominous news reports – and we watch as she takes a covert trip into the city, where she spends her hard-earned allowance on getting her dad’s watch repaired for his birthday. Where she is ushered out onto the street by the shop owner’s frightened wife, who orders her to go home… before pulling down the shutters.
Watch the trailer for The Last Of Us below:
Sarah is our anchor in a world which is teetering on the brink of chaos. And so, when her dad slips away later that same night to bail Uncle Tommy (Gabriel Luna) out of prison, those who haven’t played the original videogame begin to worry incessantly: surely Joel is safer with Sarah, our MVP, than he is out there in an increasingly hostile world?
So, when Sarah wakes up to find her dad missing, she’s naturally frightened – particularly as the TV is ordering her to “stay indoors” and wait for military assistance (never a good sign). Rather than follow this excellent advice, though, she decides to check in on her elderly neighbours… and quickly discovers that they’ve been zombified.
Thank god for Joel, eh?
There’s no place like home
Everyone in the world has someone that feels like home, and for Sarah that’s her dad; when she hurls herself into his waiting arms, you know that she feels safe. You know that she believes that everything is going to be OK, even in spite of the swarms of cannibalistic infected roaming the streets – and, for whatever reason, we feel it, too.
It’s oddly claustrophobic, travelling in the car with Joel, Tommy and Sarah; the world outside is drenched in darkness, the horrors that surround them only made clear when and if their headlights fall upon them.
“Is [the virus] from terrorists?” asks Sarah. “Are we sick?”
“No,” her dad replies instantly.
“How do you know? How do you know we’re not sick?” she responds, asking all the questions that we, the viewer, are keen to get answers to.
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Now, anyone who has played the videogame knows what’s coming. Of course they do. Still, though, it’s hard to believe that anything could ever happen to Sarah; she’s our eyes, damn it! She’s with Joel! She’s safe! Hell, even when their car crashes amid a sea of infected, she still feels safe as houses; her dad notes her broken ankle, picks her up, and carries her in his arms through town. He never once puts her down – never once even thinks about putting her down to save himself, in fact.
And so, when they stumble across a US soldier, it’s all too easy to believe that they’ll get the happy ending they deserve.
This is The Last Of Us, however. And there are no happy endings here.
An unexpected enemy
The entire series, up until this point, makes it abundantly clear who poses a threat to our already-beloved characters: it’s the infected, or the zombies, or whatever you want to call them. They feed on human flesh without a second thought, driven to do so by the terrible fungus that’s taken over their bodies.
But here’s the thing: nobody knows who’s infected, really. And so, when the aforementioned soldier spots Sarah’s bleeding ankle, he is forced to radio his superiors.
“I’ve got two civilians by the river, one of them injured,” he says. Then, in response to a question we can’t hear: “Ankle.”
The soldier continues his conversation, as Sarah – always thinking of others – asks her dad what they’re going to do about Uncle Tommy, who they lost somewhere along the way. And Joel starts to reply, but our interest is elsewhere: we can hear a shift in the tone of the soldier’s voice.
“I’m sorry, repeat?” he asks, sounding almost frightened. Then: “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
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Just like that, the machine gun swings back round to point at them, firing as Joel dives to protect Sarah. “I’m sorry,” the soldier says, moving towards them to finish the job, but, thankfully, Tommy is back and he’s firing his own gun. Threat eliminated.
Except… well, except there’s a lot of blood. A lot of blood.
The ultimate bait-and-switch
You’d think, based on everything that’s happened so far, that it would be Joel, not Sarah, who would take that fatal shot to the abdomen. This girl has, after all, been our everything throughout the episode so far; we’ve spent the day with her, watched her go about her business, seen how she looks out for those who are more vulnerable than her. We’ve seen her escape certain death so many times already – so how can it be that we’re only halfway through the series premiere and she’s dying?
It is, without a doubt, the most gutting death scene of all time, ever, and largely because The Last Of Us doesn’t soften the blow at all. Sarah doesn’t slip away quietly; she clings to her dad and screams in pain when he tries to move her, terror etched all over her face.
