From day one, the major challenge of The last of us could be highlighted: its need to stand out from the number of series with similar themes and broadcast in the last decade. Gamers might be obsessed with the level of loyalty to the reference work, but the serial fan community might worry about the feeling of déjà vu when watching fascist dystopias, lonely journeys through devastated civilizations, the desolation of the survivor and, of course, walking dead, no matter how much they try to camouflage themselves with mushrooms. And, after dodging direct comparisons with The Walking Dead, one of the audience phenomena of this millennium, the HBO series finally fell victim to the inevitable: the eighth episode, the penultimate of the season, could belong to the zombie franchise. Based on the comics by Robert Kirkman.
In the episode, titled When we are in need, circumstantial characters are introduced at the beginning of the episode. David (Scott Shepherd) is a reverend trying to calm his community, who lives in a town in the middle of a snowy forest and who has just suffered a casualty at the hands of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). He too has a food shortage.
This somewhat ominous man meets Ellie after she has just shot a deer in the woods, much-needed meat for David’s people, and tries to convince her to join his group and give him the deer in exchange for antibiotics for Joel. Among his parishioners, in addition, is James, played by the actor Troy Baker who played Joel in the video game.
The parish serves as an excuse to dissect the faith in a series that, being produced in the United States, was surprising that it had barely touched on the subject. It also allows us to talk about violence and the primal and dark instincts that inhabit the main characters (yes, Ellie has a murky side) with the excuse of surviving in a hostile world where anyone can be an executioner. But, when it is discovered that David was indeed leading a cannibal community, The last of us enters into a direct comparison with The walking dead and his stage in Terminus, so hard, of irredeemable vileness. (For those of you who don’t remember or know what Terminus was, it was a community that sold itself as an oasis and was actually cannibalistic.)
This déjà vu cannot even be compensated for by the extremely classic nature of the series, which combines the dramatic seasonal arcs of its characters with episodic situations that must be presented and resolved in an hour. And it is that until now one of the key elements was their vindication of hope even in the worst of horrors: Ellie and Joel could face losses and difficult decisions but the creation of a family bond between them, in addition to normality with which the young woman lives her present, allowed them to maintain a certain optimism and impregnate the work with this essence, just as Tess had asked Joel before she died. In fact, on this road trip with a neowestern flavor, a pristine community has appeared, Jackson, with a democratic spirit and which cares for its members in all aspects.
By surrendering even temporarily to the presentation of a sordid reality without a hint of goodness, the fine line that prevented The Last of Us from being interpreted only as an improved version of The Walking Dead vanishes. The only novel element of fiction is lost: this tone that, despite the adversities, did not give in to pessimism. But what’s disappointing, in fact, is how uninteresting David’s speech is while Craig Mazin’s script is exposed as opportunistic: Joel is on the verge of death until suddenly he can once again become a physically adept ally for escape the cannibal sunset. In an a priori quality and adult series like this one, one hopes that this very positive evolution of his physical condition will be better justified.
Perhaps this was not the best way to enter the last act of the first season, which next Monday will issue a denouement that (very sure) will make rivers of ink flow.