‘The Last of Us’: The last shall be first

In the final episode of the second season of Craig Mazin’s The Last of Us — spoilers ahead —, when Ellie and Jesse enter a bookstore, we can read on one of its walls: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” That assertion has controversial implications, especially in a time when traumatic events are increasingly imbued with a life-affirming character so they can be processed, i.e. “Thanks to this misfortune, I’ve learned, I’ve grown, I’ve become who I am today.”

I don’t believe in pain as a driving force, nor agony as a blessing, nor torment as a form of learning. The fact that one can learn from pain doesn’t legitimize it. I’m more aligned with Woody Allen’s school of thought in Annie Hall: life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering… and it’s over far too quickly. The food is terrible, and the portions are small.

Setting that nuance aside, what we can be certain of is that we didn’t need an aphorism on a wall to understand that The Last of Us does indeed have a solid, well-constructed, and profound moral — one that was already sketched out in its first season and takes full shape in this second one. A thesis, inherited from the video game, that sharply points to revenge as a dead end — to the endless spiral of violence and hatred it unleashes. And it does so by masterfully using point of view as a tool.

In this case, form and substance blend together with care, without swallowing the plot — a common risk in stories with such a clear conclusion. Because from the beginning of the series, the viewer is with Ellie and Joel; they understand — though don’t excuse — that the massacre Joel committed to save Ellie is a glaringly selfish act, born from his love for her. And that act triggered everything we’ve seen and suffered through this season — good Lord, I still break into a cold sweat thinking about the second episode; no one wants to watch Pedro Pascal die, and certainly not like that.

But what would have happened if our experience, from the very beginning, had been Abby’s? How would we have felt about the murder of her father? Would we have empathized with her thirst for revenge? To answer these questions, the third season of The Last of Us — as hinted at by the end of the second — will focus on her. She will go from being the video game’s final monster to the protagonist. This isn’t moral relativism; it’s the full picture needed to understand what this story is really trying to tell us.

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