Adapting The Last of Us
A brief word on video game adaptations before breaking down spoilers in the finale
An Oscars ceremony without incident. Well done to Everything Everywhere All At Once for cleaning up. The Daniels created something truly kooky and heatfelt, a tale about Asian Americans and the immigrant experience, at the same time as multiverse hopping, hotdogs for fingers and a dildo fight.
The Last of Us season finale had to compete with the Oscars. Being in New Zealand I didn’t have to choose and I did delight in hearing Pedro Pascal earnestly announcing “My Year of Dicks,” while presenting the nominees for Short Film (Animated).
Video game adaptations have a messy past. Most end up as terrible blockbuster movies. Hopefully, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is going to be an exception to the rule. Now TV executives are turning to video games as the new hotness to add to their arsenal in the streaming wars. Is this a new frontier or have they just run out of IP to mine?
Regardless, Sony’s taking advantage of this with shows in development for some of their flagship games: Horizon: Zero Dawn, Twisted Metal, and God of War. And if The Last of Us is any indication, it’s proving a successful move.
Video games are a difficult medium to adapt. They’re designed as interactive experiences first and foremost. While many have exciting worlds and characters, stripping them down to their base plots often results in rather vanilla adaptations.
In an interesting move for The Last of US HBO show, Craig Mazin of Chornobyl (and the Scriptnotes podcast!) teamed up with Neil Druckmann from game developer Naughty Dog, who wrote and co-directed the original game. Meaning, this sticks pretty close to the source material with small tweaks to make up for the loss of interactivity and/or to take advantage of its new medium.
The Last of Us has made obvious changes in light of this. Instead of killing countless fungus Infected (and militia) as you do in the games, showrunners Mazin and Druckmann have opted for a more restrained approach and the Infected are hardly ever shown on screen, making less of them a more terrifying threat.
I’ll break down the finale below and touch on what I’m curious to see in a second season, with some oblique references to The Last of Us Part II video game.
“Look for the Light”
The Last of Us: Season One, Episode 9
The breezy 40-minute episode kicks off with a scene devised entirely for the show. This is Ellie’s backstory (as backstory as you can get) showing Anna, her mother, giving birth to her in the upstairs of an abandoned farmhouse. And who should play Anna? None other than Ashley Johnson, the actor who played Ellie in the games. As with the Troy Baker cameo in the previous episode (Troy played Joel in the games), it’s a little distracting knowing a bit more than a fresh-faced viewer, but I’m glad these two were included in this project as they were so instrumental to the success of The Last of Us (2013) in the first place.
Fortunately, a lot less graphic than the many harrowing birth scenes in HBO’s other genre fare, House of the Dragon, and I had a good feeling this baby was going to be okay considering the baby had to be Ellie. Anna managed to give birth but not before being attacked and infected. She cuts the umbilical cord after the fact, maybe a hint at how Ellie developed her immunity. Marlene then shows up out of nowhere to save Ellie and reluctantly put down Sarah. Marlene is played by Merle Dandridge, who voiced and mo-capped the same character in the game. Her and Ashley would have been a sweet reunion, forgetting about their tragic scene for a second. We also now see the greater meaning behind Ellie’s knife, in that it once belonged to her mother.
“After all we’ve been through. Everything I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing.”
Transitioning off baby Ellie to present-day Ellie, Joel and Ellie make their way to the Fireflies at the hospital before they’re rudely captured by said Fireflies. After being knocked out, Joel wakes up in the hospital. He finds out from Marlene that Ellie is being prepped for surgery. Marlene explains that the doctor needs to retrieve a sample of her Cordyceps and they’re pretty confident they can create a cure. Unfortunately for Ellie, the Cordyceps hide out in the brain.
Marlene remarks that the decision was hardest on her as Anna asked her to keep Ellie safe. I don’t know if I quite believe the toll it took on her, as we don’t really get to see her grapple with it. As for Joel, we’ve seen him develop a close bond with Ellie over the course of the season. And we know he’s pissed.
