The Last of Us & The Best of Us
In 2023, a year when Covid starts to calm, a year when text to image generators arise from machine muck, a year when digital software rather than creative decision making and nimble fingers define artistic vision, HBO released The Last Of Us and departed from the pacing of a wildly popular video game to unpredictably climax a take on humanity with an abridged Linda Ronstadt classic, Long Long Time. If there were a slaughter rule for streaming narrative, other shows, begging for kudos, could have picked up their episodic tidbits and gone home.
Rickety expectation found that TLOU mirrored the video game by putting Ellie and Joel at center in their story; but the tale unexpectedly abandoned both and sharply turned to the story of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) whose meeting, courting, struggling and deaths make up most of the third episode’s narrative. It is an episode about living, surviving and the emotional bonding that holds them and us together. As the internet proved after the episode drop, the storyline, that could have been a tangential filler, astonishingly, out of the harsh, mushroom gray, became a touchstone for real tragedy: living unloved in a world of mere survival.
As the episode ends and the protagonists return, Ellie (Bella Ramsay) shakes a cassette tape like a castanet and then pops it into the departing truck’s player.
Joel (Pedro Pascal) tells Ellie to put the cassette away. Ellie, of course, doesn’t listen.
Joel, hearing the music, says “oh, this is good” and asks if Ellie knows who Linda Ronstadt is. Ellie says no , “I don’t know who Linda Ronstadt is.”
This exchange edges on the ragged boundary of Joel and Ellie's lives. This is the past. Ellie is no longer cargo. With his eyes shadowed by memory (“oh, man”), Joel, in an instant, reviews all the loss that has gone before. The Ronstadt tape continues to play.
“Wait for the day, you’ll go away.”
Joel, holding back his tears, chuckles. Ellie, listening to the song, defining their relationship, says “it’s better than nothing.” Joel and Ellie briefly live in a memory of the life that never was and are about to pay the costs in the struggle ahead where each for the other will do everything they know. Joel and Ellie, cocooned in a bright blue truck under the cover of gray skies, leave Bill and Frank’s gated home.
“Wait for the day, you’ll go away”
The camera pulls back. A white window frame encases the view from Bill and Frank’s window. The curtain sheer on the left flows in the slightest of breezes. The golden yellow curtain on the right moves almost imperceptibly. A charcoal drawing of Bill hangs above a once blooming plant. Frank’s perfect day is over. TLOU abridges a song of unrequited love and sharpens the focus on challenged love, abiding throughout the remainder of the season.