**WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD**
The setup for The Last of Us is fairly simple for most to grasp quickly in today’s pop-culture climate that’s infested by The Walking Dead phenomenon. In 2013, a mutation of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has granted it the capability to infect humans. It’s means of sustaining itself is to find a host, overtake said host, hijack their motor functions and force them to a prime space in which to complete it’s growth. When it reaches its mature state — killing the host in the process — it will release it’s spores to begin the process anew.
I’m not going to pretend that this setup is revolutionary, the whole “mass amount of people succumbing to a epidemic that turns them into uncompromising creatures of destruction, leading us to a narrative that fits to be an essay on the human condition of those who survive” schtick, but I will say that at least this very different origin fits to make the aesthetic of the infected far more unique and frightening when a shadow is cast in a dark and lifeless ruin of our world that looks just as much alien as it does human.
The
world beyond the walls of the Quarantine Zones is filled with
nightmarish creatures wandering aimlessly about a horrific ruin,
searching for a sense of purpose
...there's also those who were infected
by the Cordyceps...
The Cordyceps outbreak ravages the human population, plunging the world into a desolate societal wasteland. Vegetation reclaims buildings once considered the hubs of commerce, overgrowth turning our once proudest monuments into mere ruins of a forgotten world...
A man named Joel (portrayed flawlessly by Troy Baker) finds himself caught amidst the chaos of the zero hour of the outbreak in Austin, TX with his daughter Sarah and brother Tommy. It is this opening that first grips the player into realizing that The Last of Us is a story-driven game unlike anything we’ve seen before in video games. In a very clever stroke of narrative genius, you play the prologue partially from the perspective of Sarah, as she’s awakened in the middle of the night by her uncle calling the house and frantically telling her to get her father on the phone. Everything that descends from this moment in time feels gritty, authentic, and horrifyingly real. The Zero Hour Prologue probably connects so deep because it’s so damn honest. The entire thing: from the little bits of the escalating chaos you see (police cars flying by Joel and Sarah’s house with their sirens blaring; massive traffic jams as people attempt a midnight exodus out of the area), to the big set-piece moments (panicked citizens getting into car accidents), to the motion captured performances feel completely genuine. It fits to connect me directly to the characters and their plight because the controller resting in my hand makes me feel a weight of responsibility towards them. This feeling only fits to completely gut-check you when tragedy inevitably strikes our fleeing family through no control of our own, setting the mood and emotional core for the entire experience.
“You have no idea what loss is...”
20 years later, Joel has taken up residence in a quarantine zone in Boston. He and his smuggling partner Tess set off to track down a stolen shipment of firearms. They come to find that it was taken by Robert, a supposed confidant of theirs. When they corner him, they discover that he sold their weapons cache to a woman named Marlene — the de-facto leader of a resistance group who calls themselves “The Fireflies”.
As she rightfully purchased them, Marlene agrees to split the cache with what Joel and Tess need, but only if they escort a young girl named Ellie (gorgeously brought to life by Ashley Johnson) to the Fireflies on the outside of the zone, because Ellie is allegedly immune to the Cordyceps infection.
Thus, against their better judgement, Joel and Tess begin their journey of taking this girl to the Firefly doctors who might be able to procure a vaccine from her condition. In classic post-apocalypse adventure fashion, road blocks repeatedly pop up that force the smugglers to carry out their obligation far longer than they anticipated. The journey sees Joel and Ellie trek from Boston, to Pittsburgh, to Colorado and finally to Salt Lake City, where a Firefly headquarters is still in operation. The final leg of this journey sees them traverse a partially flooded highway tunnel, where both Joel and Ellie are knocked unconscious as the Fireflies find them.
When Joel comes to in the Firefly Lab, he is told by Marlene that Ellie is being prepped for surgery. What also comes to light is that because the Cordyceps infection grows all over the brain, the only way to figure out why she’s immune and to engineer a possible vaccine is to kill her. He fights his way to the operating room, bursting through the doors just in the nick of time. It is here where the main controversy of the game comes to light...
