Spoilers for The Last of Us ahead. Be careful if you have not watched the show. This post was mostly written between the sixth and seventh episodes.
The Last of Us premiered on HBO on January 15th, 2023. It was an adaptation of a post-apocalyptic video game where a middle-aged man and a teenage girl crossed the country together after a fungal disease wiped out large chunks of the population and turned people into zombie-like creatures. The heartbreaking story of survival and fatherly love touched many gamers who anticipated the television show. For the most part, the show lived up to the expectations that many of those fans set.
I consider myself one of those fans, even if I’m not an avid gamer. I’m into video games that feel more like cinematic experiences that you get to interact with, which is maybe why I was into The Last of Us. It felt like a movie that showed the father/daughter bond between Ellie and Joel. The only difference was that I got to share their experience. I got to share their hardships. I played through The Last of Us when it first came out and replayed it when the sequel was released. There wasn’t really a reason to make a television adaptation when the story was told in such an engrossing way through the video game. But HBO wanted to make a television show, so I was going to keep my mind open. And I’ve enjoyed what they’ve put out.
Through watching the, so far, six episodes of The Last of Us, one thing has struck me. The Last of Us has relied on death as a major force to drive the characters forward. Every episode, minus the fourth, featured the death of a major character. The events that pushed Joel and Ellie, the protagonists, into the next chapter of their journeys have been deaths of characters they interacted with. Or tried to interact with. Death has been as constant as Joel’s unfriendly demeanor. It’s always there, waiting for its moment to strike.
To some, that might seem bleak. Everyone that Joel and Ellie encountered along their journey through the fungal infested apocalypse met an untimely end. The initial outbreak led to the death of someone in Joel’s life. His acquaintances in Boston ended up on death’s door as Joel began his journey with Ellie. The people they met on the road also lost their lives as Joel and Ellie rolled through town. That’s not to say that Joel and Ellie were the cause of those deaths. They weren’t. Okay, maybe Joel was the cause of one. Usually, they just happened to be travelling through when each death occurred. It is quite a bleak story. The world The Last of Us built was one where death could be around any corner.
The important thing to note about The Last of Us is that it is always meaningful. Most television shows rely on death as some sort of shock. Some ending to a character’s storyline, whether done gracefully or not. Very few shows tackle death in quite the same way as The Last of Us. This show has repeatedly shown how death can affect the people around it. It changes people. Not too many shows have taken the time to navigate death in quite the same way. They typically feature a death to shock the audience and to quickly move in a certain direction. In this case, though, every death brings about a different emotion. The characters felt something different each time someone died. The audience felt those same differences in emotions. The audience being me, but you can easily extrapolate that to other people, too.
The Last of Us began with the final days and death of Joel’s daughter, Sarah, in his arms. This death continued to hang over Joel twenty years after it happened. It was this death that led to Joel closing himself off from connecting with other people, turning him into someone with basically no emotion in 2023. Sarah’s death has hung over the entire series. It was why he hesitated to connect with Ellie beyond her being a delivery. If he opened himself up to people, they could die, and he could feel the same hurt he felt when Sarah died. There was meaning to her death. It was shocking when it happened, both in game and in the show, but it had repercussions.
Tess’s death came one episode later, as she was bitten by a clicker. It wasn’t the bite that killed her, though. She sacrificed herself after the bite to save Joel and Ellie from a bunch of other clickers chasing them. In terms of how meaningful the death was, Tess’s demise might have been the most insignificant. It was a plot point to get Joel all-in on the journey. She left Joel with a dying wish that he would complete the journey and deliver Ellie to the Fireflies, a group of rebels hoping to find a cure to the fungal disease. It was kind of an ordinary television death, one that moved the plot forward more than hitting home with the emotions of the characters or the audience.
Now we move onto Bill and Frank. This was where the real inspection of death began. Yeah, we already had Joel’s daughter’s death and how it turned Joel into a cold, emotionally reclusive person. With Bill and Frank, we got a story about how or why a person could be accepting of death, through a love story in the fungal apocalypse. In an unlikely scenario, Bill met Frank and they fell in love. They lived together for nearly two decades until Frank fell ill. One day, Frank knew it was time. He knew it was his last day and asked Bill to help him through it. They spent one final day doing the things they loved together before both drinking some drug laced wine and dying together in their bedroom. They were each happy to die together, in love, because they were only living for one another.
Bill and Frank really set the groundwork for what I think the show might be trying to say. I may be wrong here. I probably am. But this was a large departure from the story of Bill and Frank that was told in the game. There had to be a reason for the departure, and I think it was that the show wanted to contemplate death. The writers seemed to want to analyze life and death and how intertwined the two are. People are connected and the death of one person will affect all those around, for better or worse. In the case of Sarah, Joel’s daughter, it was for worse as it destroyed all Joel’s other connections. In the case of Frank and Bill, it was for better as their love withstood death, even though death got them both. Joel also got Bill’s suicide note which showed that, even though he was emotionally closed off, he had still made some friends who, though they wouldn’t admit true friendship, cared enough to say goodbye. It was a death with emotional closure.
Next on the list were Henry and Sam, two brothers that Joel and Ellie ran into in Kansas City. The setting was originally Philadelphia in the game, but I think it was changed to Kansas City to play a little more into the far-right political nature of the human villains for the two episodes. Henry and Sam were two brothers hiding out from the rebel group who had taken control of the city. The rebels eventually caught up to them while they were helping Joel and Ellie out of the city. A firefight began when a bunch of infected showed up. Sam was bitten and eventually turned, following Ellie’s attempt to save him with her blood. Henry shot Sam to save Ellie, then shot himself out of grief from killing his brother.
