How The Last Of Us missed an opportunity to become great or The power of Less is More! [SPOILERS]
A solid show that could have been phenomenal, if only for one simple tweak!
After patiently waiting for the dust to settle on the first season of HBO's 'The Last Of Us', I must say that the showrunners have done a commendable job of creating a gripping, suspenseful series - go watch it before you read this!
I was looking forward to seeing if the showrunners would address what I felt was a somewhat lackluster opening in an otherwise good show. However, it remained unresolved.
The problem is the first 30 minutes of episode 1. These 30 minutes exposition spoilt the whole season arc for me.
The show starts from the exposition bit of a talkshow discussing “the-thing-that-will-destory-the-world-if-we-ain’t-careful”. And it’s fine, it’s episode one, it’s some real info that is interesting even on it’s own (Shoutout to Fantastic Fungi documentary I watched on Netflix a while ago that talks about the real possibility of such an outbreak happening). However, the following “flashback” of the outbreak undermines the rest of the season by diminishing Joel’s arc.
Why do we need to see the outbreak happen? Why do we need to see Joel lose his daughter? Why not start in the present of the story? We don’t need to see him “save the cat”, we are empathetic without it.
If we chop the next 25-30 min of episode 1 (which filmmaking wise I loved), Joel’s character would be amazing as we would slowly discover his depth and backstory WITH Ellie (through her eyes), which would be so much stronger.
S1E6 - 41:16
ELLIE
I’m not her, you know.
Maria told me about Sarah.
JOEL
Don’t... Don't say another word.
The way it is done currently we know that Joel was a father, hence his indecisiveness with escorting Ellie is never convincing enough. We just wait for them to connect, we know what is going to happen. Imagine how strong the revelation about Joel’s daughter would have been if we discovered it with Ellie.
Moreover, we “flashback” to Sarah later anyway, but those flashbacks are dramatised, we WANT to see what Sarah looked like, we WANT to know what happened to her.
Could it be justified?
I understand that this sequence establishes Joel’s personal conflict and his trauma, but I’m not convinced that this justifies the “flashback”.
Showing the death of Joel’s child first removes the pressure from the question of wether Joel will “adopt” Ellie. The only other reason I can see for doing this is to do exactly that - to remove the doubt so we can focus on something else.
Just like in Melancholia (Lars Von Trier) [another spoiler] the movie starts from the Earth being destroyed by the asteroid. This removes the pressure from the audience on the external level saying from the get-go “yes, everyone is going to die”. Now the audience can focus on everything else and rather see how the characters deal with the looming apocalypse that will certainly happen.
Transposing this onto The Last Of Us, I don’t really see the reason for removing the pressure between Joel and Elle. A good reason could have been to subvert the established expectations and have Joel NOT escort Ellie, but this would have been a very different story.
It’s not a flashback, but it is.
To understand if something is a backstory we need to pinpoint the story’s present. The present of The Last Of Us is the post-apocalyptic world, it’s 20 years after Sarah’s death, 20 years after the outbreak. The post-apocalyptic life of Joel is the “everyday life”, which is disrupted by Ellie. Hence, the outbreak sequence is a beautiful filmmaking spectacle, but it undermined the story that followed.
Imagine after we see the 1960s talkshow exposition, we jump straight to the present, to the boy looking at the destroyed Boston. The child is tested at the quarantine zone and the lady lies to him that he is safe while they give him a lethal injection. Meet Joel burning the bodies of the deceased as he grabs the dead body of the boy. This is a freaking strong opening.
And all it would have taken is the editor going “Hey guys, this opening flashback is deadweight, we don’t need it right now. Let’s save it and use it later in the series when the audience is begging to see it.”
When the story starts when it should.
Episode 3 is undoubtably one of the strongest episodes of the first season (my personal favourite).
We meet both characters in the present and discover everything about them from their actions. This is the episode that made me excited about watching the series.
It’s so freaking good because we don’t have 20 min expositional scenes of how both characters used to live their lives before the outbreak. The only thing we have to judge is the characterisation (a.k.a. judging the book by its cover, characterisation being the cover) of the characters as we meet them. Then we discover their depth through their actions that don’t match their characterisation and reveal their true character.
S1E3 - 28:40
When I watched the piano scene I expected Frank (Murray Bartlett) to smash Bill’s (Nick Offerman) head with a baseball bat. My expectation came from the characterisation of Frank and the world the episode has built (and probably from watching GoT). Giving “flashback” exposition to these characters would have destroyed the episode.
When they flashbacked the right way.
Episode 7 is dedicated to Ellie’s backstory. This is when we see Ellie lose her friend and love interest and discover that she is immune. This episode plays out exactly when the audience begs the writers to reveal what the heck happened to her.
Imagine we saw this in chronological order just like we witnessed Joel’s backstory in episode 1. It wouldn’t be even half as strong.
I’m certainly not Alfred Hitchcock, but I do dislike flashbacks in general. If I had to chose the lesser evil, I would pick Episode 7. Was it the best place to have this flashback? Questionable, but it’s another topic.
(Quick mention of) the other things…
Episode 5. The elder brother kills himself after his younger brother turns into the monster. I wish this character was treated better than a tool for the episode. The filmmakers could have let the guy live and have him comeback in a later season.
Imagine if he didn’t kill himself…
Now that he doesn’t have a reason to live (his brother), he only has the hate guiding him. And let’s say he doesn’t blame the “zombies” for what happened, he blames FEDRA for not taking care of his little child brother with leukaemia, he blames the fireflies whose ideology blinds them to what people they supposedly fight for need.
He turns into a baddy with nothing to lose. What if he discovers how to treat the disease or how to communicate with the infected so they don’t touch him but instead of helping people he is trying to eliminate humanity now?
This character had an infinite amount of potential and my example above is just one of them. I call his suicide a waste of a great set up. Unfortunately, the character is the tool helping our protagonists along their journey and the moment he completes his job - he is removed… for good… forever.
You will be missed.
Episode 6. Joel’s decision to first not go with Ellie and then (after sleeping on it) deciding to actually go feels rushed and anticlimactic (we know he will go with her, this wasn’t convincing enough to doubt it).
Episode 8. The final one. The main characters spend the whole season travelling to this location for Joel to annihilate it and leave. There is no problem with any of the decisions, it’s just fails to produce a strong effect because it is rushed. I think they should have saved some money from the first episode flashback and pumped it into the finale adding an extra 10 minutes to it.
The season ending lacks a strong lead out. We end on the feeling “this lie will come bite Joel in the a** later in the series”, but it doesn’t feel strong enough.
I wished for something along these lines:
ELLIE
Swear to me that everything you said about the fireflies is true.
JOEL
I swear.
ELLIE
Then I can't trust you.
FADE OUT
In the current ending Ellie just says “Ok”.
I mean.
Ok.
I’m not saying that my ending IS THE RIGHT ENDING!, just that the original ending doesn’t feel like the ending of the whole season. It feels like there is another act of the last episode. I don’t feel this is the strongest possible lead into season 2.
What do you think?
Do you agree with me? Do you think a person who skipped over the exposition in Episode 1 would have had a better experience? Let me know what you think and if you enjoyed this article in the comments below.
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P.S. I know I said “one little tweak” and then went on adding more things. I really do think the first episode exposition was objectively unnecessary and they rest of the decisions are not as crucial. I think the showrunners did an amazing job overall and a lot of these decisions could have come from somewhere other than the writers.