“C’mon baby,” he begs, yelling at his brother to help him – but she’s gone. Sarah is gone. Joel did everything he could, gave it everything that he has, but his one and only daughter is still dead in his arms.
A prevention of psychic numbing
Much like Joel, we mourn Sarah – we truly feel the loss of her. And I know, I know: her death may feel a lot like an example of ‘fridging’ (a persistent sexist trope which sees a female character hurt, killed, maimed, assaulted or otherwise traumatised in order to motivate another character or move their plot forward). Personally, though, I think there’s far more to it than that.
Think back to Dr Newman’s claims at the beginning of this episode, when he declared that a fungus-based pandemic could result in billions of casualties. Can you imagine 1 billion people? Can you imagine their hopes, their dreams, their pain? Can you understand the countless complexities in the narratives of their lives? Can you fathom the loss?
I highly doubt it; when we get to numbers on this scale, they feel like an abstraction. To quote (and I’m sorry for doing so) Joseph Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, [but] a million deaths is a statistic.”
Basically, as the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy, our willingness to help, reliably decreases – even when the number of victims increases from one to two. It’s called, as per The Arithmetic Of Compassion, psychic numbing – but The Last Of Us takes action to avoid this diminishing returns on human compassion. Instead, it gives us one person to care for, and then it snatches her away, thus reducing those impossible numbers to something far more human and fathomable.
Sarah, god love her, is humankind’s representative in this post-apocalyptic series. Because, sure, she stands in for all those others who would have died that night – but she is also a metaphor for everything else that has been lost; the songs on the radio, the hot meals, the running water, the friendly neighbours, and all the other little things we take for granted in our lives.
And yes, fine, her loss will also drive Joel forwards in his own story. Because he is a father without a child, and, while his heart has been hardened by trauma and grief, there is still very much an opening in his world for, say, a surrogate daughter someday.
Here’s looking at you, Ellie (Bella Ramsey).
A prescient message from Avril Lavigne and Dido
It’s worth noting that this series – much like The Handmaid’s Tale before it – uses music to convey messages alongside the cinematic drama unfolding, which means that its soundtrack is its biggest Easter egg.
Don’t believe me? On the morning of that fateful day in 2003, when Joel unknowingly enjoys his last ever breakfast with his daughter, Avril Lavigne’s Tomorrow can be heard playing in the background.
“I don’t know how I’ll feel,
tomorrow, tomorrow,
I don’t know what to say,
tomorrow, tomorrow…
is a different day.”
A warning of a drastic change to come, perhaps? Almost definitely – and the message becomes all the more prescient when you combine it with Dido’s ever-mournful (but always iconic) White Flag, which blasts out next.
“I will go down with this ship,
and I won’t put my hands up and surrender.
There will be no white flag above my door,
I’m in love and always will be.”
It is a testament to Joel’s enduring love for his daughter – to the fact that she will be lost in this fight, but that he will never give up (despite appearances). And it likely also nods to events to come later in the series, too… particularly with regards to the journey that Joel is duty-bound to take with Ellie, and where they will find themselves at the end of it, too.
“Your watch is broken”
That’s right, Joel is still wearing the watch that Sarah gifted him on the day his world ended. And, sure, it doesn’t work anymore, but you know what they say about stopped clocks: they’re always right twice a day.
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Which suggests, if you’re looking for a deeper metaphor here (and aren’t we all?), that Joel’s life may be in tatters now, but it will once again come right. It will just take a very specific series of circumstances to get him there.
And remember: Ellie is all that matters
The leader of the Fireflies, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), tasks Joel and Tess (Anna Torv) with escorting Ellie to a drop-off point outside of the QZ – that’s the Quarantine Zone, for anyone who needs to know – and agrees to some outrageous terms to ensure that deal goes ahead.
“You are all that matters,” she tells Ellie.
She means, of course, that Ellie is all that matters with regards to the survival of humankind (trust us, it’s a whole thing with this kid), but take note of those words now, people: Ellie may be cargo at the moment, but this writer suspects she will come to mean a whole lot more before too long.
Until next week, we guess…
The Last Of Us will air weekly on Sky Atlantic at 2am BST.
Images: Sky/HBO
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