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.

POSE WEEK: BE TRUE TO THE WORLD OF YOUR STORY

POSE 106, written by show co-creator Ryan Murphy & Janet Mock, has a great storyline for Stan, the Trump employee with a wife and kids who’s seeing the transgender Angel on the side. All along his story has been really interesting. It’s never clear where exactly it’s headed or what exactly is going on with him.

 

Having found out what he's doing, his wife Patty tricks him into going with her to see a psychologist.  And the scene is very well crafted. Even as he’s betrayed her, Patty approaches him with a  kind of care that is atypical for these kinds of scenes, and the shrink too. 

 

Confronted with the question of what exactly his deal is in terms of orientation and attraction, Stan completely breaks down. He has no answer for them. He just keeps insisting he doesn't know. 

There's a version of this story where it's made clear in some way that he's in denial, his "I don't know" a way of saying "I don't want to know". But that's not the story POSE tells. Even as he gets further beats in the final two episodes of the season, he remains a mystery to us and to himself.

That ends up making for a much more satisfying resolution to his story.  In part it just has a greater ring of truth to it.  Scripts so often love to drive from mystery to some moment of self-awareness or articulation. But sometimes the greatest truth of all is the acknowledgement of our own limitations and confusion. 

 

But I think it also lands as well as it does because it's truer to the world of the show. POSE is about people owning who they are without having to justify themselves. The demand for explanations or "proof" is understood in this community as a form of violence, a means of silencing and rejecting people whose lives are different. The episode allows Stan his "I don't know" because that's the show. In a way it's right there in the episode title: "Love is the Answer".

 

Sometimes you're writing into that big moment of self-expression or revelation and you go round and round and nothing seems to work. There can be a lot of reasons for that. But POSE 106 makes me think one question to ask in that situation is, Is this moment that I'm writing true to this character, this world, etc.? Maybe I'm stuck because I'm actually breaking the rules of my story.