My god, is Bella Ramsey a great actor. That’s what I found myself saying over and over to myself following the close of this week’s The Last of Us. After starting the series off as the closed-off counterpart to Joel – a character we knew far more about than we did Ellie, Ramsey has gotten the chance to shine in these last two episodes, showing us just who Ellie was and who she has become over the course of the season. And, as a penultimate episode to this first season, what a way to send us to the finale.
The idea that humans are the real monsters when it comes to post-apocalyptic stories is old hat at this point. After all, once you’ve seen that particular theme play out a couple times you almost become immune to it. So, it wasn’t exactly a shock to find out that David (a great Scott Shepherd) wasn’t exactly the pious man he wanted folks to believe him to be. And, really, judging from our current knowledge of those who claim divine providence, it wasn’t hard to deduce that David was going to turn out to be a misogynistic, terrifying despot who was more drawn to the power of his position in the community than he was to protecting those within his cult (see the various stories of preachers/cult leaders doing all of that in the name of some higher power). Really, he was only a few weeks away from declaring that God told him they needed to start sacrificing people to keep Him happy in order to remove the stronger men and consolidate more power over the women – this isn’t exactly an original situation here. But what I appreciated about this particular version of this tried-and-true storyline was its execution.
Where some shows might push too far and turn David into a Svengali from the outset, here, Craig Mazin let us connect the dots on our own. The cannibalism reveal didn’t happen until late in the episode, but it wasn’t played for shock value. Mazin trusted that the audience would have put two and two together on their own by then so Ellie’s discovery of the ear was simply a confirmation of what we already knew (and I say this as a non-game player who didn’t know about the cannibalism going in). Similarly, Mazin lets the reveal of David’s true intentions – take Ellie as a “wife,” use her to cement control, etc. – unravel slowly. We can tell he’s creepy and power hungry – and that he doesn’t like any sort of power challenge – from the opening scene, but we don’t quite see the mask fully off until late in the game. Now, it’s possible to go through the episode and be shocked at the reveal as the steakhouse burns around Ellie and David, but I suspect we all knew this was where things were headed – a final showdown where Ellie would need to use every ounce of her strength to escape from the situation.
And let’s talk a bit about that final showdown. I’m someone who hates the use of sexual violence in a series where it doesn’t serve the storyline (see a number of other HBO shows, one of which involved the two leads of this one). Here, I didn’t love that David tried to rape Ellie as the steakhouse burnt down around them, largely because it just doesn’t make sense. The pair are in mortal danger, there’s no telling how long that roof is going to hold and this is the choice David makes? Considering how meticulously David wields control over his community, I don’t really understand the choice here, outside of once again telling us that David is a terrible man who only wants to have power. And, perhaps, providing Ellie with another layer of trauma she will need to work through in the story. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And, frankly, we can read between the lines with his previous interactions with the other young girl in the community to sus out just what kind of father David wanted to become for her that we didn’t need this included within the story at this point. I was fully sold that David was the villain and Ellie needed to escape without the story including an attempted rape to further drive the point home and traumatize its lead character. It was a lazy choice that wasn’t necessary at this junction in the storyline.
Speaking of fathers, we do get the wonderful moment at the close of the episode where Joel finally accepts Ellie as his surrogate daughter. Having him call her “baby girl” brought a tear to my eye. In this world – in this moment – there’s nothing Ellie needs more than someone she can count on and trust. And now, Joel recognizes that he is that person for her and, perhaps more importantly, he wants to be her protector and family. And that’s what the story is really about, isn’t it? Watching two people find a family in each other at the end of the world. The rest of the Joel side of the story saw the character reverting back into the man we have only heard about, the person who would kill those he ran into (along with Tommy), even when he didn’t need to. Joel was vicious, unflinching, and unwilling to lose Ellie to those who had taken her, and while it was great to see him fully commit to her safety (for more reasons, clearly, than just her potential value as a possible living cure), it was troubling to see just how easy it was for him to slip back into that persona once more. We know from our time at Jackson that Joel ultimately didn’t like the man he became, although he won’t apologize for a lot of the actions he took alongside Tommy back then. So, I suspect there might be some residual trauma for our quiet leading man moving forward as well. With only one more episode left, I’m not sure how much time we have left to dive into all of this in this particular season, but there’s plenty of complex trauma for us to unpack in season two.
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Writing
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