_____________________
A number of our colleagues have expressed frustration with having to "shoot the doctors" that are operating on Ellie. (I use scare quotes, because Joel will alternatively stab the lead doctor if you approach him.) I think shooting the doctors is a necessary moment in the player's relationship with the game, and couldn't simply have been another non-interactive violent cut scene. By the plot's climax, the game's designers needed to emphasize that the wants of Joel and the wants of the player are not the same. Sure, you're guiding Joel's external actions, but you have no control of his internal thinking. Forcing you to shoot the doctors — to externalize what's happening inside of Joel's brain — is the writer shouting, "Shame on you for assuming you are this man." It's a smart twist on our expectations from having played hundreds of faceless, characterless heroes in action games.
_____________________
As a preface: you didn’t have to shoot all the doctors in the Firefly operating room. I actually only shot the surgeon who threatened me, and that was after a stand off that saw me take a slow approach towards Ellie while pointing a shotgun at his chest issued zero resolve. As the other two doctors weren’t in my way nor attempting to stop me, I let them cower in the corner as they gazed at the lifeless body of the clownshoes who brought a scalpel to a gun fight.
I actually completely empathized with Joel, and understood most of his actions fairly well. When the world ends, the worst of humanity comes out. The only way to survive is to become a part of that — to understand that survival will call for you to do things that are ethically “wrong” to most, because this construct of morals and ethics becomes a completely self created, man-made hindrance when structure falls away. It’s like what Commissioner Gordon says in The Dark Knight Rises, “There’s a point — far out there — where the structures fail you, and the rules aren’t weapons anymore, they’re shackles letting the bad guys get ahead.” The despicable don’t play by rules of morality, and the desperate damn sure don’t worry about the ethical consequences of their actions. If you can’t accept this, your corpse will become just a stepping stone for those who can. As the old Nietzsche quote says, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.”
I guess the biggest understanding point for me was that I too found myself slowly projecting my own protective instincts onto Ellie, with my point of empathy to Joel’s actions coming from the protectiveness I feel for my sister, who is 6 years my junior. Once I felt that Ellie was to Joel what my sister Ariel is to me, all concepts of a bigger picture and “greater good” faded away for the solitary goal of doing what was best for her. I would’ve massacred the population of a goddamn continent without the bat of an eyelash if it meant getting to her and keeping her safe in that finale.
I may not have been Joel, but I certainly understood him.
_____________________
The moment is powerful and absolutely necessary for Joel's final lie to work. And the lie, wow, it's perfect. Because we expect this man to change. We misread him, because we think the empathic Joel in the cut scenes is different than the psychopathic Joel we play as. We've been trained to do that by the lion's share of action games.
When Ellie gives Joel the photo of his dead daughter, we think we're witnessing growth, Joel is finally moving on, but what we're really seeing, in hindsight, is Joel completing the projection of his old daughter onto his new one, that Joel is digging deeper into his emotional pit.
It's a horror story, right? In the end, Joel's taken this young girl hostage and turned her into his dead child.
_____________________
For the record, the lie they are referring to is the last scene of the game. Ellie asks Joel if everything he told her about the Fireflies was true — about how they found them and discovered there were a lot of other people like Ellie who were immune and who didn’t do them a damn bit of good in producing a cure, so they simply stopped looking for one. She tells him to swear to her that it was all true. After a beat, Joel straightens himself and says, “I swear.” Her reply is a simple, “...Okay.”
Now, according to writer and creative director Neil Druckmann, it’s a love story. That makes sense, as the old adage tells us “love is blind” and can make us do rash and sometimes selfish or stupid things in the name of that love.
I actually believe that Joel did change, because he grew to love Ellie. Not because she was Sarah to him, but because she claimed the same innocence and bystander-status that his daughter did when she became a victim of a mindless drone who was “just following orders.” The entire game illustrates his struggle to let himself remember what it felt like to truly care about someone, before the world made caring a deadly sin. I feel those seeds are planted when he, Ellie and Tess are on the roof of looking towards the Capitol building in Boston. There’s this small, somber smirk that Joel lets slip that gives us a glimpse of his fleeting compassion. I think that essentially, that’s the story’s core: learning to open yourself up to care again after you’ve been scarred so deeply. This negative outlook on attachment is echoed through everyone he meets, including his old friend Bill:
“Once upon a time, I had someone that I cared about. A partner… someone I had to look after, and in this world that sort of shit is good for one thing: getting you killed.”
