When Sartre said that “hell is other people,” he surely wasn’t accounting for rogue fungi. Still, though, in “The Last of Us,” a world in which the majority of the population has been turned into killer monsters by a Cordyceps brain infection, people are still the main threat. In a world where violent skills ensure endurance, only the strong survive.
It’s been over two years since we last journeyed through the apocalyptic wastelands of America with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), so let’s take a beat for a refresher. Based upon the Naughty Dog video game of the same name, “The Last of Us” follows a man named Joel who reluctantly agrees to guide a 14-year-old girl named Ellie to safety. The goalposts for this journey keep moving as every group they encounter is either in severe distress or dead. Like most narratives of societal collapse in the face of a worldwide pandemic, there doesn’t seem to be much hope. But a wise man once said, “No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for.” (Joel. It was Joel who said that.)
The first season of “The Last of Us” was divided into succinct episodes that were mostly defined by heartbreak, tragedy and loss. If the primary interactive component of the video game was point-and-shoot survival, then the TV series offered up an emotional rollercoaster, allowing viewers to truly feel like they were part of the world of the show. In Season 1, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann did an excellent job of introducing complex and sympathetic new characters, just to rip them away from us.
One thing we know about this show is that it will get us to care deeply about characters before throwing them to the fungus-controlled wolves. So, grab the nearest can of Chef Boyardee and a book of dad jokes and settle in as we review the first season of “The Last of Us” by honoring both the dead and the survivors. And, for fun, we’ll also get to know some of the newbies joining the cast in Season 2 . . . right before they’re probably ripped away from us, too.
Isabela Merced and Pedro Pascal in “The Last of Us” (Liane Hentscher/HBO)Character: Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal)
Status: Alive
Let’s start with Joel. Pre-apocalypse, Joel was a contractor working in Texas. He was raising a teenage daughter named Sarah and he worked alongside his brother, Tommy. But when the Cordyceps infection hit, Sarah was shot and killed by a soldier. Joel never forgave himself for failing to protect Sarah, but he kept going. After Sarah’s death, the show flashes forward two decades, and we see that Joel has made a life out of scrapping and conning the system within the walls of the Boston Quarantine Zone (QZ). He has a companion named Tess, and we’re meant to understand that the two of them have been an unstoppable pair for a long time.
Y’all know that Joel Miller is going to fight every time.
When Joel and Tess look for a car battery so that Joel can go find his missing brother Tommy, they run into trouble. A resistance group called the Fireflies has everything that Joel might need, but they want a favor in return: Joel and Tess must bring Ellie to a drop point in exchange for their goods. Joel pushes back, but ultimately relents. However, since this is the unpredictable world of mushroom mania, the Firefly base just outside of the Boston QZ has been overrun. Tess, having been bitten by an Infected, stays behind in order to give Joel and Ellie time to escape. Along the way, they’ve discovered that Ellie is immune to the Cordyceps infection, and Tess believes that if they successfully deliver her to the Fireflies, they might be able to create a vaccine.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
As the two make their way through dangerous and compromising situations — we’ll get to all that in the “dead” portion, RIP to so many people — Joel begins to soften toward Ellie. Instead of being cargo to him, she becomes a person, and then a person he loves dearly. By the end of their journey together, Ellie is basically a daughter to Joel. His emotional walls come down, but he still hasn’t done anything to resolve his trauma from failing to protect Sarah all those years ago. So, when Ellie and Joel finally reach their destination and Joel finds out that the Fireflies are planning to kill Ellie in the quest for a cure, he goes berserk. His fight-or-flight is activated, and y’all know that Joel Miller is going to fight every time.
After Joel murders dozens of Fireflies, he reaches the operating suite. The surgeon tries to take a stand, but Joel quickly kills him, too. The nurses unhook Ellie and Joel lets them live, but he spirits Ellie away in a car before she can wake up and see the truth. Later, he covers up for his massacre by telling Ellie that the Fireflies couldn’t come up with a cure and that they released her. Ellie is obviously suspicious of this. The season ends on an auspicious note as Ellie asks Joel once again if he’s telling the truth, and her response is a very delayed, “OK.”
