THE LAST OF US KEEPS US GUESSING

THE LAST OF US 106 starts with a three month time jump. Which is super weird. Our heroes have only been on the road really for 3 episodes, and now suddenly we're in Wyoming. What?

Those who know the video game will know that's its narrative. But who cares about that? There's a lot of territory between Kansas City and Wyoming. Why not do at least one more story in between?

But giving us that time jump is another way of undermining our expectations. Even after having the love story episode and other characters given their points of view, the basic structure of THE LAST OF US is very much a zombie/apocalypse/quest story, which brings with it all kinds of rules, including you have to keep stopping for problems/adventures along the way. You don't jump time, you go from place to place. 

By dismissing that, Craig Mazin leaves unsure what to expect. Personally, my brain insisted on sticking to the rules: they're going to cross the river and then get attacked. And Mazin leans into that—he gives us them having to cross that narrow bridge, which seems absolutely primed to be a trap. We've even got Ellie constantly looking around.

But then it isn't a kill zone and the two of them have a nice little moment. After which, the twist—oh shit, maybe the Native couple meant this other river. Suddenly gunshots, they're surrounded, the dog. Okay, perfect. This is what we expected. The next big challenge. 

But then it turns out these are Tommy's people, and there's not going to be any big action sequence. We're going to get a whole episode of Joel and Ellie hanging out with Tommy's community. 

There's more going on here than dramatic effect, right? This is about theme: THE LAST OF US is a story about what people do for love. And that means it doesn't need to be one zombie or human battle or fetch quest after another. In fact it can't be. It has to have new characters in relationship alongside the ongoing questions/sacrifices of the Joel and Ellie relationship. That's the story it's telling. 

I don't want to overstate this. I do think it might have been nice to have a one off episode somewhere else before we got to Tommy, maybe have them meet someone who is alone. 

But it's definitely an interesting and unusual choice, one that only gets reinforced by that first scene with the Native couple, which is also really unusual and specific (see tomorrow). And maybe all of that is meant to loosen us up so that when we get to the scene where Joel breaks down, we're ready for such an unexpectedly emotional moment from Joel. Maybe these early moments are trying to shake us free from f some of the "Zombie Means Kills" blood lust that watching so many stories like this have instilled in us, so that we can be open to something more tender.

THE LAST OF US SHOWS THAT THEME IS YOUR FRIEND

THE LAST OF US is a show about the end of the world, right? Except we've seen that. And zombie ends of the world maybe more than any other at this point. So, quite frankly, who the fuck cares? 

A lot of movies and TV shows would shake their head that response.  The point is, I don't know, a thrill ride, or some new wrinkle that supposedly changes everything. These zombies can shoot machine guns!!

But the underlying question remains: Who cares? Which is really at heart a question about theme. What is this story really about? 

A lot of TV stories, in my humble opinion, never crack the theme question. They're about plot and character. Someone like David Simon, on the other hand, is clearly thinking about theme or metaphor in every single episode he's creating. Theme becomes a way of fine tuning the focus on each arc within each episode, of taking it from something cleverly and thoughtfully plotted to something truly crafted, if that makes any sense. 

Mazin and Druckman take a somewhat gentler version of the same approach. As far as I can tell, you're not generally going to get a new thematic metaphor or idea in each episode. But there is one abiding idea for the season which they use to elevate the story out of the realm of the typical "Survive the end of the world" obstacle course. Druckman talks about it in the post-game interview for 103. The story, he says, is about "Where love can take you."  

Once you have that theme in mind—and I often think good theme-ing is kind of like invisible ink code; it shouldn't make itself known overtly. Instead it's the kind of thing that is revealed through some kind of key that you're given near the end—an image, a line of dialogue, a metaphor. You gain that and then suddenly you look back through that lens and holy crap you see this whole through line you missed.

And that's how "Where love can take you" works. You can watch 104 and 105 and just think of them as about this crazy vendetta being played out across this entire city. But really it's about what two different people do for love: Henry sacrifices the heart of the community, Kathleen's brother; Kathleen burns the whole community down, basically, looking for him. 

Joel's story has always been about what he's willing to do for love: really that's the opening, him doing everything he can for love of his daughter. Then he agrees to take Ellie all the way across the country for love of Tess. And in 106, he's willing to give Ellie up for love of her. 

