Week-to-Week: Is HBO's The Last Of Us not a Game, not yet a TV Show?
All we need is time to consider emerging discourse on the series' connection to the media forms it's tied to
Over the past few weeks, the Thinkpiece Industrial Complex surrounding The Last of Us evolved. While the novelty of a “prestige” video game adaptation drove early discourse around the series, and episodic reviews have naturally focused on the emotional rollercoaster of the story being told, we’ve now moved to the stage where we have a clear grasp of what the show is doing, and can shift our attention to what the internet is truly for: questioning the very essence of forms of media.
The Last of Us is catnip for this media cycle. At The New Republic, friend of the newsletter Phillip Maciak brings the show into conversation with an ongoing dialogue about how television is balancing episodic and serial elements, arguing that the show’s approach creates powerful stories but fails to fold them back into its ongoing storytelling:
“But the problem isn’t that The Last of Us is an episodic, monster-of-the-week adventure. The problem is that The Last of Us is spending a disproportionate amount of energy on world-building, character work, and even political critique that it then jettisons wholesale. The show keeps us moving while teasing us with questions and complications and psychological puzzles that it never has to answer or account for. It’s both a high-wire act and a little bit of a cheat. What happens when the show you’re watching murders its most interesting ideas every week?”
Meanwhile, over at Vulture, Andrea Long Chu pushes back against the idea that The Last of Us is really a video game adaptation at all. Reflecting on how the game and “cinematic games” like it challenge traditional notions of interactivity in the medium, Chu breaks down how the experience of playing the game is about the very tension between story and gameplay:
“It’s true you can’t alter the content of a television show just by watching it, but too great an emphasis on this will obscure the fact that the same is true of many video games. The Last of Us has sometimes been called an “interactive movie” by fans and detractors alike — a faintly damning term that implies, ironically, a dearth of consequential interaction between players and the game. And it’s true: As a game about difficult moral choices, it gives the player none. There are no plot decisions, no dialogue options; there is no open world.”
As I’ve been reading the great comments on Zack Handlen’s reviews of The Last of Us here at Episodic Medium, and as I’ve been discussing the show with critics with no real understanding of modern video games, these types of formalist conversations have naturally risen to the surface, and are worth exploring further. While Zack and I have discussed how focusing too heavily on the games is something to avoid when writing weekly reviews, the truth is that if you’re someone who plays games and writes about television it’s incredibly hard not to indulge in the conversations that are now emerging as central to the show’s cultural impact [within Extremely Online Discourse]. And so as the show approaches its final two episodes, I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity to indulge a consideration of how the two texts approach worldbuilding in distinct ways.
In his article, Maciak makes the argument that the power of standout episode “Long, Long Time” is muted by the fact Joel and Ellie didn’t experience its full significance—while Joel gets the note from Bill at episode’s end, effectively transitioning the “moral” of Bill and Frank’s story to his quest to protect Ellie, the nuances of their love story are entirely reserved for the audience. As such, while the show wields tremendous power in telling these episodic stories (see: Sam and Henry), if they don’t actually linger in the narrative beyond that point there’s a risk of the details becoming purely ephemeral and the show’s ongoing story feeling thin by comparison.
However, as Chu notes, the reality of playing a video game is that your experience of the narrative is different than your avatar’s. She points out that the player’s understanding of a game’s story is shaped by the trial and error of gameplay, where you see Joel’s quest to protect Ellie fail in brutal fashion over and over again as you work out the best way to approach a room of clickers or a mob of soldiers. As players, we bring baggage into each encounter that the characters themselves don’t, and while the game doesn’t have comparable sequences to episodes like “Long, Long Time” where we delve deeply into the lives of other characters, it does nonetheless depend on the idea that the journey one has playing the game is different from the journey the characters actually experience.
As a television show, The Last of Us has leveraged this through its efforts at worldbuilding, which exist outside of Joel and Ellie’s perspective from the time the show starts. The first two episodes open with scenes unrelated to Joel and Ellie’s story, offering insight into the origins and initial outbreak of the virus that plagues their world. The detours into Bill and Frank’s love story and Henry and Sam’s story in Kansas City are the continuation of that effort to sketch out how different groups of people have endured and survived in this world. Maciak is right that Joel and Ellie’s ignorance to some of these events means they don’t linger as long as they might, but I’d argue that the show consciously used the framing mechanisms of the first two episodes to train the viewer into cataloging them in a separate folder, as it were, than the simple linear story being presented elsewhere.