The world has engorged itself on apathy in the wake of the outbreak, yet the entire story seems to tell us that our sympathies can endure — that life doesn’t become completely bleak unless we let it.
“After all we’ve been through. Everything that I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing.”
I also think that how you viewed Joel depended on how you played. Yes, certain times you were forced to clear a room and leave nothing but rotting corpses in your wake, but sometimes that’s what pure survival is about: kill or be killed. It doesn’t make him a psychopath. I choked out or crept past about 65% of the human enemies I encountered when I could, which to me painted him as a far more calculating and intelligent survivor. In the apocalypse, wildly firing bullets off isn’t exactly ideal when ammo is scarce (this approach proved particularly effective when I played through on the Survivor difficulty level, where ammo and supplies are almost non-existent). While obviously not on the level of story interactivity as say, Telltale's The Walking Dead, I still feel that Naughty Dog gave us the option to craft the crisis-engaging side of Joel however we so chose for the most part. If you wanted to go in guns blazing, letting the battle cry of “WOLVERINES!” ring out while you Matrix the entire room up, you could, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that the character was definitively one way or another because of how the individual chose to play the game.
For me, the concept was more about a really deep and dark question: after everything I’ve been through, where does the logic that this shit stain of a species known as humanity deserve a second chance to fuck Earth up again stand on it’s feet? We had David who attempted to murder Ellie for cannibalism; we had a whole shit load of those Pittsburgh hunters who tried to murder us just for shit they may not even want or need; and we had poor Henry who had to resort to shooting his 13-year-old infected brother, before the trauma of the action proved too much for him and he resorted to taking his own life. We are beaten over the head throughout the game with the depths that humans can and will sink to just to see another sunrise. The message of reality rang clear to me: we are not inherently good people. When the world goes to shit, we let it take us with it. Those that don’t can not and will not survive, because survival doesn’t play by house rules and will always reward those who can cast aside moral dilemmas in favor of another gasp of air. It is a perfect reflection and companion to the words Harvey Dent spoke in The Dark Knight: “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
“Guess what, we’re shitty people, Joel. It’s been that way for a long time.”
“No, we are survivors!”
I actually paused the game when I burst through the door in the operating room, unsure of what exactly I had come to find on the other side. In this moment, I reflected on my entire journey up until this point. When I resumed the game, I took a slow and calculated approach towards Ellie's body, holding the surgeon at gun point. Call me a cynic and selfish, but when he refused to back down despite staring down the smoking barrel of a shotgun held by a man who wants to prevent the death of a child, it was at that point that I came to the conclusion that no matter what I did at this point, we were already too far gone. Thus, I pulled the trigger, and carried the Fireflies last long-shot hope of stopping this epidemic out of the building.
I think the name The Last of Us is indicative of more than just devastated human population numbers — perhaps inciting that in the end, those of us that remain have only been able to do so because they have embraced the horror of humanity’s true nature: we are ruthless, sick, depraved killing machines — no better than the nightmare-inducing Clickers and Bloaters that wander the darkest regions of 2033...
_____________________
I enjoyed the journey with Joel to uncover his true nature. But I hope for the next game, Ellie takes center stage. After all, she has the most potential to change: a young girl with a suicidal sense of purpose, a desire to do no less than save the world. I want to be alongside her when Joel's lie is made explicit.
_____________________
I actually thought that Ellie knew that Joel was lying to her from the second it came out of his mouth. I feel like she wouldn’t have asked that question if she thought everything he said to her in the car was true. The expression she showed led me to believe that she didn’t buy what he was selling one bit, but that she chose not to hold it against him. She did this, because when she looked at him, she saw the words she spoke in the farmhouse within him — the supposed heartless smuggler who didn’t even want to have anything to do with her in the first place:
“Everyone I've care for has either died or left me. Everyone — fucking except for you. So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared.”
