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...)
