Bloody Compromise: The Last of Us Season 2

Isomorphic is David McNeill's column about adaptations and the infectious influence of memory.

I thought first of my own injuries from the video game on concluding The Last of Us season two: a bleak, ugly story devoted to replicating a flat conception of reality that makes little effort to say more than “there’s good people on both sides” about some morally imperative problems. I would be more easily swayed by certain adaptive changes if writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann attempted to address the underlying issue of this story, which, in no uncertain terms, is that the story does not have much to say about its themes of violence, and, by the end, essentialises all violence as individual rather than structural or socially located. Muddied further by the television adaptation insisting on protecting our protagonists from their worst choices.

I knew I was in trouble with season two when, after the events of the cabin on the hilltop, Dina looked at Ellie and said “I loved him too, you know” - and I said to myself “huh, that’s an odd choice.” Comporting Dina into a more classic highschool girlfriend archetype is sensible but love? Is she another adopted daughter, then? Nominally Dina and Joel having a relationship is a dimension in the game. In the game as Dina and Ellie patrol the snow, Dina announces she and Joel are planning a movie night, and invites Ellie. You can read this a few ways. Is Dina hanging out with Joel just as an excuse to get closer to Ellie? Is she trying to mend their relationship as a sort of gesture to help someone she really likes? Does she just actually like hanging out with Joel? Like a lot of the game’s writing, this idea is presented as flavour dialogue to engender you, the player, to like hanging out with this character. Because it’s super fun, actually: riding a horse through the post-apocalypse learning all about your new girlfriend is just a good idea for a gameplay sequence, so much so Naughty Dog dedicated a miniature open-world sequence in Seattle to this exact idea.

I’m not convinced the only thing that makes this work in the game is that you, the player, are doing other things. I’m not convinced that nudging the stick on my Playstation controller and sneaking around infected adequately occupies my brain so that Dina’s dialogue feels less like exposition and more like flirting. In fact, I actually made this argument about The Last of Us Part 1 on the release of that second remaster - just kicking around the empty world with Ellie, mediated by gameplay loops, does serve that narrative in some impressive ways. I found myself more actively engaged with those small “press square to chat to Ellie” moments and more actively listening to her ongoing chirps. Much more impacted by her change in demeanour toward the end of the story, especially in the lead up to the hospital. The moment where she does not provide you gameplay assistance by dropping a ladder, in particular, hits different in such detail.

The Last of Us Part 2 attempts a similar alchemy with its character switch halfway through the game to produce a truly predictable narrative that never quite lands any of its many punches, both literal and figurative. To be blunt: the game is far too simplistic in how it writes and approaches its themes, especially so the replication of the conflict in Gaza where it attempts a “both sides” argument when writing about a protracted decades long genocide. And look I get it: Druckmann is writing about his own personal experience growing up, but the story fails as a tragedy because these characters never sit down and try to contend with their grief and trauma in the context of this world. They never actually try to reason with their own motivations, their own actions. The brief glimpses of this reflection (Ellie falling silent after beating someone to death in anger, Abby using her oldest friend Owen in a dire romantic encounter) do not coalesce into saying anything other than violence is here, and violence is roundly bad.

Consider, by contrast, the best tragedies: Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Of Mice and Men. Each centres violence, domestic and otherwise, but their tragic figures have things to say about these events. Justifications. Deflections. Lamentations, regrets, convictions. And they want to talk about it. Because that’s the juice: how do our tragic protagonists deceive themselves and the world about how they feel? That’s just honest to goodness drama.

The act of switching characters to play as Abby, and filling her world with characters that she likes and that like her, and repeating the Joel/Ellie dynamic with Abby/Lev, is effectively a game of empathy that produces a much more complex thesis. Where the first game engendered you to Joel by having you play as him and do the work of protecting Ellie, the second game makes you play as Abby to empathise with her, and, ultimately, complicate your feelings about Ellie’s revenge quest. To the extent that by the end of the game your perspective should be shot-through with Abby’s grief as much as Ellie’s. But the complication is asked and answered by the ending: yes, violence is indeed bad. How quaint, you might say, as Ellie holds a knife to Lev’s throat. Druckmann’s corpus is filled with similar hollow suggestions - the cynical e-brake turn of the Uncharted series - explaining every inch of Nate’s life for a sterile “perhaps the family you choose is the real family” ending makes me want to yell to this day  comes to mind. Not to undercut the emotional impact of Ellie’s plight or the awful, sweaty panic I feel from Abby many times during her journey.