In an almost poetic beauty, Joel seems to reverberate this line when he tells his lie. And Ellie accepts him — not as a liar, but as someone who understands the fear of loneliness he faces if he makes the choice to willingly lose her. Right before this, Joel tries to comfort Ellie’s survivor’s guilt by telling her that you always find something that makes pushing through and surviving worthwhile. When he tells his lie, Ellie realizes at that moment, she was Joel’s reason to keep pushing on, and he hers. And maybe she also realized that unlike her, Joel had no false sense of heroism to aid him in escaping this burden — if he was going to quit surviving, it would be by suicide, and would force him to confront his own state of mind and the why of after everything he’s been through, now would be the time to decide to “opt out”.
“I struggled for a long time with surviving. And you — No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for...”
The question that flitters through my head though is why would it be assumed that Ellie has a suicidal sense of purpose? Because of what Marlene told us? I guess because she showed survivors guilt at the end, but honestly I felt that was more along the lines of looking for a cop-out. Usually, survivior’s guilt tends to be fairly irrational at it’s core. Those who suffer from it are trying to say that because of their ability to adapt, others inability to adapt, or freak circumstance that they’ve seen this day, somewhere along the line they shouldn’t have been “chosen” to survive. Now, this logic is actually sound when it comes to Ellie’s case, but I guess the question really is: How do we know that after everything she went through, Ellie doesn’t see the world as something that’s possibly too far gone for saving, and she’s really just expressing remorse that (as far as she knows) she can’t share her gift of immunity at will in any way?
I mean, let us step back a second: when the Fireflies find Joel and Ellie, Ellie is out cold. We’re making assumptions that when Joel woke up, Ellie had come to, talked to Marlene and said “yes, take my brain”. The problem is that Ellie asks what happened when she wakes up in the backseat of the car Joel is driving away from the Firefly HQ (and thus tells his lie). So, in reality it probably went something like — bring Ellie in, keep her sedated, prep her for surgery. The assumption that the Fireflies intentions are pure simply because they want to “save humanity” is naïve, and would be ignoring the entire commentary of the 20+ hours of gritty, raw humanity we were exposed to over the course of the game.
So if people do whatever the hell they want to suit their desires and needs, to the point where it’s valid enough to harp this chord repeatedly with Joel, it is just as applicable to Marlene and the Fireflies? At the
very least, we have to consider that for every “decent person” we would be saving with a vaccine, we would also
be inherently saving humans like the two girls who maliciously lit an endangered tortoise on
fire in Florida along with them. That is a mere tiny fragment of
the atrocities we’ve seen humans commit in this story, and you must be
accepting of them being a part of your new world order. You must also find yourself under the belief that when you establish an order of a relatively safer future, these people will
actually be able to adjust themselves down from the mental space of pure survival brutality. How long will it be before the people who simply cannot come back after two decades of scraping by inevitably fall back to their old ways? Sure, we’re led to see the good in people, but you must never forget their true nature and capabilities.
The biggest problem if people start buying the Firefly propaganda without questioning it simply because their motives appear pure from a surface level, is that you ignore the writing on the wall of the subsurface commentaries throughout the game. When Joel comes to and tells them to stop prepping for the procedure on Ellie, Marlene says:
“I get it. But whatever it is you think you’re going through right now is nothing to what I have been through.”
You get that? Not only did she just trivialize a man’s care for this child who he just trekked across the entire fucking continental United States with, but she just decided to have a pissing contest about who is suffering more for this potential loss of Ellie, which is coming from a choice she is still making. Does that not tell you about her personality? If anything was made clear from the game up to this point, it’s that Druckmann knows how to write dialog, and he damn sure knows about subtleties and their place within realistic exchange. If we read into her words based upon the context of the situation, Marlene has just shown us her true colors: she is the type who will beat her chest and climb to the highest mountain just to shout “praise me, for I have suffered so that you may claim this reward!” That’s some fucked up, narcissistic, martyr-like shit right there. We must at the very least consider the
possibility that Marlene is no better than Joel, if not worse. For even
though she states that procuring a vaccine through these means “isn’t about her”, in the end, she would be the face that would be presenting this mythical vaccine to the masses should it be rendered. Thus, she would become the face of the Fireflies prevention of human extinction — the Cordyceps Outbreak Savior to those who still remain.