Status: Alive
Ellie, for her part, is a shrewd and intelligent kid. Throughout the season, we get glimpses of her entire backstory, going all the way back to her birth. You see, Ellie is immune to Cordyceps because her mother Anna was bitten by an Infected right as she was delivering her. Anna (played by the original Ellie from the games, Ashley Johnson) was a true warrior, killing the monster right at the same time Ellie came into the world. Seconds after getting bitten, she cut the umbilical cord. Ellie’s brief introduction to Cordyceps at the very beginning of her life made her immune somehow, but the circumstances surrounding her birth also indicate a genetic talent for tactical aggression and rebellion.
Anna was a member of the Fireflies, along with her friend Marlene. As she’s dying, Anna hands Ellie off to Marlene, who places her in the hands of the government. Throughout the season, we learn about the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), and how they control everything within the designated QZs of the country. From birth, Ellie has been raised within the system, and as a teen, she’s forced to attend FEDRA boot camp with the option to either become a grunt worker if she chooses to resist drinking the authoritarian Kool-Aid, or an officer if she chooses to assimilate. She’s struggling when her friend Riley (Storm Reid) comes to take her on a wondrous journey to the center of an abandoned mall. During this outing, both Riley and Ellie get bitten and they decide to “be all poetic and lose our minds together,” but then Riley turns and Ellie doesn’t.
Ellie, like her father figure Joel, is a survivor.
The Fireflies find Ellie, pair her up with Joel, and their journey begins. Recently traumatized by having to kill her infected friend, Ellie is hungry for any human connection. She gamely tries to endear herself to Joel, and slowly, he finds himself caring about this rebellious kid. As they travel, Ellie begins to respect Joel for his survival prowess, but she also learns a lot along the way.
By the time Joel is incapacitated by a group of raiders, Ellie finds herself able to work off of her instincts to survive. She encounters two men in the woods, one of whom is the leader of a cannibalistic cult. Eventually, she gets them to give her medicine for Joel, and later, when they capture her, she’s able to escape on her own, brutally stabbing the leader to death with his own knife. Ellie, like her father figure Joel, is a survivor.
However, just as Joel begins to realize how important Ellie has become to him, the situation flips. After Joel massacres the Fireflies to save Ellie, we see that Joel is the one desperately trying to endear himself to his young charge, and that Ellie’s pushing back because she doesn’t fully trust what he’s saying. The conflict between the two is sure to loom heavily over the second season.
Status: Alive
As Ellie and Joel first embarked on their journey, they had two goals: Get Ellie to the Fireflies, and find Joel’s brother, Tommy. And in the sixth episode of the first season, they finally locate him. Tommy had been living in a commune in Jackson, Wyoming. Joel finds out that his brother is in a relationship with one of the leaders, Maria, and that they’re expecting a child. Jackson seems like an idyllic place to live, with running water, electricity, and the community gathering together to do adorable things like watch old movies. There are zero sinister vibes here, just love and light. It’s almost too good to be true.
Joel and Ellie choose to leave so that Joel can fulfill his mission, but the pair was on their way back to the commune in the final moments of the Season 1 finale. Tommy, Maria, and Jackson are sure to play a role as the next season begins to unspool. But if we’ve learned anything from other post-apocalyptic stories like “The Walking Dead,” we know that nothing good can stay.
Status: Dead
Bill and Frank know all too well how nothing good can stay, but their story is a bit different than almost anyone else’s on “The Last of Us.” They’re worth mentioning because their story packed such an emotional impact within the world of the show and also on the world at large.
Bill was a survivalist; Frank was a man who got stuck in one of his traps. The two of them fell in love and led a beautiful life together in the gated community that Bill created for them. They even connected with Tess and Joel as trading partners and, eventually, friends. However, after years of struggling with a neurodegenerative disease, Frank asks Bill to spend one last day with him. At the end of that day, the two men drink a bottle of wine laced with a gigantic dose of sleeping pills, peacefully ending their own lives. When Ellie and Joel arrive at their house, Bill has written a letter to Joel, reminding him to protect the people he loves. Bill’s sentiment proves to be the overarching theme of the entirety of “The Last of Us”: In a world where nothing can stay, protect the things you love.
