The Last of Us: Infected

The trouble with being a week (or more) behind on my self-assigned reviewing project is that I was happily doing some thinking about “Infected”, the second episode of The Last of Us, when I got hit with episode three, “Long Long Time”, which is serious gut-punch. The latter is the kind of story that post-apocalyptic narratives are uniquely suited to tell — strip out society and focus hard on fragile, beautiful human connection — but, for whatever reason, doesn’t. So. I’m going to do my best to muddle through some thoughts about “Infected”, but know that my heart isn’t quite in it because Frank and Bill broke it.

One thing I didn’t mention when talking about the pilot episode was the cold open. The entire series opens on a 1960s talk show panel discussing one of the panelist’s new book, something apparently about the dangers of infectious disease in the age of air travel, and the prospect of a pandemic. I was rueful when one scientist talked about how a disease could move from one side of the globe to the other “in a matter of weeks” — surely it’s faster than that now — but then I realized that Covid-19 did indeed take weeks, sometimes months, to get all around the globe, infection rates and incubation periods being what they are. I was just talking to a family member about the beginning of the pandemic, and Minneapolis shut down on the Ides of March — March 15. We weren’t locked down here, at the top of Lake Superior 200 miles away, until the day after St Patrick’s Day — March 19. Four days, 200 miles. This is all a jillion times faster than when the Black Plague landed in Europe, in Italy, in 1347, and took almost five years to travel to northern Russia.

Then the other epidemiologist (played by the charming John Hannah) chimes in: I’m not scared of viruses or bacteria, he says, what really worries me is fungus. He then goes on to describe in loving and terrifying detail what the cordyceps fungus does to ants. The whole vibe of the room changes. The audience goes from laughing at the moderator’s stupid jokes to watching in stony silence as he talks about the annihilation of the entire human race. It’s a pretty great opening, because while obviously it’s there to infodump how the zombie pathogen works in this story, it also seeks to disarm an audience which is weary of pandemics in general, and zombies in specific. I did it myself while watching: yes, yes, we all know how air travel will change the way diseases move through the population; you sweet summer children have no idea. Hannah’s little monologue really gets into the terror of the fungal infection — being piloted and replaced by an alien while you remain locked in your own body — while explaining to a pandemic-weary modern audience why we should sit up and take notice.

The cold open in the second episode doesn’t so much explain as illustrate, profoundly and horribly, how this fungal zombie infection is Not Your Daddy’s Zombie Virus. We open in Jakarta two days before the opening of the first episode. An older woman — a mycologist — is having lunch at a café when some cop-types escort her to … well, it’s not entirely clear. A government facility? There is a split second showing a sign giving advice about how to deal with SARS, which definitely dates the proceedings. She’s shown a slide of something which they claim came from a human, but she pushes back: cordyceps cannot infect people. She’s then sent into a pressure-negative clean room to inspect a body. She cuts near a bite mark on the body’s ankle, which reveals fibrous strands, not the usual blood and muscle. When she opens the cadaver’s mouth, fungal spores reach out, straining in the air towards her. She reels out of the room, clearly horrified almost to the point of panic.

This actress did such an amazing job. Like most of the audience for The Last of Us, I don’t speak Indonesian, so she had to convey her emotional state through body language and her carefully expressive face. You can see it all: her confusion and fear when she’s picked up, which segues to a casual professional confidence when she snaps into scientist mode. So when we see her shakily drinking tea and quietly, calmly suggesting they should firebomb Jakarta, you know exactly how fucked up everything is. Like the 1960s talk show, this isn’t really telling us anything new, except in the minutia. We’ve seen the clickers at work in the pilot, and we’ve already gotten the scientific rundown. There was some mention of flour mills in Jakarta in the first episode, so this is a confirmation of that location as ground zero for the infection. But this sequence put a face on what could be dry facts: This pathogen is so terrifying an expert in mycology suggested firebombing her hometown. Even then, she knows it’s not going to work, and asks to be returned home, so she can spend what little time she has left with her family. Oof.

After the cold open of second episode, the narrative continues with Tess, Joel, and Ellie outside of the Boston QZ, moving towards a meeting with the Fireflies so Joel and Tess can pass off Ellie, and move onto whatever bullshit they have going on. This part of the episode definitely had the feel of a video game. Encounter an impediment; work around the impediment. Tess and Joel discuss going the long way or the short way. The long is, of course, the safer. There’s a fair amount of crawling over things and working around obstacles, like the kind of thing you’d find in a video game. They inevitably end up going the short way after the long way proves blocked; the short way is through the Bostonian Museum, a (fictional) museum which appears to be about colonial Boston. We get our first up-close look at a clicker who’s been overtaken by the fungus for years, and these zombies are definitely residents of the Uncanny Valley, their faces covered with mushroom frills, blind, and smelling. Their blindness makes them seem less worrisome than your usual Romero-style zombie — stay silent and out of the way — but once they hone in on your location, they are significantly harder to kill. We also get some important exposition about the clickers. Apparently those fungal fucks are connected underground, so that if you disturb the wrong thing, it’ll pluck the unseen network like a spider’s web, and draw clickers from miles around down on your location. (Surely this won’t be necessary information later.)