In the opening credits, there’s audio that highlights the changes over the 20 years between the prologue and main story, and it’s made quite clear that the Fireflies are persecuted in the beginning of the outbreak when the quarantine zones are constructed. How do we know that manufacturing a cure isn’t just going to boost their ego so they can wave it around in faces of the remains of society and say, “See!? We did this!” To inflate their own self-importance? I mean, do we honestly believe they would willingly dole out the vaccine to everyone, including the people who assaulted, tortured and murdered their family and friends? It’s written as borderline fact by some people that it couldn’t happen any other way, as if as humans the Fireflies wouldn’t be prone to pick and choose and exercise the absolute power that they would finally claim, as if we don’t have tomes of historical recounts proving that humans are more often than not power-hungry creatures Hell bent on obtaining even the smallest shred of it anyway they can. We simply do not and cannot know what their true motives would be until the time was upon them, but frankly, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of killing a child just to find out whether or not we went and substituted one over-lording group without the means to properly rebuild for another.
“There is no other choice here!”
“Yeah... You keep telling yourself that bullshit.”
I think the dilemma that’s raised in The Last of Us is one primarily of conditioning. In so many games, our objective is to save the world through any means necessary, and if we happen to cross a few moral lines here and there, it’s justified because it’s for the alleged “greater good”. This is a game so intellectually deep and self-aware that it actually challenges the very essence of this logic, and asks us if the greater good is always such a binary equation — as if there is never any emotional attachment, moral ambiguity, or underlying feeling of betrayal that goes along with such an objective. That in order to truly understand the gravitas of this situation, we must answer for every one of our transgressions, and claim a bit of time in existential meditation on the breadth of our actions. Maybe some gamers weren’t ready to cope with this reality: we are only “good people” in almost every other narrative because we are arbitrarily labeled as such. The Last of Us ain’t no place for no heroes.
This zone takes guests through a creepy, everlasting masquerade ball,
where the dancers – still stuck in a surreal dance – have long-since
begun to rot away. It yields some of my favorite costumes of the entire
event – most of the dancers have either crudely stitched their skin
back into place, or they’ve made their ball room masks out of the more
youthful faces of unfortunate interlopers. The set pieces could use
some work – I like massive candles with the blank human expressions
melted into the wax, but is that really it for this zone? Perhaps
Universal doesn’t want to drop in too many obstacles in this high
traffic street (which is a direct funnel to all four soundstage
haunts). If that’s the case, however, then I’d rather they just move
zones like this to nearby streets where they can be fully realized, even
if it forces guests to travel a little out of their way to see them.
In spite of their disadvantages, the actors do bring just enough energy
to keep this one interesting.
This is based off the SyFy reality TV show, not the movie where
Nicholas Cage and John Travolta wear each others faces for two hours
(unfortunately…). The TV show is basically a horror make-up artist
competition, and the zone showcases a lot of the better creations. I
was frankly worried this would end up being a photo-op zone, but luckily
I’d liken this more to 7 from 2011. The most impressive
creations stand atop pedestals, generating a lot of interest and
pictures. Their minions, however, weave in and out of the crowd,
attacking anyone who distracted by the main attractions on the
pedestals. Much to my own bewilderment, it’s the most all-around solid
zone this year, and gets the nod for Zone of the Year.
If creepy and detailed atmosphere is your thing, just keep walking – Halloween
doesn’t give much of a damn about these subtle nuances. This house
only knows how to attack repeatedly, and without mercy. The sets here
are among the event’s most basic and uninspiring. Granted, the movie
takes place in a house, so it’s not exactly providing a lot of rich
visual scenes to draw from, but even so, it really feels like HHN forgot
to fill in a hell of a lot of blanks. Now, while I said these sets
were simple, I did not say they were ineffective. In fact, Halloween
puts on a clinic of effective set design, overwhelming guests with
misdirection, ambient noise, and clever hiding locations for the cast. A
great example of this is the winding hallway of hanging linens, where
every individual closet door rattles as if an actor stands right behind
it. Only about two or three hold an actual Michael Myers. The cast is
bar-none the best at Horror Nights this year. None of their appearances
are half-assed – if they’re there, they’re coming full throttle, with a
booming sound-effect to maximize the effect. It’s one of, if not the,
house to see this year. Can’t miss.
Posts