Without the mediation of the gameplay itself, The Last of Us season 2 has to do something to elicit the same empathy from a reader, and then, hopefully, have a perspective on that empathy and what it might mean for these characters.

One of these somethings, then, is to show us part of Joel and Dina’s relationship. Early on we have Dina sitting with Joel as he teaches her how to replace a capacitor. But then, as if realising they added this extra dimension to their relationship, it’s Dina who accompanies Ellie on the search for Joel. She’s captured by Abby’s crew and drugged unconscious, because Dina needed to be there, but the added dimension of Dina’s love for Joel should force the scene to change, right? Dina should react to Joel being killed in real time, and we would lose Ellie’s isolated reaction. And I have… no idea why they did not do that. Why put Dina there instead of Tommy, and then do nothing with it but reproduce the same logistics but without having to punch Dina in the face? Just to have Tommy back in town for the Game of Thrones sequence? Why not just have Ellie alone? This is a classic trap of adaptations: the relentless comparison to a previous homeostasis is why it is so difficult to think and write about adaptations. I’m not meeting the text, but rather, drafting a previous version of reality with a new brush and complaining the image resolves differently.

Because that truly is the lever that the TV show can pull that the game cannot: resolution. Without the need for gameplay the story can divert and indulge and express in ways that wouldn’t quite make sense for the game, even in the Playstation house style of narrative blockbusters: there is just a wider aperture of what you can put into the story. This is something the show takes advantage of with varying degrees of success. Joel’s dire therapy session is excellent character work, while the added characters to the Dina/Ellie patrol only serve to make our protagonists more immature by comparison.

I’m usually the last to excoriate additions like this unless they undercut an idea I’ve already staked rhetoric on or built an argument around. The net:new Bill anthology story in season one is a great example of a change that I like quite a bit despite what we lose in the translation. No longer is Bill a cautionary tale of what might become of Joel if he cannot open his heart, but instead an example of a life well-lived. The immediate resolution to the “will they, won’t they” of Ellie and Dina in the game is strung along in the show for added melodrama that, honestly, works. Isabela Merced puts forth a stand out performance as Dina. The revelation of Ellie’s immunity via a bite to save Dina is followed by a harrowing eight minute sequence of Dina holding Ellie at gunpoint, distraught, trying to come to terms with shooting her best friend. The moment relies on Merced flashing through a dozen emotions at once and she sells the visceral relief when Dina finally believes Ellie is immune, cascading into a kiss of pure, cosmic relief.

Yet the story seems content to ratchet up the tragedy at every opportunity, make the violence more real and even buy into the idea that these characters are fused with violence as an elemental quality. Violence is not socially located but inevitable. Dina delivers a speech about this very fact: there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for revenge. Despite this, Ellie’s violence in the aquarium is played up as an accident. Self-defence. Violence is at once bad, sure, inevitable, yes, but also accidental? Minor compromise to insulate Ellie from moral consequence. These things happen to her. They are inevitable. Nora was already going to die from the spores, why not torture her for information? It’s already too late. It’s already too late.

I resisted the performative credulity that follows identifying these changes, and then the show provides us a “reason” why Joel is the selfish hardcase. We flashback to Joel’s childhood in a freighted, bizarre addition. The scene is captivating: Tony Dalton turns in a brilliant frayed portrait of masculinity. A young Joel stands up for Tommy, says his father won’t hurt Tommy, and Dalton breaks down in tears, says he wants to do better than his own father. No surprise Joel’s father is a cop, I suppose, but this detail casts a long bow in an attempt to contextualise Joel’s whole deal as a complicated dad. And that really is the story of this show now. Ellie is bad for extracting revenge, but not that bad. No longer does she beat Nora’s face in with a pipe. Now she just beats Nora’s leg a bit and already after Nora is infected - gone is the blood rage. No longer is Joel bound to anxious attachment by the loss of his daughter’s death, now his father was kind of physically abusive but Joel took care of Tommy so it’s also a hangover of his childhood, you see, unresolved traumas, you see. Tommy doesn’t responsibility run off for revenge, instead he and Jesse are here to support Dina and Ellie. These micro-compromises shoot through the whole of season two in a perhaps necessary attempt to make our characters redeemable.

