The Last of Us – Sky’s thriller set in a desolate America populated by the violent undead – has put viewers through the emotional wringer. Tragedy is never far from triumph, peril alternating closely with sanctuary. And this second season has upped the stakes, delivering, first, the sheer shock of a main character’s death, and then, on the latest episode, “The Price”, a heartbreaking rumination on the nature of fatherhood and inheritance. Not bad for an adaptation of a point-and-shoot video game.
Great television shows are not always a source of great fathers. Think of Don Draper drifting in and out of Sally and Bobby’s lives in Mad Men. Or Walter White recklessly gambling Walt Jr’s safety in Breaking Bad. Or even Tony Soprano’s failure to provide Meadow and AJ with a sense of direction. Because the canon of great American television has been so singularly focused on flawed men – the antihero – it has also been a breeding ground for bad parenting. Ambivalence or animosity; they are ad men, meth kingpins or mobsters first, and parents second.
The Last of Us has always been about fatherhood. The show opened with Joel (Pedro Pascal) losing his 14-year-old daughter, Sarah, as the world ends around him, and then picked back up as he forged a surrogate family with recalcitrant cargo Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Joel, the show tells us, was a good father before life, and a ruinous plague, intervened. And over the time spent smuggling Ellie across the barren, devastated United States, that instinct reasserts itself. At the climax of the show’s first season, Joel makes a potentially catastrophic decision to save Ellie from those who would vivisect her to synthesise a cure for the disease that had brought down society. Joel the rebel, Joel the cynic, Joel the survivor; all are, in that moment, suppressed in favour of Joel the father.
“The Price” has been described by its writer, Halley Gross, as “a bottle episode about Joel and Ellie and the best moments of their relationship, and the disintegration of their relationship over time in Jackson”. That term – bottle episode – is usually reserved for episodes of TV that break their format and contain the drama, like a ship in a bottle, within a single location. That’s not what “The Price” is: it’s an expansive look at how this makeshift family matured over the years between the show’s seasons. They have beautiful moments – playing in an Apollo XV command module during a visit to a derelict science museum – and destructive ones. Joel demonstrates both his gentleness and his hardness, and the episode ranges from his childhood to Ellie setting off for vengeance. If it is a bottle episode, it’s been uncorked.
“I’m doing a little better than my father did,” Joel’s abusive dad, Javier (Tony Dalton), tells his son in flashback. “And I hope that, when it’s your turn, you do a little better than me.” It is a line that will recur, as one generation gives way to another. For all that The Last of Us feels like a grand metaphor for social decay and the end of the American century, as the show has evolved, the focus has increasingly fallen on the quotidian endurance of humanity in the face of horror. What, after all, is the point of surviving the desolation of the known world by fungoid mushroom-zombies, if you don’t then do a decent job of raising your kid?
Life goes on. This is the central message of Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s show, and few episodes have captured that better than “The Price”. Birthdays mark the passage of time, from that last vestigial innocence to the complexity of adulthood. “So,” Joel seethes when he catches Ellie fooling around with a girl in her bedroom. “All the teenage things, all at once.” Despite everything they’ve been through – all the horror – there is no preparation for living with a teenage girl. This is the evolution he missed out on with Sarah; the banal despair of watching your perfect angel become an autonomous, and often idiotic, adult. Even with the total decline and fall of Western civilisation, Joel – the Gen-Xer – is still going to struggle with parenting a queer child. Sometimes it’s easier to fight your way out of zombie-infested sewers than it is to connect emotionally with your daughter.
When “The Price” delivers its sucker punch – a scene in which Joel finally reveals to Ellie what happened in Salt Lake City, and what he cost the world in order to protect her – viewers already know that this is the last bit of parenting Joel will ever do. The truth, a knowledge that he passes down to Ellie, just as his father passed down to him the watch he still wears and the lines he speaks. “If you should ever have one of your own,” he tells Ellie, through tears. “Well then, I hope that you do a little better than me.” For a show about paternity, this is a last pivot into patrimony – Joel passing down to Ellie an heirloom that she can’t pawn, forget or lose.
The Last of Us has proven a hugely effective vehicle for these standalone episodes (like the first season’s “Long, Long Time”), which speak simple emotional truths. There is no sweeping allegory here, no hint at a critique of right-wing populism or bellicose jingoism. Just the simple, everyday mess of trying to do a “little better” than our parents, incrementally shifting that parental dial. In its sensitivity to these challenges, The Last of Us has proven itself to be, perhaps, the great TV show about modern fatherhood.
’The Last of Us’ can be streamed in the UK on Sky and NOW, with new episodes arriving every Monday