Ellie is alive with wonder and curiosity about the world outside the QZ, and fascinated by the remnants of a modern world she has never lived in. Sometimes recklessly so: She tells them she was infected with cordyceps when she broke into a mall which had been declared off limits. (She also claims she was alone, and that is surely a lie. As I mentioned in my first post, I don’t have knowledge of the game to fall back on, but seriously. No one underlines how alone they were in fiction unless they weren’t.) Ellie’s delight with the world, even the ravaged, decaying parts, is in contrast with Joel & Tess’s world-weariness and trauma. I find this is a common tension in zombie narratives (and post-apocalyptic stories more in general): the new generation, the one born after the death of the modern world, has very different instincts than that one who watched that world die. Boston isn’t a cenotaph for Ellie, not a marker for the death of modernity, and modernity itself is something between a tall tale and a myth.

So. A totally decent episode which was more about setting up necessary exposition than hard-core interpersonal interactions. I mentioned Colson Whitehead’s Zone One last week, how he builds a taxonomy of survivor recollection. The Silhouette is for people who you don’t intend to be with very long, just a simple sketch of where and when. The Anecdote is for more long-term of one’s short-term companions; this recounting will get deeper into details. The Obituary is the real story, with blood, snot, and tears. The last episode was Joel’s Obituary. It showed us who he lost and how utterly devastating that was. In this episode, he barely, barely, gives Ellie a Silhouette. She asks him not very intrusive questions — the kind of thing you’d ask someone in a waiting room — and he answers “pass” to more than a couple. Given his resolve to stick with her at the end, it’ll be interesting to see him thaw towards the more intimate modes of recollection — and she him.

The Last of Us: When You’re Lost in the Darkness

However many years ago (many), I diligently rounded up every The Walking Dead episode as it aired. It was in the doldrums of season 3, so I did a lot of bitching, but it was still a fun exercise. I know I’m super bad at follow-through when I assign myself homework, but I’m going to make a stab at it with HBO’s newest zombie show, The Last of Us. Already I’m off to a great start, because it’s been a solid week since the show premiered, and they’ve already aired episode two. But to begin my chatting about the first episode, I’m going to make some disclaimers and talk about zombie tv, ok? Ok.

The Last of Us, like The Walking Dead, is based on preexisting media, this time a video game instead of comics. I had read up to the second compendium with The Walking Dead — roughly when the prison is breached — but I don’t have that kind of background here. I’ve never played the game, so I don’t have any particular feelings about this casting choice or that. I do know that the usual suspects are mad about Black people existing and whatnot, but those types can dry up and blow away. I’m going to take the individual performances as they are, and not as some perfect 1:1 version of the video game. I totally get having things in your head if you’re familiar with a specific narrative, but that’s not where I’m coming from. Moreover, perfect fidelity to source material is not my metric for success. One of my favorite film adaptions of a book — and, coincidentally, another zombie narrative — is Pontypool, based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess. The film uses only one of the intertwining plotlines in the novel — which are alluded to in brief, weird interludes — because an attempt to portray everything that happens would get diffuse quick. The narrative’s simplicity makes it a stronger film.

So. The opening of The Last of Us is very much what Colson Whitehead, in Zone One, described as the Last Night. It’s the last day of normalcy before the world falls away and everything changes. As the wry narrator in that novel observes: “At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.” Whitehead’s ironic dismissal is a sort of inversion of Chekhov’s old saw from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The unhappy beginning of any zombie story is the same: they came, we died, etc. I say ironic, because however distanced the reader is by narrative bracketing or other literary tricksiness, those Last Night stories are individually, personally gutting. Every Last Night story is about someone losing everything, often violently. That zombie stories flatten this trauma to some snatched keys and a locked bathroom door speaks to the emotionally insulating power of the genre trope, something writers have to consciously write against.

We first meet Joel and his daughter Sarah on the morning of his birthday. Sarah’s got all the poise of a child who’s had to keep things together because her parents won’t — or can’t. The mother is absent — I presume dead because there are still pictures of her in the house — and Joel seems to work too much. He promises he’ll be back in time for them to celebrate his birthday, but this is inevitably not the case. We then follow Sarah through her day: she goes downtown to fix a watch with (unknown) special significance; she visits with the neighbors she finds affectionately annoying. During these mundane tasks, there’s this thrum of disquiet. The wife of the man who fixes her watch hustles her out of the store, telling Sarah to get home before she hurriedly closes up. In one of the more unsettling scenes in the pilot, the catatonic grandma at her neighbors’ goes through unnatural facial contortions, but we only see this out of focus behind Sarah’s turned back. Sirens blare in the distance constantly.