One of Chu’s main points is that it’s something of a red herring to obsess over how television can’t match the interactivity of games, given how limited that interactivity can often be. However, while she is right to focus on the absence of the death cycle of the game’s action gameplay, the parts that are in many ways hardest to replicate in the show are the portions of the game dedicated to worldbuilding. In between action sequences, you’re traversing spaces solving environmental puzzles that have you moving objects and sorting through the remnants of a lost civilization to get from Point A to Point B. In the process, you’re reading letters, finding notes, and discovering stories not unlike Bill and Frank’s. And while the characters do occasionally have some incidental dialogue responding to this content, for the most part it’s there for the player to choose to engage with, and ultimately piece together more for their own benefit than for any accumulated benefit within the story (which often glosses over it).
The show actually skips over one of the core examples of this. After the players first band together with Sam and Henry, they travel through the sewers in Pittsburgh. It’s a sequence without a real plot hook—the show invented a whole plot in Kansas City for Sam and Henry, but the game eschews that in favor of a narrative of environmental discovery, as outlined in this YouTube breakdown of the abandoned community they discover within the sewer system.
This story is told through a series of notes that Joel picks up as they head through the sewers to a radio tower, but those notes aren’t mandatory: you could easily play the game without ever seeing them. The production design within these spaces is filled with lost details of the community that “Ish” built, but the player is the one who has control of how far Joel digs into the details, and how much time is spent exploring every dimension of the space. There’s no cutscenes detailing what happened, or having the characters reflect on it, and ultimately it doesn’t actually impact their stories. It’s just there to color our understanding of a world that we just entered, so as to catch up with someone like Joel who has been living in it for 20-odd years.
The show sort of adapted this sequence, having the characters stumble upon the classroom part of the community on their way out of Kansas City. However, you could easily imagine a version of this season that used Ish and the Sewer Community in the same way the show ended up using Bill and Frank. The decision to focus on the latter makes sense: it comes earlier, Bill’s character was already integrated into the original game, and Joel and Ellie come directly in contact with the dynamics of Bill and Frank’s relationship as part of their journey in the game (although in a different context wherein they’ve separated and Frank’s suicide was due to being infected). But ultimately, the game is built around stories that matter more to the player than to the actual characters, making the time spent on developments beyond the scope of their experience one case where they are tapping into the game-playing experience in an indirect way.
“Left Behind,” this week’s episode, represents an interesting inflection point to both of these arguments about the show’s formal qualities. It takes the show’s episodic quality and applies it directly to one of the central characters, reorienting the storytelling method Maciak identifies toward the central dynamic of Ellie and Joel in ways that will resonate deeply as the show continues. I’m open to discussion as to whether this simply underlines how disconnected the other comparable stories were or creates a thematic link that brings the season’s larger worldbuilding efforts into the main story more successfully, but I suppose the best test of this is how Mazin handles the season’s final episodes.
But in terms of adapting the game, “Left Behind” is arguably the biggest change thus far in terms of how players experienced this story. For those unfamiliar with the games, you may have seen Zack and others notes that this episode was originally released as downloadable content—or DLC—for The Last of Us: it was a bonus chapter, featuring additional story and gameplay, released roughly eight months after the game itself. DLC is common practice in the gaming industry, but story-driven DLC can often be complicated. If part of what made The Last of Us so striking was its linear, “cinematic” narrative, how do you create DLC without compromising that story?
The answer was surprisingly clever. Rather than extend the story forward, Left Behind simultaneously flashed back to Ellie’s life before meeting Joel and filled in narrative gaps within the game’s timeline by creating an entirely new segment during the period where Joel is injured and Ellie is nursing him back to health. The latter ensures the game can still have your requisite stealth and gunplay elements, rummaging through an abandoned mall for supplies and taking down infected and soldiers in equal measure. The former, though, delves into the emotional core of the story by introducing the character of Riley, canonizing Ellie’s queerness, and showing us the tragic moments that brought her to where she was when we first met her.
