The Last Of Us : The show that emotionally wrecked me in the past few weeks

By Harshit

The Last Of Us is beautiful yet tragic, heartwarming yet gut wrenching, hopeful yet grim, brimming with emotions and yet devoid of it. It is a show that's more interested in exploring extraordinary humaneness in a non-humane world. In a show that's about the world in a zombie apocalypse (of sort), it barely shows you any zombies (or "infected", in the grammar of the show). That may not be as true for the game which it's based on. Even though the show borrows almost everything from the game - from the characters and story arcs to production design and cinematography, it dares to make a few departures from it that enriches it so much more as something that's meant purely for storytelling and not for gaming. The central objective of a game is to put you in the shoes of the protagonist and let you be in charge of making morally or physically difficult decisions. And it does that by giving you a set number of missions, which in the case of a "zombie/apocalypse" game would mean regular confrontations with the "infected". But the show instead chooses to focus on the part of the game that made it such a rage in the first place, and it's not the fights with the infected. It is instead this story's efforts to examine the psychological implications of such an apocalypse or pandemic. It heavily cuts down on the number of zombie confrontations, and instead tries to spend time evoking a sense of familiarity about this world. As the events in the show are taking place 20 years into the outbreak, the show wants us to be at peace with the normalcy of the circumstances. It doesn't spend any time on exposition/world- building. In fact, a lot of times you may even feel lost because you feel like you have no context of some characters whose names are being spoken casually, or some groups or terms which are referred to nonchalantly. You eventually do start making some sense of who these characters are or what the terms meant, but it's not really that important for the show. These technicalities aren't important, what's important is that you feel so confused by the chaos that you feel very much like a part of the people in this world. It's a world governed by mayhem, fascism, there are no rules and nothing makes sense. And it is a result of this very mayhem that causes people to act in ways which aren't very "human" in the current world. It is fitting that the infection in the show develops in the brain and causes the victim to lose sanity as a result and prey on the uninfected, because the writers are in a way trying to draw parallels to the people that aren't infected and yet prey on people to serve their own interests.

The show wants to portray the extremities of the human psyche and the corruption of morality when it's subjected to a pandemic of this kind. So be it the fascist officers of FEDRA, self-serving anarchist groups, the cult-leaders of a starving town, or even seemingly good characters like Henry, Tess and Joel himself who have killed innocent people for survival, the show again and again draws your attention to the psychological implications of living in this world. Yet the show gives you moments of hope. It gives you belief that even in the most harrowing of circumstances, there will be extraordinary stories of humanity, empathy, kindness, and love, and those are the stories that will always keep us going.