In “The Final of Us,” teenage Ellie’s life is unimaginably exhausting, however she nonetheless finds methods to get by way of it. She loves a very good pun, takes nice enjoyment of how her sailor’s mouth makes each grownup round her uncomfortable, and does not put up with anybody’s crap. She’s an angsty, feisty teen in each sense of the phrase, however the sequence by no means tries to deal with her feelings as overdramatic. Issues suck for Ellie, and the present offers her the house to specific simply how a lot issues suck.
In episode 8, Ellie comes nose to nose with a menace arguably worse than demise or zombies — David, an grownup cannibal who desires to take Ellie as his sexual conquest. Ellie fights again tooth and nail when coping with David, breaking his finger as a warning, after which later, violently bludgeons him to demise. As /Movie’s Valerie Ettenhofer so expertly states in her evaluation of the efficiency, “In on a regular basis situations, conversations with an undercurrent of implied sexual violence have grow to be so normalized that women study from an early age to nod and smile and never trigger a fuss so as to safely make it out the opposite aspect.” Ellie fights again, one thing so many people have been denied the chance to do, however that does not imply the expertise does not nonetheless hang-out her.
When she leaves the scene of carnage, Joel (Pedro Pascal) touches her shoulders from behind her, and her instant intuition is to scream, “No! Get off of me!” She killed David, however the looming menace of him does not go away together with his demise. I am in my 30s and I nonetheless have the instinctual response to flail and flinch once I’m touched with out warning. Watching Ellie reply the identical manner I did then, and infrequently do now, was as efficient in my therapeutic course of as remedy.