What I’ve always found so interesting about Left Behind, though, is that developer Naughty Dog has never made an effort to insert it into the game itself. When the game was remastered for PS4 in 2014, and when it was remade from the ground up in 2022, Left Behind is included as part of the package. However, while “Game of the Year” editions for titles like Horizon: Zero Dawn have placed interstitial DLC story segments into the narrative to allow new players the chance to encounter them where they’re intended to “fit” as part of the larger story, Naughty Dog has consistently framed Left Behind as something you’re meant to do after finishing the game. Although it’s certainly possible for the player to choose to pause the main game for a “chronological playthrough,” the game itself recommends against this, as the writers intended it to be an epilogue for the player even though it’s a prologue/interlude for the story.
But while the introduction of flashbacks and other content disconnected from Joel and Ellie has thus far been in line with the way the game told stories through exploration, “Left Behind” is the first moment of adaptation that has transformed the central story. As DLC, Left Behind is about returning to different points of Ellie’s life fully aware of where her story ends at the game’s conclusion, with the player carrying extra baggage that their avatar lacks. But once inserted into the narrative, Ellie’s encounter with Riley now becomes her north star, shaping viewers’ first encounter with the forthcoming ending in ways that have never been true of the story to this point.
The fun thing about this series is that this discourse is only going to keep evolving—while thematically similar, the second game represents even greater structural complexities, ones that will force additional adjustments in format and storytelling to translate both gameplay dynamics and episodic structures in entirely new ways. Ultimately, I agree with Maciak and Chu that what the show is doing is neither transforming TV into video games or turning video games into straightforward serialized TV. Instead, Mazin and Druckmann have cobbled together a range of different approaches, experimenting to see how this approach brings those unfamiliar with the games into the story. In two weeks, we’ll know for certain whether the resulting narrative generates an impact similar to the game’s conclusion, but it’ll be years before we know if The Last of Us’ first season has created a foundation for telling a new version of the story Naughty Dog has brought to life for gamers.
Episodic Observations
In his review of “Left Behind,” Zack noted that the worldbuilding around Fedra and the Fireflies has been a little too opaque, and I would be inclined to agree. The first game really treats “worldbuilding” as a process of outlining human stories happening around rather than within that conflict, and so I’m not shocked the show is choosing to go that route. However, without going into spoilers, the second game (which I fully expect to be adapted over two seasons of television) is a different beast, and I’ll be interested to see how they square that circle.
Maciak spends a lot of time contrasting the show’s narrative approach with Andor’s, arguing that that show’s episodic qualities accumulate differently because Cassian is there to soak everything in. However, per my comments on Josh’s reviews of that series here at Episodic Medium, my biggest issue with Andor was that the standalone elements were so effective at spurring rebellion that it seemed absurd Cassian was so slow to be radicalized. Last of Us, meanwhile, weaponizes this dynamic by ensuring the audience knows more than the characters, letting them come to the same place (or a different place) at their own pace.
While Horizon: Zero Dawn’s DLC technically takes place before the main story concludes, part of why most players would end up still saving it for after they complete the main story is that gameplay wise it’s meant as an added challenge in terms of difficulty. By comparison, there would be no difficulty spike if players played Left Behind where it happens chronologically—it just isn’t what the creators want you to do in terms of the game’s pacing.
Left Behind’s canonizing of Ellie’s queerness was a crucial moment in terms of queer representation within main characters in games, but the fact it was in DLC and not the main game meant that it wasn’t until the game’s sequel where it faced a significant backlash. For the sake of the show’s future, I think it’s better to have the conversation now, so we can move past the bigotry faster.
I just need to know if this article title is a Britney reference
i do feel this is one of those shows that will hopefully hold up better once all of the episodes are released. i have been enjoying the show but i get where some folks are coming from with their gripes (i wish for instance we spent more time in the Wyoming community — it felt like a mix of Deadwood and Game of Thrones so it would have been fun to explore that more).
i found myself rewatching the first 3 episodes way more than the past 4 so whether that is a reflection of my interest waning or just needing to understand the world building better is the question. i hope the final two episodes make it worthwhile.