The Last of Us episode 5 asks: What if prestige TV shows had boss monsters?

The Last of Us episode 5 asks: What if prestige TV shows had boss monsters?

Diego Alvarez

Enlarge / I think we all need a hug after that episode’s conclusion…

New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here every Monday morning. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Kyle: Like anyone who’s played the games, I imagine, I’ve been kind of dreading watching this episode ever since we first saw Henry at the end of the last episode. The ultimate fate of him and his brother Sam is one of the most indelibly sad moments in a game series that’s full of them.

Part of me tried to hold out hope that they might change that fate for the show—they’ve changed a lot of other stuff about the narrative, including a lot about Henry and Sam themselves. But really that was probably just wishful thinking born out of a deep connection with the characters. The specifics might change, but this plot beat needed to stay in there, precisely because it’s so emotionally raw.

Andrew: I don’t know how every beat is going to play out, but I do know the story is defined by the Joel-Ellie dyad. Which gives the show this sad air of inevitability whenever someone else joins the party. First with Tess, and now with Henry and Sam. I don’t think that every ally they make along the way is going to end up dead or infected or both, but the odds of them heading west with Our Heroes seem pretty bad.
Kyle: Yeah, if you are traveling alongside Joel and Ellie for any significant period of time, you might as well break out a red Star Trek uniform. Really, though, Henry was kind of asking for it with his “I’m absolutely sure there are no dangers in this creepy underground tunnel vamping. Just no Genre Savvy at all…
I'd say "Nice knowing ya" but... well... it wasn't that nice?

I’d say “Nice knowing ya” but… well… it wasn’t that nice?

Andrew: And the Kansas City vigilantes really should have assumed that Chekov’s Pulsating Basement Floor from the last episode was going to be an issue. I’m not going to say I would be great in an apocalypse, but knowing how these stories work definitely seems to give you a leg up.

So, you say lots of details of the Henry-Sam story are different than in the games, and you said last week that this Kansas City story and the characters in it were different from the games. Without knowing what’s coming in the next few episodes, what purpose do the changes serve? Just reformatting things to be more workable on TV or something else?

Kyle: Some of the changes are kind of incidental in the grand scheme, like making Sam a bit younger and deaf. The biggest change to this whole arc is the creation of Kathleen, who gives a stronger narrative focal point to the more anarchic Hunters faction in the game. I did appreciate them trying to humanize her a little bit with her reminiscence about her brother and such, but in the end, I did not really feel bad when Little Miss “LOL, no trials for these jokers” got her comeuppance.
Andrew: The show decided it needed to make Kathleen a monster and humanize her inside of just two episodes, and that’s hard to do, especially when all we know about her brother is told and not shown. Melanie Lynskey gives it her best shot, but at the end of the day it is hard to root for the character advocating for child murder. The way that Joel and crew just kind of… leave her to her fate was kind of darkly funny, whether it was meant to be or not.
Kyle: Yeah, after the second time you point a gun at someone only for Infected to distract/eat you at the last moment, you know the writers are just out to mess with you at that point.

By contrast, one thing the show managed to establish quickly was the friendship between Ellie and Sam. We’ve talked about her “tough girl” exterior here before, but the thing this story hammers home so well is that, deep down, she’s just a lonely kid who’s quickly realizing that everyone she grows close to could leave her.

We'll open the cans of food later, buddy...

We’ll open the cans of food later, buddy…

Andrew: Their relationship is instantly believable and sweet, and that Ellie is so quick to strike up a friendship with someone around half her age shows just how starved she is for this kind of interaction. She can do the grown-up stuff, and she makes sure everyone knows it. But there’s an ease to Ellie’s interactions with Sam that conveys just how hard she’s working to seem grown up, another shade to Bella Ramsey’s impressive performance.
Kyle: And then there’s the “my blood is magic” bit, which contrasts heavily with the “no cure is even possible” stuff that we (as the audience) got early in the series. Being fated to survive an Infected bite when people you love are dying from the same thing has got to weigh heavily.
Andrew: The “my blood is magic” thing is tragic on multiple levels: both that she’s unable to do anything for her new friend and that she now has to be questioning whether this journey out west is even worth the trouble, whether she is even worth the trouble. Ellie’s had a handful of pretty dark and almost death-wish-y moments in some of these episodes, and this isn’t going to do much for her sense of hope and optimism.
Kyle: At least she has her faded comic books and pun collections to keep her spirits high. Escapism is important, especially in the apocalypse!
Someone give this kid a comic book, stat!

Someone give this kid a comic book, stat!

Andrew: This episode is full of little human moments but I’ve got to say there was one bit that was silly to the point of distraction: the giant mushroom monster man climbing out of that fiery pit. Aside from everything about that scene screaming “video game cutscene,” I’m just not sure that, uh, “boss monsters” work all that well in the context of this show or what we know about cordyceps.

The point of this disease is to mindlessly spread itself at all costs, and these mushroom guys don’t really have a capacity for thought or reason or strategy. With that in mind, I am not sure what the evolutionary imperative is for a “tanky” character class that rips people’s heads off instead of infecting them.

I get the point of that character in a video game, and it’s because sometimes you need some enemies to be bigger/harder/scarier to break up the flow of gameplay. In a TV show, the moment just played a little silly to me. The best things about this episode were subtle, and that moment was the precise opposite of subtle.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s hard to argue that the bloater’s appearance in that scene was really necessary as anything more than fan service. And it does work much better in the game, where it just serves as a skill-testing tank that you don’t have to think about too hard (here I had the exact same, “Wait, why does the fungus want to behead people?” reaction. Maybe there is a human mind underneath there? And he’s just really mad?)

I can almost picture the story meetings where the game guys were like, ‘We have to get a bloater in here somewhere!’ and ‘Is now the time when we can show a bloater?’ and the TV people just giving up and saying ‘Fine, you can have 60 seconds during the underground Infected riot!’

That's just the way he talks...

That’s just the way he talks…

Andrew: It’s called a bloater??
Kyle: Yup. Just so bloated with fungus that it serves as a kind of armor.
Andrew: I’m just saying that the rest of the zombies are named after something they do, I don’t know why we gotta fat-shame this mushroom monster.
Kyle: Henceforth, he shall be known as “Mr. Angry-pants.”
Andrew: Other than the boss monster, I had no problem in particular with the zombie riot; it had been quite a few episodes since we’d seen a crowd of them, and every zombie-story-that-also-has-human-enemies gets a monster-ex-machina card or two it’s allowed to play.
Kyle: And it captures the semi-helplessness of Joel watching and sniping from a building far away, which mirrors a very similar scene in the game. Any show that can capture and make drama and pathos out of the obligatory shooting gallery section in these kinds of games is doing something right.

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