With that theme in mind other things snap into focus, too: like how the opening of 106 stays focused on the relationship of that Native couple Marlon and Florence even as Joel and Ellie threaten them. Or how the Joel and Tess moments in the Bill and Frank episode end up, in the light of that love, highlighting their care for each other.

Again, this is how theme works, and what makes it such an asset to have worked out. If I know my story is all about expressions of love, then every time I introduce new characters, I know part of what I need to do is to give them their own expression of love, whether good or bad, healthy or dark. I have questions to help me focus in on them as characters: Who does this character love, and how do they express it?

THE LAST OF US has another theme or idea running through it, too. Kathleen describes it as fate, but really it's about karma. What you put into this horrible universe, you will get back out again in spades. Henry and Sam can't escape because of what Henry did to save Sam. Same with Kathleen. Meanwhile the guys from 103 get a happy ending because they put good into the world. And Maria spent her pre-apocalypse life putting bad guys in jail, and now she's part of the leadership of this great community. 

Theme: done poorly, it reduces character and story to sermons. But done well it brings out interesting notes in a story, and becomes a way for we the writers to hone in on the key elements of our material.  

THE LAST OF US DELIVERS ON ITS PROMISES

The end of LAST OF US 105 is really interesting for the ways it fulfills the different promises of 104-105. 

 First and foremost, it pays off the promise of confrontation.  The two episodes have put in such work to give life to Kathleen and Henry and their individual and conflicting desires/problems/backstories. Everything about their stories said they have to face off at the end. And so they do.

It also pays off the promise of monsters. Chekhov's gun is one of those principles of storytelling that you hear mentioned a lot. If you show a gun in the first act of a play, by the play's end someone has to use it. A gun is understood as being so full of meaning, just by mentioning it you've set up a serious threat and foreshadowing. And if you don't follow that through, the audience will feel manipulated, like you made them feel scared for no reason. 

The clickers are like that. They're so fucking terrifying they're around, just the mention of them is enough to serve as Chekhov's gun.  So in 105 we hear that Kansas City's Fedra drove all the clickers underground 15 years ago. Then our heroes go underground and encounter absolutely nothing. 

Given how much the confrontation between Kathleen and Henry pays off that promise, I almost wonder whether the show could have gotten away with not having a million underground zombies take over the scene. But maybe it speaks to something about theme (which I'm going to talk about tomorrow). 

There's one further dimension to the promise of monsters here, I think. It's the promise of early safety—in an post-apocalypse every success has to be earned, and the cost should be A LOT. So, if you're you're going to be able to wander underground without encountering clickers, you not only need to encounter some after the fact, before the final escape is completed, they need to be harder than what we've already seen. 

The KC strategy of burying their infected is much the same in principle, but a thousand times worse. If you are able to go 15 years without clickers, then when you see them again, it's got to be THE WORST EVER. 

And so we get not only the endless flood of zombies, but new mutations, a child gymnast clicker who is doing stuff with your body that you cannot actually do with your body; and King Clicker, who is massive and impossible to kill. 

Actually there's one other promise that the ending—the real ending needs to land, and it's connected to theme.  More on that tomorrow!

THE LAST OF US MINES THE DEEPER DRAMA IN TEXTING

A while back I wrote about how HEARTSTOPPER figured out a genius way to make texting work onscreen. So many shows and movies show people texting these days. Sometimes—like when the text bubbles actually appear onscreen rather than through cuts to the phone—it works. A lot of the time it feels like there's probably a better way to tell this story. 

But in HEARTSTOPPER (and also YOUNG ROYALS) they end up using the process of writing texts as a way to take the audience on these little journeys through the characters' thought processes. And there's a kind of suspense built in as we wait to see what exactly they're going to send. 

In THE LAST OF US 105 we meet Sam, a child who cannot hear or speak. And when he's communicating with Ellie he uses one of those cheap Magic Erase Boards where you can pull up the plastic top layer and erase everything you just wrote. It's a pretty classic end of the world touch to have Sam using something like this, very "there is nothing else left but classic old school pop culture stuff." 

And as with HEARTSTOPPER, part of the drama is in discovering what each of them has written; basically the scene is a series of those texting ellipses that you get when the other person is writing, followed by the reveal of what they wrote. 

