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.
