The Last of Us Ep. 7 does it again.
What has emerged as a signature storytelling choice affords opportunities for character development, and a powerful thematic message.
The Short Take:
Another moving flashback that layers on character development in the present timeline. We need to invent a new word to describe the proprietary blend of post-apocalyptic emotions this show can dish out.
Image Credit: IndieWire
[SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to show you the many wonders of this episode.]
The Long Take:
Well that was the worst best first date. Or best worst first date?
With such a cliffhanger from last week, I was not expecting most of this week’s episode to be an extended flashback, with what happens after Joel keels over from a knife wound comprising only a brief bookend for the episode. I suppose I could have viewed this as a cruel delay, a dragging out of the suspense, but I didn’t because what we got was so crucial to understanding Ellie’s reaction to Joel’s critical condition. I could see that her experience with Riley causes Ellie to go back to try to help Joel.
In particular, Riley’s words about never giving up, even when they’ve both been infected and their fate seems sealed, seems to guide Ellie. Riley says, “But we don’t quit. Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up.” When we as viewers can see the tremendous loss Ellie has in her past, her decision to stay with Joel hits differently. It’s not just that she cares about him (and she does — see last week’s episode); she doesn’t want to lose another person close to her. And even she’s going to, she’s not going to, as Riley says, give up whatever time they have left.
If I place this episode next to Episode 3, (which in my head is called The Ballad of Bill and Frank) a pattern emerges. Both of these episodes feature an extended flashback that technically digresses from the main plot, but deepens that plot by giving us such a rich backstory that imbues characters within that main plot with more complex motivations. For me, this shifts my perception of the show overall because it means that Episode 3 wasn’t a one-off. This type of episode is now a part of this show’s narrative lexicon.
What does that mean? What difference does that make? For me, it seems like the show is trying to say something about how to go on after the apocalypse. That surviving moment to moment isn’t all there is. That we as humans are no different than the cordyceps consuming and destroying and trying to thrive unless we can hold onto our pasts and use that as reason to not only keep going when everything seems hopeless, but find ways to keep on living. To make meaningful human connections despite the horrors of the world.
It’s no coincidence that both of these episodes show characters finding romance, joy, and happiness in their post-apocalyptic lives. Bill and Frank meet when Frank literally falls into a hole in the ground. What are the odds they would fall in love and grow old together? And Ellie and Riley manage to escape the daily horrors of the QZ, growing up in a world that is a shadow of what it once was, and the political war between FEDRA and the Fireflies. Even if it’s only for one night, they’re just be a couple of teenagers romping through a mall. They get partake in simple pleasures that only a pre-apocalyptic person would be able to freely enjoy: riding down an escalator, riding a carousel, playing Mortal Kombat II in an arcade, and goofing around in a Halloween store. This reminded me so much of Bill and Frank sitting down for a nice meal, playing music, walking down to the boutique to pick out some clothes, or biting into strawberries and letting the juice drip down their chins in indulgence.
Image Credit: Slash Film
These two parallel stories, however, are not simply happy. They elicit a hard to pin down feeling. Bittersweet is probably the closest word I can think of, but even that fails to capture the purity and the beauty baked into the tragedy here. Or, conversely, the tragic subtext that casts a shadow over these moments of bliss. I opened with a joke about what we should call Riley and Ellie’s tour of the “Four Wonders of the Mall,” but I do think that my impulse to make this joke reflects the unclassifiable nature of the kind of story this series tells about Bill and Frank and Riley and Ellie. I almost want to make up my own word to describe this unique mix of happy, sad, and existentially fraught. Anti-ennui? Melancholeuphoria? Tristamoricity? Tragi-sublimism? (I know I’ve gone off the rails with this one, but if you have a better suggestion, please make it in the comments!)
Image Credit: CNET
The parallels created by this episode do not end there, though. This Ellie-centric flashback makes me realize that we actually didn’t know very much, if anything, about Ellie’s life before she meets Joel. Seeing what life is like for a teenager during this time, essentially at high school boot camp, was fascinating from a dystopian sci-fi perspective. But, most importantly, we now know that it’s not just Joel who’s projecting Sarah’s loss onto Ellie. Ellie is doing the same for her grief over Riley. Yes, I know that Riley was not a handsome, middle-aged “daddy of the Internet,” but if you compare their respective dynamics, I recognize that Riley was Ellie’s protector in a manner similar to what Joel is to her now. When a classmate, Bethany, bullies Ellie, it’s only because Riley’s not there to scare her off. And as they traverse the city and the abandoned mall, Ellie pretty much always follows Riley’s lead, with the occasional fake protest.
When we see them sitting next to one another, contemplating what will happen to them now that they’ve been bitten, I kept thinking about how confusing and painful it must have been for Ellie to have survived, immune, as Riley turned. Ellie probably had to kill Riley to protect herself as well. This adds a whole new layer of survivor’s guilt to Ellie’s character. She likely feels as though she doesn’t deserve whatever genetic immunity she has because she had to watch her best friend and potential girlfriend (considering what could have been in another world or another time is heartbreaking) slowly disappear.
Image Credit: Looper
If I zoom back out to the episode as a whole and not just the story contained in the flashback, the payoff for all this is huge because when we cut back to a panicked Ellie, we can see that she once again finds herself having to step up when her tougher, survivalist friend can’t be there to look out for her anymore. She has no choice but to be the one to make decisions and figure out what to do. She has to — as Captain Kwong tries to tell her — become a leader instead of a follower. At the very end of the episode, when Ellie begins to sew up Joel’s wound with a random needle and thread she found in someone’s abandoned kitchen, I think she’s made that transition. Even if we don’t yet know if or how Joel is going to be okay, seeing him squeeze Ellie’s hand, as if to say “I’m so glad you came back” or “I thought you should leave but I didn’t really want you to leave” was well worth the plot slowdown generated by the Riley and Ellie go to the mall flashback.