THE LAST OF US AND THE ARC OF THE COVENANT, PART II: REMEMBER YOUR RULES

So in THE LAST OF US season one Mazin and Druckmann scatter breadcrumbs to build the sense of something bigger at play on Ellie, deep feelings within her that are going to need to be released. 

But then, when you're plotting the actual moment where that happens, there's still the question of the specifics. What should occur? 

And you've got unlimited options, right? It's your show. Anything could happen.

But you and I both have seen way too many stories where the thing that does happen just does not feel right. To some extent my complaints about the David are an example of that. Her going full Wilding Mode on someone makes total sense to me. But this guy that she's murdering, he does not seem right. 

And I think this points to a key thing about writing a TV show. Whether we know it or not, every show we work on has an internal set of rules. A lot of them, actually—rules for how each character can and can't behave (which depending on your show could be A LOT of rules; rules for how the world of the show works, what kinds of things happen in this world and what don't; and rules for the series, by which I mean what kinds of stories do we tell her and in what kinds of ways. 

Sometimes you can break these rules and it's thrilling for the audience specifically because it's so unexpected. But almost always if you try you can trace back that rule break and find a way in which actually no, it does fit the show. For instance the last of THE GOOD FIGHT has an ongoing growing riot going on outside the law offices, and it keeps impeding on their work more and more. It's insane and scary and some might say, what the hell, that is not this show. Except when you step back, sure it is. It's just the latest and most profound sense of dislocation that one of the characters has been feeling since the very beginning. And this show is about that deepening instability. 

The rules of THE LAST OF US definitely include the possibility of Ellie going completely nuts. While we haven't seen her do that yet, we have seen her confront some terrible things, and we've seen some scary stuff running across her face at times. So that part checks out. 

But the rules of THE LAST OF US also include the idea that every character is actually trying to proceed out of some kind of experience of love. Which is also to say, that every character has the ring of truth about them. They resist tropes. 

And this is why the Peter fails, right? At one point he might have been doing what he was doing out of love, and as I wrote on Tuesday, if he had just been doing the cannibalism thing, I think they could have made it work. But with the pedophile moves and all the ranting that follows he's suddenly just a crazy person. And that breaks the rules of the show. 

But you could also see Mazin and Druckmann getting to 108, knowing they wanted to get Ellie to that climactic meltdown, but asking themselves, what do the circumstances that trigger this need to include? Like, what would cause her to lose it so completely? And they might argue, if we're going to follow the rules of Ellie, he would have to be an absolute monster. Him just feeding people she doesn't know human flesh, that's not going to trigger her enough. She needs a lot more. And making him this violent predator, that'll do it. 

Personally, I wonder if it wouldn't have been enough just to have him on top of her, trying to control her, maybe threatening her life, without any of the rape or "actually I am secretly a monster" stuff. I wonder if wouldn't have made it more grounded and personal to Ellie, in fact—this isn't about who he is, it's about her being triggered and what she does when she is. It's about the trauma inside her. 

Or was there some other way of building David or that moment to get Ellie to that point? Could he be someone who has love, but only for his own people, and in the end he's going to kill Ellie to feed her to them, and the threat of him plus the madness of that is enough? 

Or maybe some people would say they like it just the way it is. The point is, in building that climax we have to keep looking back to our rules for the show and make sure our plot choices fit, that they're true to the characters and world that we've built.

THE LAST OF US AND THE ARC OF THE COVENANT (aka CLIMAXES NEED SPACE)

After I posted about the David on Tuesday it struck me that there's another side to the show's decision to present such a flawed and trope-y character in a show that has brilliantly avoided those kinds of clichés. 

It turns on the character purpose of the episode, i.e. where does Craig Mazin need Ellie to land? And it's really clear, he thinks she needs to murder David, and to do so in just the most horrific fashion. 

But does that actually need to happen? That's what I want to talk about today, which is really Writing the Climax of a Character's Season Arc. 

If we plotted out Ellie's story in season one of the series, we would find moments here and there that are disturbing and traumatic. Everyone remembers 103 for the gay love story, but before all that we spend about 10 minutes with Ellie and Joel. And there's that spooky scene where Ellie goes down into a cellar that she finds without Joel knowing. She finds a zombie trapped under a bunch of bricks, and rather than just kill it or leave she goes up to it and slowly cuts into its head, almost just for kicks. Then when she does kill it, it's with all this rage. And she tells Joel nothing. So chilling. 

In 104 she shoots a man to save Joel, and once again there's that rage on her face, and also absolute horror. And in the episodes that follow we get other sorts of horrifying things she has to deal with. In 105, she tries to save Sam, and ends up failing him in her mind, then watches Henry kill Sam and himself. In 106 she's suddenly rougher to the Indian couple than she had been with people in the past. She's not violent or anything, but she is kind of menace-y in a way that seems new. And in 107 and 108 she has to deal with Joel getting stabbed and everything now depending on her. She either saves him or she's all alone. 

