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.