I struggle here because the show falls for the adaptation problem of adding extra material in occasionally unhelpful ways. Compare season one’s Bill episode with season two’s Joel episode. Rather than a unique anthology story in the world, season two ops for an extended portrayal of the birthday mission, but one that contorts itself to also be the same sequence Ellie burned over her bite mark. The same sequence Joel made her a guitar for her birthday. For all the cuteness of a high Ellie eating cake with her hands, these decisions engender a sense of completeness to the story, to the extent that Joel sings his ballad: If I ever were to lose you on the very same day.

For all that: fuck me if the museum doesn’t hit like a ton of bricks. The warmth between Joel and Ellie allides with Joel’s murder in all the familiar ways. The Apollo 15 sequence still damages me in a personal “my Dad wasn’t really around when I was a kid” way. All to say: I want to like what is here, but I find myself just sort of… stuck in my ability to appraise the alterations to the story, in no small part, because the show almost commits to making Joel, well, Joel. His reaction to Ellie’s queerness and drug use is “this is my house” and Ellie countering with a classic marxist “you don’t own anything” argument rings true enough. This is the end of the world, Joel, property doesn’t exist (and maybe never did). But then Joel, after a beat, is fine with Ellie moving to the garage for her own space. This is what I mean: the show’s constant capitulation to “what if things were always kind of okay and reset to a status quo” when given space to expand the text. Gone is the notion that from about age fourteen Ellie and Joel are apocalyptically estranged. Now they just sometimes argue with each other in small ways.

The show does call overt attention to one idea that the game doesn’t: Ellie’s moth. This is the symbol on Joel’s guitar, and apparently(?) the design of Ellie’s tattoo that covers her bite. The moth, as the show posits, is a symbol of death. A symbol Joel gives to Ellie on the guitar. Yes, Joel does give Ellie death to keep her alive at the hospital, we know this, but I am unsatisfied with the solved jigsaw of the season this produces. We have to see Eugene’s death because it’s referenced earlier. We have to see the burn, because it’s referenced earlier. We have to see the tattoo, because it’s referenced earlier. This sense of completeness dispatches whatever small subtlety Part II had. To the extent that Joel does an Of Mice And Men on Eugene in a scene that the show seems to frame as beautifully tragic that is so over-explained by the cinematography and Joel’s dialogue: ten minutes of Joel, more or less, facing the camera and explaining that he is, in fact, a bad dude but a justified one.

Yet the show has the audacity to fix my biggest issue with the game: the porch scene. You spend twenty hours murdering people in the game because of Ellie’s unresolved Joel issues only to get an epilogue sequence that reveals they resolved their issues before he died! And the show just gives us that, plain and simple, in episode six. But then, unbelievably, the porch scene becomes the “you swore” scene from the game. The aperture shrinks further and our world grows that much smaller because of it. Not to take away the performances and directing: Joel weeping and nodding. The stutter in his voice as he speaks. The break in Ellie’s voice and the violence in her gaze as she calls Joel selfish, and he repeats his father’s words “I hope you do a little better than me.”

So if we set aside the changes themselves for a moment and step back, the story retains, and seems to be heading toward, the same bleak, compromised theme of violence is bad and there’s good people on either side. Joel kills Abby’s father. Ellie slays all of Abby’s friends, and so Abby slays Jessie and nearly blows Tommy to hell (okay that bit doesn’t happen in the show). And then Ellie goes to hunt down Abby and her surrogate son. This violence is inevitable! How can it possibly be stopped! We’re all just monsters waiting for a reason and gosh darn it we can’t help but put ourselves in positions to keep doing violence! To the monsters, we’re the monsters, right?

This radical moralism is the fundamental failure of The Last of Us season two. “See, the homophobe can be on Ellie’s side, these characters have dimension” my television shouts at me as it performs a sleight of hand to rob Tommy of any complexity because we need a likeable dad-type now that Joel is in a pinebox. The moral crisis of whether Ellie should complete vengeance on Abby is no crisis at all here: violence is inevitable after all, and instead we’re left to argue for a small genocide over a large genocide because in the world of The Last of Us this blood-sport between Ellie and Abby is, first, necessary, and two, after a fashion, productive. To borrow the language of Ian Dell Danskin: “the war crime that stablises a region is not, to them, a necessary evil; if it was necessary, it was no evil at all.”

I’ve made the argument before that Druckmann’s work capitulates to centrism as a default position, but the second season of the show really works hard to produce a moralist universe, fill that joyless country with violence, and shrug as it paints the walls with blood.