All these little moments are meant to add pressure within us, a sense of anxiety about where Ellie is headed that will need to be released in some way.

At the same time, one of the things that I love about the Druckmann and Mazin approach is that it's done with a gentle touch. You do not go into 108 thinking, Oh my God Ellie is about to fucking lose it. A lot of shows do exactly that—they want to give you every single breadcrumb on the path to that final moment. And it turns out if you've done your job right, that's unnecessary. In fact, telling us too much kind of suffocates the life out of the moment. We end up knowing that it has to happen, and pretty much exactly how and maybe even when.

The Druckmann/Mazin approach instead is to give us breadcrumbs, sure, but also to leave a lot of room for the emotions of that final moment to expand into. That's what we want. 

An analogy: The big character arc climax moment is like a fire that we're going to light. If we want that moment to really explode, there needs to be a lot of oxygen available when we light the match. 

In climaxes where we've done too much work, we've effectively lit the fire too soon, so the climax just doesn't have much oxygen to work with. Which means it can't be as emotional and explosive. 

Druckmann and Mazin hold a lot back, give us just moments here and there, and in that way they allow a lot of room for the emotions of Ellie's climax. They enable it to be as big and as crazy as it is. 

So, does Ellie's climax fit her arc? Does it or something like it need to happen? Absolutely. 

But then the other question is, Does it need to happen in this way? And that's what I'm going to talk about tomorrow.

THE LAST OF US INTRODUCES US TO THE DAVID

I'm back, and hoping this week to look at the last few LAST OF US episodes. I'm probably going to be hopping around between eps a bit, so hang on. 

Today I want to talk about a trope you find in post-apocalyptic shows—the religious figure. In THE LAST OF US he's called David, so let's just refer to the trope as The David. 

There's a couple key things to know about the David. First, he's always the leader of some kind of community. We're not talking about some guy who lives by himself and likes to talk about Jesus. The David is always in charge of a community, both spiritually and politically. 

Second, The David almost always presents as well intentioned. He may be a bit intense, or be stuck having to make some hard decisions, but when we meet the David he's almost always presented as down deep a decent guy earnestly trying to help people. 

Third, that presentation is altogether nonsense, the David is always a monster, like seriously a monster. 

And lastly, The David is ultimately always frustrating, because somehow at one and the same time he's completely insane and totally predictable. 

I'll give Craig Mazin credit, he really did try to fool us with his David. He insists over and over again on his men not hurting Ellie, he gives her the medicine she needs. He really tries to get everyone in the community to trust and not lose and not go all eye for an eye. 

But honestly, The David's writers are always trying to fool us like this, and it never works because there's just too much about the David that is immediately wrong. Starting with: he's a religious figure put in charge of running a community, and he uses some version of religious belief to legislate how things are going to go in the community. All of that is just a complete non-starter, or at least it is in the United States.

Also, and this, too, is very The David—the writing and the acting just can't help tipping their hand. That first scene of David with the community, encouraging them to have faith in God—it just doesn't feel right. He's definitely holding them hostage somehow. When he slaps the girl who lost her dad later, it's like, yes, of course he did that. He's done that a hundred times before, and that's what we were feeling in the room in that first scene. 

So, they try to make us believe he's fine, though we know that he's not. Then eventually something bad or stressful happens to The David—it's almost never that they're secretly evil and are just waiting to show it, it's that they've convinced themselves they're fine and then our protagonists Had to Go and Do Something  and now The David is going to have to gut them like a fish, you know, like Jesus said he should.

(Actually once The David gets heated up the whole religious thing generally flies out the window, and he's just some dude that gets off on hurting people.) 

And then it's just a straight up cage match, which The David always loses, because didn't you get the memo, he crazy. 

And all of that in a nutshell is why The David is such an annoying character. You insist he's good, we know he's not, then he turns out just like we thought, he basically turns into just a really hard obstacle, and in the end he dies because he's just stupid. 

In other words, you can file The David under my theme, "The Problem With Crazy."

I'll be honest, I was shocked to see THE LAST OF US use The David. Because he is super tropey, and this show has been so insistent on presenting new characters as real three dimensional people who are trying in some flawed or special way to love. Maybe Mazin would argue this guy is just the same, it just went bad, but I'm sorry, no, he's too typical for that. 

Also, this David is seriously THE David. When we get right down to it we find out he's a guy who's been feeding his people people—which in most people's books would be bad enough (and at the same time actually might have worked with Mazin and Neil Druckmann's overall take on the show, because this community is in desperate circumstances; there is a case to be made that he was trying to save them, and maybe suffering because this was the only way he could find to do so). 