Status: Dead
Joel and Ellie’s journey is also echoed in a pair they meet on the road to Wyoming. When passing through the Kansas QZ, Ellie and Joel get derailed by some scavengers, kill the scavengers, and then find themselves the subject of a city-wide manhunt. Coincidentally, Henry and Sam — a pair of brothers — are also being hunted for giving up the leader of the Kansas resistance. The much-older Henry fed FEDRA information in exchange for medicine to treat his younger brother Sam’s leukemia. As the group teams up in an attempt to flee, we see that the terrorizing reign of FEDRA is over, and the people are now in charge. However, as led by a revenge-filled mercenary named Kathleen (a terrifically terrifying Melanie Lynskey), the resistors don’t prove themselves to be any better than FEDRA.
Kathleen and her crew catch up with Henry, Sam, Joel and Ellie just as they’re about to escape the city. However, a huge sinkhole opens up in the ground and a swarm of Infected descends upon everyone. Kathleen is killed, and Sam is bitten. Sam doesn’t tell anyone that he’s been bitten until they’re safe, and even then he only tells Ellie. Ellie tries to stay up with him, much like she did with her friend Riley, but she falls asleep and he turns, attacking her as the dawn breaks. Henry and Joel are shocked when the two kids come rolling into the living room, and Henry impulsively shoots his little brother. In full shock over what he’s done, Henry turns the gun on himself, yet again underscoring the thesis of “The Last of Us.” Is life worth living if we can’t protect the ones we love?
Status: Dead
The leader of the Fireflies has a different mission than almost everyone else we meet on the show because she’s thinking bigger. Her mission is to provide a cure or vaccine for the Cordyceps infection. However, in the Season 1 finale, as Joel mows his way through the entire Firefly compound in order to save Ellie, Marlene proves to be the final boss. Instead of fire power, she has reason on her side. She tries to explain why Ellie’s sacrifice is so important to humanity, and then, when that doesn’t work, she pleads for her own life. Joel isn’t buying it. So he kills her. Seeing as how Marlene was the leader of the country-wide resistance effort, it feels like Joel’s decision to murder her in cold blood will surely have consequences.
Status: Season 2 newbie
Joel clearly has some stuff to work out, and Gail might just be the person to help him. In the trailer for Season 2, we see her engage in what looks like a therapy session with the gruff guy. He seems to have met his match because she doesn’t flinch at all. We don’t know much else about O’Hara’s character, but for those of you worrying that she won’t be bringing her flair for the comedic to the otherwise bleak world of the show, don’t fret. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, O’Hara said, “You don’t quite know why she’s got . . . well, she’s got this edge to her, but it makes for some weird, good dark comedy, I think. So, it’s there. I never want to deny the gift of humor.”
Status: Season 2 newbie
We don’t know much about Jesse, beyond that he’s very cute. Okay, fine, there’s more. From the Deadline casting announcement, we also know that “he’s a pillar of his community who puts everyone else’s needs before his own, sometimes at terrible cost.” Oh man, should we all start the pre-grieving process now?
Status: Season 2 newbie
Since Ellie can literally never get a break, Dina seems to be a character to worry about in Season 2. According to Entertainment Weekly, Dina is Ellie’s love interest this season. Druckmann and Mazin state that she’s, “. . . warm, brilliant, wild, funny, moral, dangerous and instantly lovable.” Like Ellie, we’re all sure to get very attached to her . . . but maybe we shouldn’t get too close.
Status: Season 2 newbie
Casting Kaitlyn Dever in the upcoming season of “The Last of Us” proved to be controversial for many fans of the game. According to Deadline, Abby is one of three “playable characters” in “The Last of Us Part II,” and will play a big role in the upcoming season. Fans of the games are irked that Dever doesn’t look like Abby from the games, seeing as she’s not as muscular or large. However, Neil Druckmann dispels these concerns, stating to Variety that “Kaitlyn Dever wanted to work with us; we wanted to work with her. It’s not worth passing it up to continue a search that might never bear fruit to find someone that matches the physicality.”
If you know about Abby, you know, but if not, the table seems to have been set for her to bring chaos to the show at large. In Season 1, “The Last of Us” proved that they won’t pull any punches — in fact, we know that every punch is going to hurt — so let’s all get ready for some devastation on April 13th.
Read more
about “The Last of Us”