Review: The Last of Us, "When You're Lost in the Darkness" | Season 1, Episode 1
A prestige video game adaptation arrives with a well-made, if heavy-handed, pilot
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In both versions, the girl dies. No, I’m not spoiling the ending; I’m not talking about the girl. I’m talking about Sarah, Joel’s daughter. In both versions of the story, when the fungal apocalypse kicks off, Sarah is killed while she and her father are trying to escape a rapidly disintegrating Austin, Texas. In fact, she dies much the same way whether you’re playing the video game or watching the TV show: a soldier catches Joel and Sarah and, following orders, tries to shoot them both. Joel survives, Sarah doesn’t, and we get a hard cut to black and a time jump twenty years down the road to the present day.
This isn’t particularly sophisticated in terms of emotional manipulation, but it works—it hits especially hard in the video game, if only because games don’t often pull this kind of trick in their opening levels. Killing off a seemingly major character (a character the player has controlled throughout) wasn’t unprecedented in 2013, but it still felt fresh enough to sting, and every time I’ve revisited the game, I’ve found myself dreading that final moment. Sarah’s a cute, smart kid. She could’ve easily been the protagonist, and we spend just enough time with her to get a sense of her identity before that sense is lost forever. More than anything, the opening in the game establishes the stakes to come: people can and will die, and Joel—the player character for the bulk of the experience—has gone through something you never really walk away from.
As for the TV version… it works too. It would be pretty hard to fuck this up, honestly, and both Pedro Pascal (Joel) and Nico Parker (Sarah) do a terrific job of quickly establishing a father/daughter relationship, as well as giving us a brief sense of both characters as individuals. We spend most of the first twenty minutes of “When You’re Lost In The Darkness” seeing the world through Sarah’s eyes, and her death is agonizing stuff. I don’t remember video game Sarah dying quite as rough as this Sarah does–PS3 (or 4, or 5, god help us) graphics, gorgeous as they are, can’t quite match the panicky look Parker gets in her eyes as she bleeds out her guts.
But while the adaptation works, I don’t think it works as well as the source material. Not yet, anyway. I’m excited for this series, and I think the premiere is, overall, pretty good. Promising, even. I don’t have access to screeners, so I can’t see what other critics are raving about yet, but I can easily imagine this getting substantially better over time, once the initial heavy-duty exposition delivery is done. I’m also not sure how much game knowledge is going to hurt me here; I’ve played TLOU three or four times and it’s one of my all-time favorites, so I spent a fair bit of time watching this episode and trying to decide if my positive but not rapturous response was due to being overly precious with the source material. A game is, after all, a game, and a TV show is a TV show, and the simple fact that they managed to make the latter out of the former and not embarrass themselves is already impressive.
Still, back to that opening—it’s not even the opening, as we get a funny, if not particularly necessary, flashback to 1968, where the weaselly brother from the Mummy movies (John Hannah) explains to a talk show host why fungus is terrifying. This isn’t a terrible scene, but I’m hard-pressed to know why it’s there. Yes, the monsters in the show are fungal zombies (there’s no cute name for them yet, please god if we do get one let it be better than “walkers”), and Hannah’s monologue about the dangers such a creature might represent is well-delivered, but it’s not needed. Perhaps it’s purpose will become clearer over the run of the first season, but right now, apart from foreshadowing the threat to come (which, again, is neither crucial to understanding that threat or something we couldn’t have gotten from someone else later on), the only real reason I can think of for including this is to differentiate the show from the game.
If that is the reason, it’s frustrating, because the scenes with Sarah are much more compelling. But even with her, there’s that need to differentiate; we don’t just see Sarah hanging out at home with her dad on his birthday, we see her at school (getting distracted by a shiny bracelet for some reason?), we see her getting her dad’s watch repaired, we see her visiting the elderly neighbor next door. Credit where it’s due, the neighbor visit allows for one of the best scare scare sequences in the episode (I’m a sucker for “something fucked up is happening out of focus behind the main character” scenes), and none of this stuff is bad. But also: we’ve seen plenty of movies and shows where society breaks down. It’s done well here, but it’s not why this story is getting told, and it’s not even why we’re following Sarah around so much. We’re following her around so she can get killed, and Joel can be fucked up over her death; it’s good that we see so much of this through her eyes, as it ensures she’s a character in her own right and not just a device, but the premiere episode is an hour and twenty seven minutes long. Surely we could’ve been more efficient with our time then spending a whole first act introducing us to a world we’ll never see again.
