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The Final of Us is bumming everybody out. Largely as a result of the HBO collection’ juggernaut first season ended on Sunday, starting the lengthy arduous anticipate a second season. But additionally as a result of The Final of Us is basically freaking unhappy. The collection started with a person watching his daughter die, and ended with him taking pictures his manner by way of a makeshift hospital to make sure one other child didn’t meet an analogous destiny. In between, everybody died or killed (or ate) somebody, and in need of some homosexual gardening, there have been few odes to pleasure.
And actually, regardless of chatter on-line decrying the present’s dour denouement, that was the purpose.
Look, I get why curling up on the sofa to stare at a giant pile of bleak isn’t everybody’s favourite factor to do. Banks are collapsing, Joe Unique needs to run for president—doubling down in your Sunday scaries with The Final of Us just isn’t a selection everybody needs to make. However this isn’t a shortcoming of the present or its storytelling. It’s a matter of choice.
Additionally, regardless of the darkness, The Final of Us stays a type of escapism. Bleak as it’s, it’s nonetheless fiction—fiction a few pandemic worse than the one at present raging that’s meant, on some stage, to offer viewers the chance to consider one thing else. Granted, it principally makes them ponder what occurs when humanity decides the one approach to save lots of people is to slaughter many extra, however nonetheless.
In different phrases, The Final of Us doesn’t commerce in darkness for darkness’ sake. It’s not a DC Comics movie attempting to be edgy. It’s not even Squid Sport, which in a manner was much more miserable in its “oh yeah, that would occur”-ness. Because it stands, the world just isn’t contaminated with a zombifying fungus, but it surely’s full of people that will do something to remain alive and/or generate income. If something, The Final of Us is a parable for what might occur when that Cordyceps fungus is launched into a spot that usually prizes rugged individualism over group.
Sure, there are most likely scriptwriters on the market who would have recommended to Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin that they inject a bit emotional reprieve, one episode that ends on a contented notice. However in case you consider, as Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi does, that The Final of Us is a commentary on the numerous flaws of American exceptionalism, then these searching for slivers of hope are destined to be left at midnight.
All of this got here to a swirling conclusion in Sunday’s finale. Within the closing moments, Joel (Pedro Pascal) realized that the Fireflies would doubtless kill Ellie (Bella Ramsey) looking for a treatment for the Cordyceps fungus. He shot almost each Firefly in sight to avoid wasting her. Some people argue he went too far, slaughtering many individuals to avoid wasting one; others really feel his actions have been justified. However the level isn’t to determine whether or not he’s “proper” or “unsuitable.” The purpose—as my colleague Adrienne So famous over Slack this week—is {that a} society that might kill a toddler to avoid wasting itself perhaps isn’t value saving. Anybody who learn Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Stroll Away from Omelas” is aware of this.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not Joel is a hero or villain. What issues is what his actions mirror. As Hadadi famous, “The Final of Us has painted a portrait of an American id incompatible with drastic change.” When the pandemic hit, all the nation’s selfishness and individualism reworked into one thing much more virulent than earlier than. It’s bleak, but it surely additionally feels that manner as a result of it’s acquainted.