Joel is escorted out of the building but not before he takes out his two captors and goes on a shooting spree. While the show has been restrained in the amount of Joel killing, Joel mercilessly kills what feels like a dozen Fireflies, even one who surrenders, dropping his weapon. It’s closer to a regular encounter in the game but with the faded-out sound effects, and swelling of the music, the show is telling us this is a big deal.
Joel finds his way to the doctor’s surgery where Ellie is lying unconscious on a surgery table. Joel demands she is let go but a surgeon picks up a scalpel. Bad move. You don’t bring a scalpel to a gun fight. But I jest. For myself, this part of the game sticks with me the most, and coming back to that interactivity I mentioned earlier in the piece, is the fact you as the player have to shoot the surgeon. You have to pull the trigger. It’s not a cutscene. Here, while certainly bloody, I felt the impact was lessened in its translation to television.
Joel carries Ellie’s limp body down to the basement when Marlene confronts Joel with a moral quandary. Joel says that she shouldn’t get to decide and Marlene fires back with
“So what would she decide, huh? ‘Cause I think she’d wanna do what’s right.”
They drive away and Ellie wakes up in the back. As in the game, Joel tells a bald-faced lie, unable to see a reality where he would let Ellie sacrifice herself for the good of mankind. And we flash back to Joel execute a begging Marlene in cold blood.
“Turns out there’s a whole lot more like you. People that are immune. Dozens of ‘em. And the doctors, they couldn’t make any of it work. They’ve actually—they’ve stopped looking’ for a cure.”
The pair hike on foot the rest of the way back to Jackson. Ellie tells Joel how she had to put down her friend Riley. Then she asks Joel point blank:
“Swear to me. Swear to me that everything you said about the fireflies is true.”
Joel says “I swear” and we stay on Ellie’s face looking for any hint of doubt in her eyes. She says “Okay” and then we cut to credits. Another word-for-word translation from the game and the same guitar riff to match. If it ain’t broke...
It’s one of the most impactful video game endings, continuing to stay in your mind long after you’ve put down the controller. Who’s right in this situation? While I’d like to say I’d side with Ellie being allowed to make the choice herself, as a new parent I can see why Joel did what he did. While it’s ultimately a selfish act, he sees his role as protecting Ellie, even if it means sacrificing her agency and potentially the world.
Observations
Joel offers to teach Ellie guitar—a hint at what they might get up to in Jackson.
“C’mon, I’ll give you a boost". This one surely must have been put in for the fans. A lot of the gameplay in The Last of Us (2013) has Joel and Ellie working together to get to what would otherwise be unreachable areas.
The giraffe feeding scene is here, one of the memorable hallmarks of the game. And it plays well here too, even with the obvious CG.
Joel tells Ellie about how he got his scar, from a self-inflicted gunshot. He says he flinched. From what I recall, this is a show invention. It does give us some more backstory to how Joel reacted to the loss of his daughter, Sarah.
A bit of a bugbear of mine (as in the game) is having Marlene show up right at the end when the whole mission in the first place was to take Ellie to the hospital because Marlene couldn’t. Marlene throws out a line about her losing half her crew as if to placate us. What was it all for?
Next season
The Last of Us Part II is set five years after the first game. We don’t know what approach the creators are looking to take for the show’s second season, whether they will do another adaptation, or look to fill in those intervening years. Now that the show has proven popular I can’t seeing them being done in two seasons. Mazin and Druckmann agree but they also don’t want to drag it out either.
Bella Ramsey is 19 (born in 2003, the year of the outbreak in the show!). Ellie in the games was 14. So if we do a time jump to five years later, Ellie will be closer to Ramsey’s actual age even if we don’t see her character visibly age.
Part II is a divisive game and I’m curious to see what show watchers think of it if the show decides to stick to its plot. I mostly appreciated it, but it is a much darker game (and you thought The Last of Us was bleak!) and I didn’t feel great playing it. If you want to go into future seasons of The Last of Us cold, I wouldn’t recommend looking it up. Potential spoilers are out there.