The Sly Cynicism of "The Last of Us"

The hit HBO drama's most recent episode proves a bit too much for this viewer.

I’ll be honest. At first, I had absolutely no desire to watch The Last of Us, the hit HBO series focusing on a gruff warrior named Joel and his charge, Ellie, as they struggle to survive in a world overcome by a fungus which has turned most of humanity into mindless zombies. It’s not just that I find zombies–whether fungus or otherwise–unsettling, though I do. It’s also that the world is already such a relentlessly exhausting place to live in, particularly in the aftermath of an actual pandemic that exposed the worst of collective humanity, that I find it even more fatiguing to think about emotionally torturing myself by watching people die in a post-apocalyptic hellscape week after week.

However, despite my reservations, I finally sat down to watch it, both because I have a major case of FOMO and because, when all is said and done, I’m still a culture critic and so I think it’s incumbent upon me to at least spend some time with the series that is, arguably, the cultural phenomenon of the moment. The series got its hooks in me from the first episode and, like many other people, I was deeply moved by the third episode, “Long, Long Time,” with its story of queer love at the end of the world. Unfortunately, things get very bleak in the next couple of episodes, too bleak for me, in point of fact. Thus, after having seen the fifth episode, “Endure and Survive,” I think I’ve seen enough. I won’t be watching the next episode, or any after that. 

Don’t get me wrong. There’s no question that The Last of Us is a very good show, both in its own right and as a video game adaptation. It imbues each and every episode with wrenching pathos and bleakness, beauty and ugliness, the triumph of the human spirit and its defeat. In other words, it has all of the elements that we have come to associate with the prestige drama. Unfortunately, these are also the seeds of its own demise, at least in my eyes. As is the case with so many other post-apocalyptic stories, there is profound cynicism to the vision of the world offered by The Last of Us, and “Endure and Survive,” one which, at the series’ worst moments–which in my opinion include the fifth episode–make it into something akin to emotional torture porn.

“Endure and Survive” picks up right after the end of the previous episode, while also giving more backstory to three key characters: Kathleen, the sinister and ruthless ruler of the a group of Kansas City insurgents; Henry, a young man who betrayed Kathleen’s brother to his death at the hands of FEDRA and earned her undying hatred; and Henry’s brother Sam, who is deaf and for whom Henry has sacrificed a great deal. By the end of the episode all three are dead. Kathleen is attacked by a child Infected while Sam, who has been infected, is shot by Henry who then turns the gun on himself. It’s a brutal and devastating episode, one which is more difficult to watch than any of the ones that preceded. 

In the world that this show takes such titanic efforts to create, good people don’t last very long, either because of the nefarious human actors or, as is the case with Henry and Sam, because of the unfeeling nature of their surroundings. The demise of Henry and Sam is even more wrenching because, as we learn, Henry gave up Kathleen’s brother in order to receive necessary treatment for his brother’s leukemia. Unfortunately, such sacrifices are, in The Last of Us, essentially meaningless. When Henry eventually has to kill Sam, it forces us as viewers to sit with the reality that everything he’s done and all of the betrayals he’s committed were, in the end, for nothing. They bought Sam a bit more time in this brutal and fallen world, nothing more.

There’s an even deeper irony here, because Sam’s demise at his brother’s hands seems to be a validation of Kathleen’s own rebuke of Henry earlier, when she reminds him that children die all the time. Of course, these words coming out of her mouth are meant to be yet another indicator of just how corrupt she is and how she has literally no human compassion (in marked contrast to her brother who was, by all accounts, something of a Jesus-like figure). It’s thus all the more distressing to see the episode seem to align itself with her point of view. Children like Sam do, indeed, die all the time. No matter how much we as audiences are led to identify with and care about such characters, they are enmeshed in an uncaring and callous universe. No life is sacred.

Sam’s death is particularly wrenching because, throughout the episode, we’ve seen how this boy has managed to cling to a semblance of hope throughout all of the horrors he’s endured. His painting, for example, is a source of comfort for him and a reminder of how human creativity, and the hope it engenders, somehow manages to endure. And, for the second time, we get to spend a moment with someone who knows they are infected and is thus cognizant of the transformation to come. In this case, he asks Ellie whether he will still be the same person inside even after he becomes a monster, an inquiry that is as emotionally shattering as it is profound. It’s a moment of beauty marred by our awareness that nothing either of them can do will prevent the inevitable. Once someone has begun to turn, the results are as irreversible as time itself. 

As soon as Henry shot the slavering, ravenous Sam and then turned the gun on himself, I knew that I was done with The Last of Us. Everything about this scene and the cynicism it represented just wounded me too deeply, and I now have no choice but to turn away. No matter how good the series might be, and no matter how much it seems to be a part of the zeitgeist, I just can’t submit myself to its relentless cynicism and emotional torture for another week.

Let me be clear. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with cynicism. Sometimes, in fact, a healthy dose of it can be a cultural good, in that it helps to rein in some of the excesses that necessarily attend idealism. Nor am I saying that people shouldn’t have the right to enjoy the cynicism on display in The Last of Us, or that the show is somehow “problematic” for espousing this ethos. The world is, indeed, a brutal place, so it makes sense that it would be the same (even though, as Susana Polo writes in Polygon, this interpretation of the apocalypse can be positively exhausting to watch). For whatever reason, the series resonates with us, suggesting that, while apocalypse fatigue might be a thing, The Last of Us is immune from this affliction. 

Instead, it comes down to a matter of personal taste. Not only do I have a deep aversion to cynicism in popular culture–isn’t it so 2010s, anyway?--but I also can’t stand to see children brutalized. It was, perhaps, my refusal to believe that even a ruthless series like The Last of Us could possibly kill the adorable and innocent Sam that made his death such a gut-punch. The moment when Sam attacks Ellie and then is shot dead is one that will remain seared into my memory forever. In the end, no matter how cute he is, Sam is in this series’ imagination nothing more than another of those infected by a zombifying fungus.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I can definitely do without seeing Black children gunned down on-screen, thank you very much.