There’s a reason, after all, that Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma at the start of The Walking Dead, and it’s not just because Robert Kirkman wanted to rip off 28 Days Later (which in turn was ripping off The Day Of The Triffids, but I digress). Societal collapse is both difficult (and expensive) to convey effectively on screen, and it’s also familiar to anyone who’s watched or read genre stuff before. You want a good society collapsing sequence? Read The Stand. Nobody’s managed to top it (not even the adaptations of The Stand). The Last Of Us is attempting to transcend genre limitations by presenting as prestige television, much the same way the game presented itself as Special, and while I don’t begrudge the confidence, it shouldn’t allow for this kind of indulgence.
Hell, there’s a perfect example of how to do this sort of emotional brutality better in the episode itself. After the twenty year jump, we see a young boy wandering into a militarized, decaying Boston. A friendly officer speaks to him, trying to get answers, but once the officer sees a red screen flashing, the questioning turns to promises you know the officer isn’t planning to keep. The kid gets injected with something, and a couple of minutes later, we see Joel dumping the body into the fire. It’s direct, unblinking, and merciless, efficiently conveying both the shift in the state of the world, and in Joel’s character, without a second wasted.
Post-apocalypse Boston is a fucked up place, and after its solid if somewhat stodgy opening twenty minutes, “Darkness” quickly moves to establish the miserable lives the city’s inhabitants are living, and the way those lives somehow keep getting worse. The one supposed symbol of hope, the Fireflies, aren’t particularly effective saviors; they’re responsible for the graffiti that gives the episode it’s title, and not a whole lot else. Joel and his partner, Tess (the great Anna Torv) are getting by on the fringes (heh), running scams while they try and put together transport for them to get out of the city and head west to find Joel’s missing brother, Tommy. (We met Tommy in the cold open, he’s a decent dude.) Their efforts run to naught when the guy who promised to sell them a car battery tries to sell it to someone else; the battery turns out to be a dud, the guy gets killed, but not before he’s able to seriously injure several Firefly officers, including Marlene (Merle Dandridge, playing the same character she played in the game). Marlene makes a deal with Joel and Tess: if they can safely transport a girl, Ellie, out of the city, she’ll give them whatever they want.
Not a bad set up, although I have some questions. The big one being: why the hell is Marlene so quick to hand over Ellie? It’s honestly the biggest problem I have with the pilot, at least in terms of plotting. We spend enough time at Firefly HQ, seeing Ellie (Bella Ramsey) chained up and seriously pissed, seeing Marlene bond with her, seeing Marlene explaining to her second in command that Ellie is their last great hope. If Ellie is that important (and, as someone apparently immune to the fungal infection, she very much is), you’d think it would take a little more push before Marlene would be willing to entrust her to a couple of scavengers, even ones she knows. After all the careful build-up, the back-half of the episode feels curiously rushed, especially once you realize that the time spent establishing the Boston commune is the only time we’re really going to get here.
There are some characterization changes from the source material as well–not necessarily bad ones, but noticeable. Ellie is a lot more pissed off, and while she has a reason to be, it feels like a conscious choice on the part of the adapters (and possibly Ramsey) to lean into the character’s anger in order to give her and Joel’s relationship more room to grow. Ramsey does well with the part so far, and I’m looking forward to getting more of her backstory as the season progresses, but I’m not quite sold yet. I don’t know if that’s lingering affection for the game character or something about the writing, but I suspect I’ll be singing her praises in the weeks ahead.
