what about the end of the end of the world?
on "the last of us" & making a life post-apocalypse (pt 1)
Aaaand we’re back from our mini-hiatus! Thanks for your patience, Nervous Wrecks!
This episode has some mild spoilers for Episode 3 of HBO’s The Last of Us. If you’re not caught up, maybe come back to this one.
The thing about graduating from a master’s program and getting married during a pandemic is that everyone wants to know what comes next (myself included). Everyone loves to ask questions: Where do you plan to settle down? what’s the plan? Will one or both of us have to work in person? Will we need to move elsewhere for a job, or be priced out of NYC entirely?
Make no mistake: people ask these questions because they care. And I appreciate that. But even if we are very much boosted and the world is no longer in an “emergency,” as the Biden administration announced this week, I barely feel as though I’ve left survival mode. How do you know when the end of the end of the world has arrived? When does the next era begin?
I’ve been thinking about this lately, and specifically the stories we have about post-apocalyptic life enduring. The movie A Quiet Place exemplifies how families and connection can still be built even when the rules for human survival have changed. Last year’s incredible Station Eleven TV mini-series adaptation was an excellent exploration of how creativity and art can and must endure. Cormac McCarthy’s novel-turns-movie The Road examines the role of hope when the idea of a future seems entirely nonexistent.
So imagine my surprise when watching HBO’s latest smash hit, The Last of Us, an extremely thoughtful adaptation of the hit video game of the same name.
Here’s the spoiler-free plot overview: The world is nearly destroyed by a mutated version of a fungus called Cordyceps (which, terrifyingly, is an actual thing) that turns sufferers in gnarly-looking zombies. Yeah, zombie stuff is cliché at this point (more on that next week!) but as this NPR article articulates beautifully:
“…The Last of Us of is about those assorted mushroom-baddies in exactly the same way that The Sopranos was about RICO charges. Which is to say — they're a threat, yes, and they loom ever-present, but the show's really about what the characters do despite them.”
Remaining survivors in the years after the initial outbreak live in quarantine-zones where major cities once stood. A smuggler named Joel (played by hot-space-babysitter Pedro Pascal), is given the task of safely escorting a peculiar teen named Ellie (played by quirky-tiny-GoT-queen Bella Ramsey) out of the Boston quarantine zone to a mysterious laboratory somewhere out in the Pacific Northwest.
The Last of Us video game franchise is cinematic in its storyline, gory in its violence, and surprisingly emotional. To say fans of the game are rabid is like saying George Santos has told a fib or two…It’s a vast understatement.
Why does this matter? Because episode three, which aired this past Sunday, featured a couple from the original video game, adapted for a post-COVID world.
The audience is introduced to Bill, a second-amendment-loving, paranoid, self-sufficient prepper and repressed homosexual (played by everyone’s favorite animated mustache, Nick Offerman) who survives the initial outbreak. We later learn he is friendly with Joel, but at first he is all alone, and happy about it. Then a gentle, cheerful man named Frank (played by everyone’s other favorite animated mustache, Murray Bartlett) who falls into one of the traps outside Bill’s house, which eventually turns into the two of them falling for each other (I know, I know, I’m the worst).
The show follows Bill and Frank’s tender, heartwarming relationship over the first two decades post-outbreak. We see them discuss food and wine pairings; we see them fight and bicker; we see them cultivate and eat strawberries; we see them tend to each other’s wounds. In other words: they make a world unto themselves despite the fact that the world outside their safe zone has mostly ceased to exist. Without getting into spoilers, Joel and Ellie hope Bill and Frank can help them on their journey, but realize upon arrival that both of them are gone.
This episode made me sob more than any piece of media has in a long time. And at first, I thought it was merely heartbreak for two characters I’d quickly grown attached to put into an impossible situation.
But I actually think it’s more than that. Yes, Bill is focused on survival, but once Frank enters his life, their life is no longer about surviving: it is about living and connecting with others, making plans to make something of the life we still have.
And I think this can be traced back to the devastating letter Bill leaves for Joel to find at the end of the episode:
"I used to hate the world and I was happy when everyone died, but I was wrong because there was one person worth saving and that's what I did. I saved him and I protected him. That's why men like me and you are here. We have a job to do."
The audience knows that Joel has already failed at this more than once, which is a punch in the gut on its own. But what touched me specifically was that Bill indirectly articulates the trouble with defining post-pandemic life. Surviving the end of the world—or a pandemic—isn’t a victory in and of itself. What we do afterwards is everything. For Bill, he learns to let the love he never allowed for himself beforehand in. For Joel, he continues to seek redemption for his failures to protect the ones he loves.
And for me, while I’m not necessarily protecting anyone aside from my very spoiled chihuahua, I think I’ve come to a place where I’ve survived a pandemic only to need to figure out what comes next. I’ve been in survival mode in a variety of ways for years and as a result, I’m fucking tired. But I also can (and have!) traveled now. I’m teaching entirely in person. I see my friends out in the world regularly, without worry.
So—what now? If the world has ended in some sense but not in others, where do I go from here?
As Frank tells Bill near the end of the episode, he wants Bill to “Love me the way I want you to.” And I think that that’s what I’ve been trying to do post-pandemic: find a way to express the ways in which I want others to love me. If I’m going to go back to a version of a “normal,” I’d like it to be one where I say what I need when I need it.
I may not know where I’m going or what I’m doing fully just yet, but I know better what I require to not just survive but thrive. And that, at least, is a place to start.
Next week, part two of my Last of Us mini-essays will be released! Stay tuned!