Again and again, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, the storytellers behind HBO’s The Final of Us — primarily based on the PlayStation sport by Naughty Canine that Druckmann co-directed alongside Bruce Straley — assert that their story is about love. Love that’s most clearly proven within the connection that Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) forge in a world of discord. In addition they argue that, along with acts of care and altruism — Invoice and Frank’s romance in episode 3, or Henry and Sam’s brotherhood within the present’s Kansas Metropolis arc — there’s a darkish aspect to like price exploring. Like Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), who leads the Kansas Metropolis resistance to fascism in a long-simmering rage over her brother’s dying, and, in fact, Joel’s final resolution to homicide a constructing stuffed with Fireflies to cease the surgical procedure that may kill Ellie in hopes of a remedy.
Love, Druckmann and Mazin assert, accommodates multitudes. Mazin describes it this fashion in Vulture:
Love is behind essentially the most excessive decisions we make and essentially the most excessive behaviors through which we interact. Do you’re keen on this particular person greater than these folks? Dad and mom say issues like this to their kids on a regular basis: “I like you greater than the world itself.” Do you? For Joel, the reply is “Sure, I do.” That’s profound, and the anomaly of the positivity of affection is what we ought to be taking ahead. What Joel has executed within the title of affection is a egocentric act however an comprehensible one. It’s setting a sequence of occasions in movement that won’t be undone. If you happen to have a look at any sort of intractable battle between folks or peoples, sooner or later you’re gonna discover someone doing one thing due to love. That love manifests as concern, hatred, xenophobia, racism, non secular superiority. These items that begin like little seeds develop into large issues that we will’t comprehend the best way to get out of.
This assertion tends to go unchallenged; it’s why the pair maintain repeating it. That is the upside of speaking about an summary but common thought like “love” — it’s one thing that may look totally different for everybody, which implies that everybody can learn a narrative like The Final of Us a bit bit otherwise, making it all of the richer. However when both Mazin or Druckmann expound on this, they title different emotional drivers which might be notably not love, which, whereas too broad to universally outline, can typically be understood as a deep affection that’s usually disruptive, even irrational.
Individuals uproot their lives and transfer the world over for love. They stop their jobs and alter careers. They decide to caring for animals they could have hated at first or kids they by no means thought of having. They write poetry and sing and scream and sob. They starve so one other can eat.
What the characters in The Final of Us do as a substitute is grieve. They work by their collective trauma, poorly most often, but typically — in Invoice and Frank’s case, or most efficiently, with the neighborhood in Jackson — they’re able to grasp a simulacrum of what they misplaced, whilst they mourn it. Joel’s foundational trauma in The Final of Us is the lack of his daughter; her absence reduces him to the grim shell of a person within the first half of the present, and treating Ellie as her substitute is the rationale he turns into a hotter presence within the latter half of the sequence.
The factor Joel feels for Ellie may be love. It is also one thing else solely, a egocentric want for the factor he lives for within the post-apocalypse to be the daughter that was taken from him. Ellie will not be the item of Joel’s affection, she is a vessel for his grief — he even calls her “child lady,” his pet title for his long-deceased daughter. Ellie may additionally conceivably love Joel again. Or she may merely belief him in a world the place she isn’t in a position to belief anybody else, blissful to replicate what Joel sees in her again at him. Or she may see him as a deluded man to indulge for lack of choices. Or, or, or.
That is what makes it laborious to just accept Mazin’s efforts to assign love as the basis reason behind oppositional notions like “concern, hatred, xenophobia, racism,” or “non secular superiority.” It’s poorly supported by the textual content of the present.
Within the universe of The Final of Us, love isn’t a lot a multifaceted emotion, however a catalyst for issues which might be already there. Additionally it is justification after the actual fact for abusers like David, the preacher in frozen Colorado main his congregants to unwitting cannibalism, as a lot as it’s for Joel’s ultimate rampage in opposition to the Fireflies. Attributing all this to “love” sells Mazin and Druckmann’s personal work brief, in addition to that of the performers bringing the story to life, oversimplifying what may very well be a wealthy textual content if it had been taken with why these characters suppose their actions are fueled by love.
On some degree, Mazin appears to grasp this. In the identical Vulture interview, he makes what may be his most insightful assertion into the storytelling ethos of The Final of Us:
Good tales should not constructed on themes like “brotherhood” or “anger”; these are simply phrases. Good tales are constructed on arguments: It’s price killing everybody to save lots of the particular person you’re keen on. We are able to debate that.
To some, “Did Joel do the correct factor?” often is the animating query of The Final of Us, however that reduces the complete work to an elaborate and violent Trolley Drawback. The higher query is “Did Joel do an comprehensible factor?” as a result of then the query is about whether or not or not The Final of Us succeeded in its objectives.
Arguably, it has: We are able to, as Mazin says, debate the ending. The difficult half, and the rationale it’s price interrogating the showrunners’ rationale is worth it, is that the why of all of it issues a lot when it turns into time to reply the query each one that loved the present desires answered: What’s subsequent?
One other factor about love: For it to be real, and have any kind of enduring presence, there must be some sort of symmetry. A mutual respect, and communication. The tragedy of the present is that that is lacking in its central relationship between Joel and Ellie — the heartbreak of that ultimate shot comes with figuring out that this potential bridge has been destroyed. What makes it all of the extra highly effective is in the best way it is usually written the world over of The Final of Us.
For a present set in a world reworked by the Cordyceps fungus, The Final of Us at all times made a degree to maintain the basis reason behind its apocalypse within the periphery. Reflecting the worldview of its characters, Cordyceps is one thing to be averted. The contaminated are like zombies, however sooner, stronger, and over time tackle actually nightmarish kinds able to horrible violence. What’s extra — they’ve gained. Nature has reclaimed a lot of the planet as humanity dissolved into factions and tyranny, as mycelial networks of Cordyceps took root and flourished. Right here is the benefit that the Cordyceps fungus has over all of us: It’s related.