I’m completely on board with Pedro Pascal as Joel, though, which is not something I expected. I haven’t seen much of him outside of The Mandalorian, and I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to nail Joel’s whole deal, but he’s fantastic. The script seems to have softened him somewhat from the original material, which is odd–we get the moment with him in the car refusing to pull over to help strangers (very Joel), and of course the scene of him dumping a girl’s body into the fire. But one of things that makes the game so queasily compelling is how it incorporates the demands of play into characterization; you end up killing a lot of people, and Joel has this innate knack for violence, so that the better you get at the game, the more of a force he becomes.
Here, though, we just get people talking about how hardcore he is, with little evidence to back the talk up. Tess says that other folks are afraid of him, Marlene says she knows what he’s capable of. Which means what, exactly? The only time we really see Joel getting violent is at the end of the episode, where he beats an officer to death after flashing back to his dead daughter. Yes, it’s intense, and yes, he knew the guy (which makes it worse), but the clumsy flashback makes it all seem like just an outburst of latent grief. That, plus his fixation on getting out to his brother, makes for a softer character than I was expecting. That’s not necessarily a bad choice (well, okay, the flashback was bad; show, did you not expect me to remember something that happened an hour ago?), but it sits awkwardly with other ways in which he’s been presented.
Still, most of this feels like nitpicking. On the whole “Darkness” is a good premiere–not great, but it has the potential to achieve greatness in it, if that doesn’t sound too ridiculous. I’m always happy to see Anna Torv on my television, the show looks appropriately miserable, and the glimpses we get of the monsters are terrific. There’s lots of good stuff ahead, and I’m excited to see how the rest of this has been adapted, what stayed and what got changed, just as I’m excited to chat about it with all of you. If this review feels like it’s bogged down in minor complaints, blame it on high standards: the original game, while not perfect, is one of those stories that always stays with me. If they get it even half right, we’re in for a hell of a time.
Stray observations
Another potential reason for the talk show opening: we don’t get a ton of mushroom murder action this week. Some glimpses during the Austin sequence (I love how clumsy the guy chasing Joel and Sarah is–running zombies are nothing new, but the idea that they move as fast as they can without any grace whatsoever is extremely cool), and a great shot of a corpse in the subway, but no Clickers. (Shit, that’s what we call them.)
I wonder if the show will ever mention Sarah’s mother. She never comes up in the game.
Zack, I want to briefly interrogate the fact that you haven't played the second game. While I certainly understand the #discourse's take on it, I'd argue that its positioning of the player is a compelling extension of the first game's work on this front, and is going to become particularly vital to what this show chooses to do in subsequent seasons (based on the ratings, I'd be shocked if they didn't at least order two more, given how the second game plays out).
I'm actually a bit surprised, although I maybe shouldn't be, that there's been no effort at seeding some of the second game into this first season. I understand that it's already burdened enough, but (minor spoilers I suppose) given that some of the comments here are naturally a bit lost on the Fireflies and what they represent, I'll be interested to see how much the season fleshes out their corner of the story.
I thought the opening was a bit weird tonally and unnecessary for me, someone who has played the game, but my housemate who had no familiarity with the game or premise said he appreciated it because it made the folllowing scenes in 2003 much more tense, being on the lookout for fungal infection. As others have noted, the flashing bracelet was from a student who had been infected and whose wrist was twitching--a great little detail, because it's something that in real life you would definitely notice, but would dismiss as just some weird twitch a guy has rather than ascribing any importance to it. It helps establish the human tendency to ignore disasters happening around them for as long as possible, until it's too late.
Overall, I thought it was a really fantastic episode. I agree with some of your gripes about pacing, and the episode definitely could have been shorter. But overall, I'm really liking the cast and the characterizations, and I didn't think Marlene's decision was that strange. It's about the same as it is in the game. She's too injured to do it herself, so she puts her trust in a couple tough smugglers and believes their greed will provide them enough motivation to get the job done. Yes, it's a leap of faith, but she feels like she's out of options at that point. By the way, I loved that they cast actual Marlene from the video game to play her in the show! That was nice to see.