There has never been an apocalypse. I’m still writing about nonsense instead of fighting for my life on the streets over a can of beans, and with any luck, things will stay that way. In the modern era, humans have never had to confront an extinction event that will alter existence as we know it. Coronavirus was certainly a wake-up call, but we worked though it and came out the other end relatively intact. Society has changed forever, but it continues onward.
Despite the lack of a real apocalypse, we remain forever fascinated with the concept of our world coming to an end. Countless films, TV shows, books, art, and video games have invested decades into conjuring up the apocalypse, both in how it will take place and what the human race will resemble once the dust has settled. While the majority of depictions involve generic zombie outbreaks and climate disasters, sometimes an example that changes the landscape forever comes along.
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The Last of Ussubverted clichés and captured our emotions to become an iconic example of what it means to thrive in the melancholy of hopelessness, and now the HBO show is taking us on Joel and Ellie’s beloved adventure all over again.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay’s take on the duo is relatively faithful to its predecessor, with entire lines of dialogue and scene compositions ripped directly from the game. Yet it also spends ample time savouring the silence of our own demise. Hectic firefights and long stealth sequences don’t exactly translate to television, so Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin opted to instead build on existing character dynamics and once neglected parts of the universe.
More than ever this feels like a world where people are living out their lives amidst a crumbling society, bitterly accustomed to authoritarian military rule and operating between the lines to keep hope alive. Everything has more substance and further explanation, even if daring to do such a thing opens the universe up to cheap ridicule. Apparently it isn’t veryrealistic.
The fourth episode follows Joel and Ellie as they spend several days travelling across the country, occasionally stopping to scavenge abandoned gas stations for supplies or rusting cars for remnants of gasoline. While siphoning fuel from an engine, Joel ends up explaining to Ellie exactly how the process works and ways in which fuel can degrade overtime. Most of us viewed this conversation as a casual piece of world building, the start of a conversation in which Ellie will eventually deliver a selection of awful puns from her joke book while hiding the gun she pillaged from Bill’s safehouse.
It is a tiny piece of information that, as the viewer, we aren’t expected to remember or ruminate upon. Some outlets and fans have, eager to label the show as an unrealistic failure because it didn’t spend several minutes interrogating the role of gasoline in a society still heavily dependent on motor vehicles. It doesn’t matter, and please stop trying to apply realism to a show that revolves around mushrooms turning the entire world into cannibalistic husks that bring about the downfall of global society.
The Last of Us certainly aims for realistic human emotion and consequence, but not once has it ever really applied the internal logic of our own world onto its own. Military quarantine zones still persist decades after the apocalypse, while infected who should have perished of starvation and natural causes roam the streets and continue to evolve. 28 Days Later is the only piece of zombie fiction I can remember that actively waits out the threat of infection, and it works in the context of that universe because it is continually built on grounded scientific theory.
Cordyceps came about after Neil Druckmann watched a BBC nature documentary and thought, ‘Wow, it would be super-duper scary if that happened to people’ and with it, the game’s initial pitch was born. It plays by its own rules, and daring to question the realism of things as meaningless as petrol durability borders on pedantic. It’s something a boomer dad would bring up before calling Joel a pussy for daring to have a panic attack. Far too woke.
If the petrol was ruined I imagine the tapes used to play music, guns used to kill infected, cans of food eaten to stay alive, and buildings we take shelter in would have crumbled into nothing by now too, but The Last of Us casts away those assumptions in favour of narrative and character. Most of the art we know and love does, stretching the truth for its own gain in ways that walk the tightrope of disbelief because they make perfect sense in context. We are smart enough to know when they don’t, and those instances are well worth critiquing in good faith because they actively pull us out of the experience.
The Last of Us hasn’t done that, at least not yet, even when making drastic changes to the source material in its translation to a new medium. Sam is hearing impaired in this instance, and by all means, shouldn’t still be alive this far into the apocalypse, yet here he is, and his character is executed more than well enough for us to buy into the illusion. Let’s draw a line and stop questioning the validity of petrol at the end of the world. Joel and Ellie have enough bullshit to deal with without us making them walk everywhere. I just realised we’ll be kicking off about the photo booth used by Ellie and Riley next week, won’t we? God help us all.
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