This was the second time that suicide was a major plot point in The Last of Us. However, this was not as peaceful as the suicides of Frank and Bill. Henry had shot and killed his brother, the one person he truly loved. The reason he had been running from the rebels was that he had ratted some of them out to the government in exchange for his brother’s leukemia care. Henry prioritized Sam over everything because Sam was the one thing he loved more than anything. The moment he killed his brother, something snapped. He was distraught with grief, one of the most painful things to watch when pulled off right, and killed himself in front of Ellie and Joel. The grief got to him.
The first major death of The Last of Us explored the emotional numbness that could come to someone after a loved one dies. The deaths of Bill and Frank studied acceptance, love, and closure that could come with the death of someone close. The deaths of Henry and Sam took a look at grief, shock, and the struggle to keep yourself together after death. Each took a different look at death. Each brought a different perspective. Most shows don’t study death in quite the same way The Last of Us has.
It looks like that sort of character study could be continuing into the next episode. From what I got out of the preview, it will be an adaptation of the downloadable content from the first game. There will be a major death in there, and it’ll be one that gives yet another different perspective of death. It’ll be fascinating to see how the show handles that one and what they choose to focus on. It should be good.
As for the final death, it wasn’t really a death. Joel seemingly died at the end of the most recent episode, after being stabbed with a baseball bat by a group of bandits. I can’t imagine Joel actually dying. For one, he didn’t die from this in the video game and was a major component of the ending. Why was that? Well, his story isn’t done yet. It hasn’t come full circle. It hasn’t even come to a satisfying ending. If we’ve seen, from the many other deaths tackled, that the show knows how to write good, meaningful deaths, we can surely see that they would have something better written than this. Joel finally opening up to his travel companion before immediately dying isn’t satisfying. It isn’t well written. It’s incomplete.
But, just for fun, let’s look at the leadup to this “death.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing. Joel spent most of the episode in his own head about his growing connection with Ellie. He thought it made him dumb. He thought it made him weak. At one point, Joel wanted to pass Ellie off to his brother Tommy, who he thought would be strong enough to complete the journey and drop Ellie off with the Fireflies in Colorado. He regretted that and took Ellie on his own, however, because the pair had bonded during their trek from Boston. Sadly, the episode ended with Joel protecting Ellie from some bandits and being stabbed with a broken baseball bat. He did the one thing he worried about doing. He was injured, to the point of falling off his horse from extreme blood loss, because he cared enough about Ellie to violently retaliate against a bandit that chased them, even though he didn’t need to. This bond had “killed” him.
That look at death could be seen as people risking their lives for their loved ones. It was a more literal interpretation of that than, say, Henry and Sam. They were trying to survive, and their lives were in danger. But the two of them weren’t acting reckless out of their love for each other. Joel had become slightly more reckless in his growing bond with Ellie. It was because she was a surrogate daughter to him. Sarah died in such a terrible way, leaving Joel a broken man. Somehow, Ellie put the pieces back together. Joel wasn’t going to have his new daughter taken away like Sarah, so he put his own life in bigger danger to protect hers. Death by way of recklessness, thanks to love. That was what the newest episode showed us.
The Last of Us has brought a study of death that so few shows have provided. It featured death as a pivotal moment in each episode. Unlike many shows, the deaths weren’t a means to propel the story forward or to shock the audience. These deaths were used to enlighten the characters. They’ve been used to enlighten the world. They’ve been used to show the many different perspectives that people have when it comes to death. How people become accepting of death. How death affects the people around it. The Last of Us looked at death with a keen eye and showed audiences that death could come in many forms and mean many things.
There are three more episodes of The Last of Us that haven’t yet aired. If they stick close to the game, which they have done for almost everything but Bill and Frank, some other major death moments will come. The trend should continue where each death is a different perspective on death, taking a look at it through a different lens. The Last of Us might be a bleak show where almost everyone dies, but it’s also cathartic in that it lets both the viewers and the characters ruminate on those deaths in a way that so few other shows do. Most shows usually show a death and quickly move onto the next piece of the plot, dropping any threads from that death almost completely. In this case, the deaths mean more. Their effects last longer. That’s the magic of The Last of Us. That’s what makes the show work.
I want to cut in here, at the end of the post, to insert an update based on the seventh episode. I’m doing this because it took me a while to find the time to edit the post and that episode came out almost a week ago now.
The seventh episode of The Last of Us did, indeed, adapt the downloadable content of the first game. It told Ellie’s backstory. She was taken to an abandoned mall in Boston by a friend who disappeared some time earlier. This was a friend Ellie was in love with. The friend, Riley, disappeared when she joined the Fireflies, and spent one final night with Ellie before being shipped off to another city on an assignment. This was a love story between the two teenagers. There was dancing. There were gifts. There was a kiss. But there was also a clicker that bit both Ellie and Riley, prematurely ending their romance.
This was a look at death that hadn’t yet popped up in The Last of Us. Episode seven was about survivor’s guilt. Ellie lived because she was immune. The person she loved, who was bitten in the same altercation with the same clicker, died from the disease. The love story was interspersed with pieces of the 2023 storyline, where Ellie tried to save Joel from his baseball bat wound. She was angry at the entire situation because she lost everyone she loved or cared about. She had lost Riley. She wasn’t willing to lose the one person she had left. She wasn’t going to survive while another person she loved perished. Her guilt was driving her to try and save him because of the Riley situation, as much as her love for Joel at this point in the series.
So that’s where I’m at with The Last of Us. It’s been looking at almost every way people could die or could deal with death. Part of that came from the video game. Part of that was the writing of the show, picking up threads from the game and expanding on them. Part of that was even the show’s writers changing things to better suit the theme. It has been fantastic to watch. This series makes me want to check out Chernobyl, the other show Craig Mazin created, which I could see having similar themes. I’ll check that out sometime. As for now, there are two episodes left and there will be more death to come.