But then on top of that he's also a pedophile? WHAT? Jesus Christ, come on. It's not just that it's horrifying, it's unbelievable. It's whatever the sick and twisted version of a hat on a hat is. Seriously, no.

No show is perfect, and these guys were pretty much throwing a no-hitter until now (that's the good thing, right? #Sportsball). So we shake it off and move on. But it's also a great learning moment. I don't know what it is about our psychology, but when it comes to post-apocalyptic stuff, we seem to have this in-built idea that it's got to eventually involve a not-so-secretly psychopathic preacher. 

And it's good to know that, so we can resist it. Because it's just played out.

(Actually, you want a challenge? Write an Anti-David in your end of the world show. He's a religious figure, people look to him, but he is just a normal dude. I suspect viewers will absolutely never trust him, no matter how many years the show runs. But then that audience expectation becomes something you can use...)

THE LAST OF US USES CHARACTER TO SHOW THE PASSAGE OF TIME

This is just a tiny note, and in a way I've already made it. But I just want to hold a lantern up to the specific way that THE LAST OF US 106 does its time jump, because I think it's relatively unique. 

After telling us it's three months later, we get that scene I wrote about yesterday in the cabin, followed by Ellie and Joel getting jumped and then taken to Tommy. And in the midst of all that we get beats that signal change in our characters. Joel's—he gets all shaky and seems to be having some kind of panic attacks—is not dissimilar from how you might seem time jumps handled in other shows like this. You meet the characters and now someone has a scar on their face or their arm is bandaged. The characters' bodies become the canvas on which to "paint" change. 

But in the case of Ellie, we get something much more unusual: a change in her behavior. Right away in the cabin scene we see her holding a gun, she doesn't listen to Joel and she's got little respect for these people, either. Marlon calls her "the little psychopath," which isn't exactly true to her behavior in that moment, but over the course of the episode, yeah, she seems more feral than before. 

And what's really great and unusual is that it isn't commented on. This isn't some mystery that the show is going to have to explain. It's just what the time out here has done to her. And it's just for us to observe. 

I think a lot of the time when writers do time leap moments, they don't consider changes in the mental state of the characters. But it's a great technique: without a single word of comment, it underlines just how much time really has passed.

THE LAST OF US BUILDS FROM SPECIFICITY OF CHARACTER

In the big scheme of things the opening of 106 is meaningless. Joel and Ellie meet a Native couple and learn where to go. 

But I adore that scene, on so many different levels. 

First of all, the scene has a pretty simple point: Ellie and Joel get information. But then the question is, how do make that interesting? And the answer is, give them a conflict that they have to solve. Which is both about making them earn that next bit of progress, and also distracting us from the fact that this is a This is Where Our Characters Get Information scene. In fact I had to go back and rewatch the scene to be sure they learn anything at all, because in the moment my focus was on the threat that Ellie posed to them. 

Which is a whole other interesting thing about the episode. As in the previous episodes, we enter back into the story through the point of view of totally new characters. And even though from a plot point of view the scene that follows is all about Joel and Ellie trying to get information, it really does proceed out of the Native couple's point of view. If you were going to sum it up, you'd say something like Marlon and Florence deal with intruders. (The actors, by the way, are the fantastic Graham Greene and Elaine Miles.)

And the fact we're seeing especially Ellie from this external point of view has an impact. We know her as this tough, whipsmart kid. But from the outside in this moment she seems wilder. Marlon calls her a "little psychopath." That speaks to what's happened to her in the intervening three months (which I'm going to talk about more tomorrow). But also, in seeing her from the outside, we see new things. It's a brilliant innovation on the series' "In our show the characters we meet get their own stories" ethos. 

The last thing is, and it's my favorite, is the way that the scene unfolds. We've all seen a million hostage situation beats in TV and movies, and probably this could have just been another one of those and it would have been. But Mazin instead decides to come up with a take that is specific and original. Marlon and Florence have clearly been together a long time, and know each so well that with just a glance Florence is able to tell Marlon what's going on. (They also know each other so well that we get those hilarious bickering moments about Florence not shooting Joe and making him soup, whether or not she is lying to Marlon, their past decision to move here and be away from everyone.)

They're also indigenous, which just as with the choice to make Sam deaf is not just a random detail, but rather gives the scene texture and nuance. The playfulness of their interaction, the way they mess with Ellie, the underlying stillness of their interaction—that's drawn from all of the deep down specifics of these characters. And it makes the scene unique and special.  

No one is going to win any awards for the first 3 minutes of THE LAST OF US episode 106. But as someone who wants to be a great scene writer, I'm going to go back to that scene over and over.