Last of Us makes Sam and Henry’s depressing game story full-on nihilism

An apocalypse story that is so bleak is ridiculous.

“We are the walking dead” — Robert Kirkman’s distillation of the zombie genre down to its most fundamental elements — was published in 2005’s The Walking Dead#24, and Andrew Lincoln read a rendition of these words to the crowd of The Walking Dead TV show’s fifth season a decade later. The comic’s TV success sparked a wave of fascination with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, not merely the outbreak. We now know what a “zombie story” is. It is really about.

But what happens if Last of Us’ fifth episode demonstrates anything, it’s that it’s not the zombies and the violence and the death that bend this particular apocalypse to nihilism. It’s the insistence that cruelty and selfishness are widespread — through revolutionaries, authority figures, and everyone in between — and that there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so you may as well grab a gun and defend yourself and your own. It’s not that we’reThey are the living dead. It’s that They are.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Last of Us episode 5, “Endure and Survive.”]

There’s something I don’t like about it that I can’t quite put my finger on… Oh, right! It’s that I don’t like to be told — especially by corporate-produced media — that deep down everyone’s a monster, so there’s no point in getting rid of the monsters in charge.

Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

Maybe it’s the way “Endure and Survive” opens with revolutionaries torturing their oppressors to death and mutilating their bodies, as the citizens of Kansas City’s quarantine zone celebrate the overthrow of their city’s FEDRA outpost. Maybe it’s the scene where Henry — who is fleeing the revolutionaries after FEDRA extorted him into betraying them by withholding lifesaving medicine from his deaf and mute little brother — describes these events to Joel, and a young Black man tells the Latino guy next to him that if you push people down long enough, this is just what happens. It’s a line right out of the “If we give up our power to the folks we’ve oppressed, they’ll use it to oppress us right back” playbook, written by the Committee for How to Justify Your Continued Chauvinism.

There’s a sense in Last of Us It is expected that such a situation will be unfavorable, but not inevitable. While people under FEDRA rule trade their freedom for safety and are right to rise up, everyone we’ve seen who lives in “freedom” are inhuman gangs of raiders or gun-hoarding preppers who watch tripwire decapitations for fun. These are the people we know. These are.

Maybe it’s that I just listened to a 51-minute debunking of the veneer theory — an almost 400-year-old philosophical position that morality is a thin “veneer” over humanity’s default state of selfishness and brutality — from NPR’sByline podcast. Or that we just went through a period of global plague in which a lot more cops beat up unarmed protestors than the other way around, and that the “protests” that led to police death were the ones full of gun-toting preppers ostensibly aligned with actual cops. This seems a bit discordant that we are saying that resistance to an oppressor is always met with equal violence.

Maybe it’s that I’m a die-hard Batman fan from back before all his recent movies were low-key about how terrorists and Occupy Wall Street are basically the same thing. It’s a cinematic palette for superhero stories that can be traced back to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight even though the quote is “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” not “Men of all ages just want to watch the world burn.” It seems difficult for some to remember that after so many promises that people are only as good as the law allows them to be, the point of that movie is that the Joker was wrong.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Perhaps all of this is why I’m tired of men telling me stories about our oppressive laws, while the ones pushing back are violence reactionaries. Stories with no substance Approved way to advocate for broad change, and therefore stories that tell me there is no “good” way to make things different. “It is what it is,” the stranger tells me about the boot on my neck.

Ich erinnere mich an das Spiel Last of Us The game became grueling but cathartic in 2013’s summer. It is important to convey a story via a video game. With agency, comes power.

Last of UsThe game put me in a position to fight and win. It gave me the feeling of ultimate invincibility. Joel and Ellie could still be fought another day, so I could go back to try again. If the story of the game had really wanted them to die I wouldn’t have been able to stop it, but — spoilers for a 10-year-old game — it didn’t.

The story of the game did want Henry and Sam to die, though, and either ironically or tellingly, the past decade had erased them from my mind until they showed up in the fourth episode of HBO’s Last of Us. While I can still recall the scenes at the start of the game and the legendary ending, many steps were forgotten. It put me in the position to move forward and gave me the illusion that I had achieved a goal. CordycepsThis plague was eradicated. (Until the story of the game — spoilers for a 10-year old game — decided I wasn’t.)

Photo: Liane Hentscher/HBO

However Last of Us the TV show has me helplessly watching Henry make dire choices from a place of loving desperation, and be rewarded by having to mercy kill his own baby brother and then turn the gun on himself in front of another child and her guardian who’s been through essentially the same loss. I sit there, for a scene where Kathleen — the revolutionary leader — baldly explains that she’s fully aware that the success of the uprising has given her the freedom to be kind, but she’d like to murder children anyway, simply because she thinks it’ll make her feel better, and everyone in her cause is kinda just fine with it? I don’t get to try to save Henry and Sam, and I don’t get to fight back against Kathleen.

So maybe it’s the passivity of television compared to games, or the decade of experiences I’ve had in between, but I’m not in a position to escape my thoughts, however intentionally or unintentionally the show’s creators were in making a show that prompts them. As I think, You can write this story if, even if it is quiet and unarticulated, you feel that the natural state for humanity is monsterousness..

You either think that this is how Please enter your email address would behave if societal codes and conventions broke down, and if you would, then everyone else would, because the idea that you’re monstrous beyond the mean is unthinkable. Or, worse, you don’t think that you would, but you think other people definitely would, an idea just a step away from “My peopleThis is something I would not do, however. They would,” a line right out of the “How to perpetuate the hierarchy that puts you at a societal advantage” playbook of the Committee for Colonialism and Genocide Throughout Human History. It is the mother of all monstrous realities: The belief that humankind is fundamentally evil.

So maybe, what it actually is, is that I don’t like when people project their own bullshit onto me.