This opening does such a good job of showing a normal that is just on the edge. Sarah keeps listening too long at things in the distance, or seeming watchful in moments that aren’t overtly wrong. A nice detail: when her father eventually turns up, he remarks that she finally locked the door, something she apparently never does. A lot of Last Night narratives don’t linger much in the moments Before. A good example would be Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, which has the heroine witness the bloody murder and reanimation of her husband in the first minutes, then never much fusses with her grief; indeed, I don’t believe he’s mentioned again. But The Last of Us almost gives us an Obituary, in Whitehead’s taxonomy of Last Night narratives: a tale told to the intimate, with a full accounting of the loss. The other two possible modes are the Silhouette, for those to whom no connection was felt, and the Anecdote, suitable for large groups and the more long-term of the short-term traveling companions. (These distinctions will come in handy when talking about how Ellie and Joel interact, later.)

The day winds down quietly. They have cake and fall asleep in front of the tv watching a movie borrowed from the neighbors. This peaceful tableau is interrupted by a call from Joel’s brother, Tommy. Tommy’s gotten himself thrown in jail in Houston for assaulting someone, and Joel goes to bail him out, leaving a sleeping Sarah. She wakes up later to the sound of helicopters and distant booms. When she goes next door to investigate why their dog is out, she finds a blood-soaked kitchen with grandma feasting on her daughter’s body. Joel and Tommy return and order her into the truck, at which point they race off, trying to get out of the city. In their mad dash out of the city, there’s all manner of unsettling shit going on, but just over there, and then you’re past it. When Sarah is eventually killed — you can see this coming a mile away — it’s at the hands of a soldier, not one of the “clickers” (as the zombies here are styled.) He clearly gets orders to kill the two civilians over his walkie, shooting at them as they run away. This sets the themes for the rest of the episode: the government cannot be trusted, and only people working through mutual aid and community organizing are going to get anything done.

The narrative skips ahead 20 years; the location is now Boston. We don’t immediately catch up with Joel. Instead, we follow an unkempt and dirty child as he makes his way through the wreckage of modernity. I immediately got all excited because I’ve been working on a catalogue of zombified children, and this kid seemed stumbling and glazed enough to register as infected, if not a full-blown zombie. He’s allowed into the Boston FEDRA QZ (Federal Disaster Response Agency and Quarantine Zone, respectively) but strapped down to a wheelchair, The Girl with All the Gifts style. A woman speaks gently to him while he’s given a shot. We catch up with Joel after this sequence: He’s loading bodies into a pyre when a woman working alongside him balks at putting a child in the fire. It’s the boy from earlier; he must have been euthanized. I suspected that was what happened, but now I know, and without a lot of arm-wheeling. There’s a lot of nicely compact storytelling going on without a lot of fuss, like government-style posters on the wall which explain how the location of bite relates to infection time, or the fact that government is now conducted on scraps of paper and a stamp.

We follow Joel through his day. He lines up work for the next, talks to a guard who turns a blind eye to his smuggling, and tries to contact his brother, who is apparently the other half of the supply chain. Tommy’s been radio silence for longer than usual, and it’s making him and his girlfriend Tess nervous. Along the way we get a good cross-section of life in the QZ. The FEDRA administration of the QZ is apparently dystopian enough to have an organized resistance against them, a group called the Fireflies. When a deal of Joel’s falls through, he ends up grudgingly agreeing to take a young girl to a Firefly location outside of the QZ, at which point he’ll have what he needs to find his brother. This marks Bella Ramsey’s entrance into the narrative. I sincerely love a foul-mouthed sass, and Ellie’s character is that plus some. The Fireflies believe she’s important, though the not so hidden football is that they believe she’s the key to a cure. (There will be more on this later.)

On their way out of the QZ, they come in conflict with the guard Joel is friendly with. This confrontation was similar enough to Joel’s run-in with the soldier who murdered his daughter to trigger a pretty healthy rage response. He ends up beating the guard to death, while Ellie looks on in horrified wonder. Everyone completely does their jobs here, especially Ramsey, who manages to convey a lot of complex emotion. Joel’s violence on her behalf registers almost as a form of affection: he is willing to kill to protect her. I’ve often said that violence nurtures domesticity in zombie narratives, often paradoxically, and that’s not always or often a good thing. Largely this takes the form of white men murdering folk because of some high-handed ideal which crumbles the minute you look past the soundbite (pun intended). But here it’s much more nuanced than most. Ellie and Joel both have their motivations, which ultimately lock together. He’s still grieving a daughter; she’s never had a parent, let alone baseline affection from the adults around her. They don’t lock together here in the first episode — that would give short shrift to their very real trauma — but you can see how they might.

All in all, I was well pleased with the beginnings of this story. My kid, who is a video game nerd, was a little dismissive when I asked him if he’d watched this. “The video game is trying to be a movie,” he said, “so it makes sense the adaption would work.” While that definitely gave me food for thought about the aims of both genre and medium, it didn’t crimp my enjoyment. Inevitably, the take-home is that mushrooms are fucked up, a sentiment I can get behind.