But the thing I also liked is the way Craig Mazin worked with the board itself. In their final scene together, most of the time, we don't actually see the words on the page. Instead Ellie reads them, either as she's writing them or when she receives them from Sam, which makes the scene move faster, and gives the scene an energy and dynamism that it wouldn't have otherwise. And it's not just Ellie; Sam delivers gives great facial expressions which often are themselves all the communication we need.

There are only three moments in fact when we actually see the words, and they are the big emotional moments of the scene: the opening, where Sam asks whether Ellie is ever scared; Ellie's eventual response "I am afraid of ending up alone." And then when she follows up with what about you, we get Sam's heartbreaking question: "If you turn into a monster is it still you inside?", which ends up revealing what this was really all about, the bite he got. 

Even though Ellie and Sam's situation is pretty unique, I think it offers some nice suggestions for how to do texting onscreen well. 

First, Lean into the drama of the texting. Those "person is now texting" ellipses create suspense. Use that. 

Second, Play around with the forms of communication. Sure you can just show the back and forth, whether on the phones or onscreen. But before you settle on that, take a second to brainstorm and see if you can find some other options, like having the characters occasionally say the texts out loud, or having the texts appear onscreen in different sizes, areas of the screen or forms depending on the emotion you want to convey. Mixing it up will almost certainly make the moment your interesting.

Finally, Think about how can you give extra punch to the most important lines. Again, size, shape or form could work here. But Mazin's solution is even more elegant: only show the "texts" that are most important. Simply by virtue of holding back for those moments, he gives them a greater importance. (Also, because they're handwritten they feel more personal. Is there some equivalent to be found in texting?)

THE LAST OF US AND HOW TO ESTABLISH NEW PROTAGONISTS WELL

I didn't write about 104 last week, in part because it felt like it might be better to wait and see 104-105 as a unit. They're an interesting choice for a story to tell following 103. 

As I wrote about last week, 103 seems like it's a game changer for the series. Its standalone queer love story suggests that THE LAST OF US is interested in something different than a post-apocalypse adventure story, or even than a Joel and Ellie story, that it might be about all of the people in this world, and more specifically perhaps about different kinds of love. 

One way of proceeding coming out of a story like that is to give us a more standard Joel and Ellie story.  It's a classic genre way of proceeding to move back and forth between plot stories, that is stories that get us from point A to B, and mythology stories. 

And 104 certainly starts that way. About a third of the episode is moving the ball (aka the characters) farther across the United States. 

But once we get to Kansas City, after they're attacked, we suddenly find ourselves in an interrogation room with a woman we've never met before, Kathleen, who is looking for someone named Henry. And from this point forward we cut back and forth between Joel and Ellie's story and Kathleen's hunt. 

And then 105 starts with neither of them, but instead ten days earlier with Henry and his brother Sam, who suddenly showed up at the end of 104 with their guns drawn on Joel and Ellie. 

So rather than sort of "mix things up," as some genre shows do, THE LAST OF US starts with something like that, as a way of keeping us feeling like that story is progressing, but then once it's accomplished that, weaves in first one and then another story of completely new characters, and does so in the way established in 103, that is, rather than say having Joel and Ellie meet these characters and so we come into their stories through our heroes' point of view, the show literally cuts away from Joel and Ellie to these new characters and gives them an entire major moment of their own. 

Introducing them in this manner is a way of once again underlining these other characters' independent value and subjectivity. Kathleen's story is not here to support Joel and Ellie's; she is a subject in her own right, the protagonist of her own story. And the same is true with Henry and Sam.

I'm struck by the fact that these new introductions are not jarring, either.  Sam and Henry are introduced at the start of an episode; that's actually a great moment to try something new, because it's the moment that you most have the audience's attention. They've just started the stream; they're going to give you at least a minute. Plus Henry and Sam were introduced at the end of 104, so they are not total strangers. 

But in 104 we're literally halfway through an episode and suddenly we're supposed to just roll with a whole new set of characters. That does not go down so easy. And in both cases the way that the writers make that work is by putting the character in a compelling moment and then taking their time. It's sort of counter intuitive, but if you're going to introduce someone new in the middle of what you think is someone else's story, you need to give the enough time for us to invest in them. 

