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.
