[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “The Last of Us” Season 2, Episode 3]
Games are the only art form where the player makes the story happen, whether that means saving the princess from the monster in the castle or murdering an entire hospital full of people to save the one person immune to the Cordyceps infestation whose death might lead to a cure. You have to make Joel’s (Troy Baker in the games, Pedro Pascal in the series) choices to finish the game, whether you agree with them or not. That’s what really hurts.
A huge part of adapting from games to another medium is figuring out what has to shift about the story when it’s no longer designed around somebody playing, and maybe no adaptation understands this challenge better than “The Last of Us.” No amount of load screen homages, lore drops and Easter eggs, or lovingly recreated environments stand in for good storytelling. When “The Last of Us” invents wholly original sequences, they provide such a strong sense of character and perspective that it makes up for the fact that there’s no controller in our hands.
A great example of how the show accomplishes this sits in the middle of in Episode 3 of Season 2, “The Path.” Writer Craig Mazin and director Peter Hoar stretch out the time between Joel’s murder at the hands of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) decision to chase after his killers by first throwing a hospital stay in front of Ellie, and then a much more reluctant Tommy (Gabriel Luna) who wants to put a posse together the right way.
That means getting the Jackson Council’s permission. We don’t see much enthusiasm for the mission from the citizens of Jackson during the council session to discuss the proposal, until resident asshole Seth (Robert John Burke) stands up and defends the need to get revenge on the people who killed one of their own. Ellie’s speech is a little more nuanced — being a community requires seeking justice for each other, something outsiders won’t do — but fails to win the vote. And, as psychologist Gail (Catherine O’Hara) correctly diagnoses, Ellie was lying. She won’t accept the council’s decision. She and Dina (Isabella Merced) go rogue and ride off to Seattle, with Seth’s help.
The council scene is wholly original to the series, which means there are so many ways that Mazin and Hoar could have handled it. A show with different priorities might have elided the council entirely, cutting from Jesse (Young Mazino) and Ellie’s heated discussion the night before to the verdict. A different version of “The Last of Us” on a smaller budget might have had just Ellie make a presentation to the council — close-ups of her reading from her prepared speech, some coverage of the serious but encouraging faces of Tommy and Maria, and a regretful twang on the Gustavo Santaolalla score as the motion fails.
Instead, the sequence lasts over seven minutes with camera positions and something like 44 different perspectives on all the characters attending. While Hoar and cinematographer Ksenia Sereda use some shots to establish a sense of the space in wides, a lot of the coverage is from the perspective of the people in the room — Ellie, Dina, Tommy, Jesse, Maria, Gail, and Seth, but also everyone who speaks (shoutout to Haig Sutherland’s Scott and his opinions about corn). The most repeated angle is one from the house left seats, putting our view of Ellie on a diagonal with Seth, and then Carlisle (Hiro Kanagawa), who advocates for mercy as a matter of principle. We see the whole community represented in the depth of that frame.
That level of detail work is only possible when you invest just as much in town hall meeting scenes as you do in zombie attacks. “People ask, ‘What’s the difference between prestige television and not prestige television?’ And the answer isn’t [that] one is better than the other. The answer is we get more time in quote-unquote prestige television and more resources to do things that serve the story,” Mazin told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
Sereda also brings a particular sensibility to capturing points of view on the series through the camera and lenses she uses for “The Last of Us” — in Season 2, these were the ALEXA 35 and the Cooke S4X. “ I was looking for lenses where you can have this connection of the close-up and what you can see around,” Sereda said. “We really wanted to [get] the closeup to work on different levels, because [there are] so many textures and layers of things you can see. When you are working from the characters’ perspective, you need to be inside, but at the same time, you need to be very connected with the environment around you.”
The environment doesn’t have to be production designer Don Macaulay’s spectacularly rewilded ruins of 2003, either. Sereda’s camera is mostly still in the council sequence, with just a little handheld shaking, and a painful, knife-twisting move left to right over Ellie’s face as the ‘no’ votes pour in. Her and Hoar’s composition choices give the closest visual sense of being present in the scene, so much so that she describes the camera as “breathing.”
“It gives this very beautiful cinematic experience, and I really love to work with actors with the close-ups. It’s — my heart is there. Because it’s all about people, it’s all about following the characters, and I really want to support the viewer’s experience with our cinematic tools, to stay very connected with [the emotions] characters are going through. The wide focus gives you the possibility of staying very close without distorting the face structure.”
Mazin’s heart is also with the people. Showing the complexity of the society in Jackson will only become more important as a counterpoint once we learn more about the WLF and the cultlike Scars, who have made wholly different choices but are full of people with the same inclinations and worries as in Jackson.
“The arguments that get articulated there are all valid in their own way,” Mazin said. “You can’t actually survive without somebody like Joel or somebody like Seth, who is willing to just throw punches to protect the people they love. But if that’s all you have, life itself becomes pretty brutal and unforgiving, which is why Bill needed Frank and Frank needed Bill.”
Of course, it’s easy when it’s just Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) and they are in love with each other. Ellie’s path is harder, filled with people who love her and want to stop her, love her and want to help her, loathe her and want to help, or who have no opinion on the whole Seattle thing. The council sequence brings us inside of all of those perspectives, immediately and invisibly, as only great filmmaking can.
“When the people who are helping you are people that you also don’t like, [can] you forgive that person? Can any of us forgive any of us?” Mazin said. “Is it possible, especially in today’s world, for us to hold two things in our mind at the same time? Thing number one, this person has done and said bad things; thing number two, this person has a beautiful part of them that would sacrifice and suffer for me. There are people who are both of those things, and how we deal with that is part of what the story’s about.”
“The Last of Us” is now streaming on Max.