So first we get some establishing shots outside, telling us we're going someplace else. Then we're outside a room, hearing a man talking to someone, saying he doesn't know anything. And only then do we go inside and watch the scene play out between Kathleen and the doctor, with her threatening to kill him if he doesn't give her the location of Henry, who apparently was responsible for the death of her brother. (Note how that is actually exposition meant to tell us important stuff about Kathleen, and yet it works because it's hidden by the high stakes of the situation.) And the scene establishes Kathleen's immediate problem: is she the kind of person who is going to kill the doctor who brought her into this world because he won't tell her where Henry is. And in the end, yeah, she is.

It's not a long sequence, maybe 5 minutes. But that's plenty of times to give us her story, her character, and a problem which she eventually solves. 

The opening of 105 with Henry and Sam is much longer, 15 minutes. And part of that is again about establishing the characters and their relationship, which is so central to where the story goes; but it's also about establishing what happened in KC; it's about explaining the doctor and the attic hidey-hole that Kathleen found at the end of 104; and it's got to get Henry and Sam to Joel and Ellie. 

But as a unit it, too, is built out of a problem that needs solving. We start with Henry and Sam hiding and trying to figure out a way to get out of the city. And he spends ten days trying to figure out how to do this on his own and gets nowhere. The lack of food and disappearance of the doctor drives them out, but still without a great plant. But then Henry sees Joel and Ellie and realizes, this is his ticket. Problem solved. 

This is a long post! What can we take from the way that the episode introduces Kathleen and Henry/Sam? First, Teach and then Trust. In 103, Craig Mazin teaches the audience to think of the show in a different way. And then in 104 and 105 he trusts that they now understand how the show works. He doesn't overdo it; 104 starts with Joel and Ellie. But he's not afraid to jump into Kathleen's story in the middle of the episode.   

Second, When You Introduce a New Character, Take the Time You Need. Really this is a subset of trust. If you're going to introduce someone new, particularly in this "everyone is a subject" way, then you need to give yourself and the audience the runway for them to take off. Otherwise the audience won't know what the hell it is. 

Third, The Secret Sauce to Introducing a New Subject is Giving Them a Problem. It's screenwriting 101, really. At the heart of your protagonist is a problem (which could also be described as a desire that they need to fulfill). Kathleen needs to get revenge for her brother's death. Henry needs to get Sam out of the city.

I've got more to say this week about 104 and 105. I'll be back tomorrow with how to do texting in post-apocalypse.

THE LAST OF US GETS REPRESENTATION

 

I’m back this week with a whole heap of posts about the last couple eps of THE LAST OF US. Today, I want to offer one last thought about 104-105.

 

As you might know, Henry and his brother Sam are characters who were originally in the video game. But in the game Sam was not deaf.

 

That one alteration has a lot of interesting impacts on those episodes. First, it adds another layer of stakes to the proceedings. When you can’t hear whether you’ve made a noise or not, you’re in that much more danger. At the same time, rather than lean into the trope of disability indicating helplessness, writer Craig Mazin explores how it’s an asset—sign language gives Sam and Henry a way to communicate in dangerous situations.

 

Sam's deafness also gives Ellie and Joe another obstacle they have to overcome, which then as they succeed ends up deepening the bonds between Ellie and Sam in particular. Again it’s that age old rule: if you make characters work for something their success lands much more strongly.

 

All of this is a long way of saying, when we’re conceiving of a script, it’s worth asking ourselves what is the most interesting version of each character. There are groups out there, like those with physical disabilities or of certain ethnic groups, that are so fundamentally underrepresented in the media that they often aren’t top of mind for writers as they imagine different roles. But as 104 and 105 of THE LAST OF US make clear, these groups can bring a ton to the stories we’re trying to tell. 

 

Sometimes when people complain about diversity, it’s just nonsense, right? There are female Jedi, queer Jedi, Black Jedi—get over it. 

 

But there are also cases where the complaint happens because the writers have not dug into what being nonbinary or blind or Native brings to that actual character and their stories. We are not all interchangeable; character is  all about drilling down into the specifics of who we are. And if our stories don't reflect that, they are still doing those groups a critical disservice. And they're just not telling very good stories. 

(Random hot take: I hate Mace Windu. Just don't like him at all. And yet I love Sam Jackson. Maybe the problem I have is that somehow the way they wrote the role seemed completely uninterested in the fact that he was a Black man.)

Bottom line, THE LAST OF US the TV show is a way better story with Keivonn Woodward playing Sam. Think what our own shows could be with characters and performances like that.