What ‘The Last of Us’ Says About the Fragility of the Modern World

And what it means to be detached from our progress

HBO

One of the aspects that makes HBO’s The Last of Us unique is the way that it drives home the swift loss of culture that occurs when a parasite sweeps the globe. Yet because the majority of the show takes place two decades after the initial outbreak, we watch people reflect back on that lost world in myriad ways. The days after the fungal infection goes viral are never shown, and instead viewers are catapulted into a future that’s tried its hardest to adjust and reestablish some semblance of normalcy.

For the people who remember life before the collapse, they’ve defaulted to nihilism and despondency. They’ve got scarred, rugged exteriors and have by and large lost all faith that humanity could ever truly return to form.

But among the most interesting depictions of peoples’ attitudes toward the past come from those who’ve never experienced it themselves. There’s a moment in season 1 episode 3, titled “Long, Long Time,” that illustrates this beautifully. The two lead protagonists are walking along the eroded highways that weave between forsaken cities when they pass by the distant remnants of an airplane. It had likely crashed into the open field on the day of the outbreak. By the time they spot it, the flying structure has been almost completely grown over and returned to earth.

Ellie, played by Bella Ramsay, is in awe of the decaying monolith. By contrast, Pedro Pascal’s Joel still remembers when people viewed taking to the skies as mundane — even inconvenient.

“You [ever] fly in one of those??” Ellie asks, breathlessly astonished that such a feat could even be possible.

“A few times, sure,” Joel responds non-committally.

“So lucky.”

“Didn’t feel like it at the time — get shoved into a middle seat, pay 12 bucks for a sandwich.”

“Dude, you got to go up in the sky!” Ellie retorted, taken aback that Joel could ever trivialize such a transcendent experience.

In my eyes, it’s this exchange that most expertly encapsulates the divergent lives of the two lead protagonists.

Having grown up in a world that’s already fallen to pieces, the only picture Ellie had gleaned of that faraway past was through stories. She remarks at one point that, growing up inside a quarantine zone, her school never taught her how the government failed to prevent a pandemic; she’d spent her whole life wondering how a society of planes and trains and flourishing cities could all come crashing down over the span of a few days. She could only daydream about what that functioning world that Joel grew up in looked like. What kind of populace could launch building-sized vehicles into the sky and carefully guide them back down again — what kind of extinct advancements it would require to put people on the moon.

The Walking Dead and its various spinoffs each depict their share of children who know no different than a world in disrepair, but it’s rare for those kids to meaningfully grapple with the void of culture and technology they were born into. What makes the exchange above so special is that we see Ellie realistically stand in amazement before the things that prior generations once viewed as ordinary — innovations that today we don’t stop to give a second thought.

If a caveman were suddenly transported into a city of the 21st century, he wouldn’t have the words to describe it. They might be able to say to their contemporaries that it was “big,” or “bright,” but they wouldn’t have a vocabulary suited for the digital world we’ve erected. They wouldn’t have phrases to detail the neon on our streets, the satellites in the sky, or the information reservoirs we store in pockets.

The progress we’ve made would be confounding to all those who’ve come before us. But inversely, regression could render these peaks of innovation that we’ve already achieved into what seem like impossible dreams.

The Last of Us shows a world that falls over like dominoes. By the end of the first episode, everything’s gone. In some ways, this rapid spiral might come across as unrealistic. But it’s hard to appreciate just how many of these systems that we’ve built depend on one another.

In this electronic world, a freak solar flare could be enough to trigger a near-catastrophic event for our species. Many of us simply wouldn’t have the knowledge to survive an extended blackout.

The Last of Us paints a scenario where we think back longingly on what it was to watch DVDs in the clouds as we darted between disparate corners of the planet on spontaneous whims — and at the speed of sound.

And that longing is all but ubiquitous. It permeates dilapidated homes strewn with dusty photographs and artifacts of a less precarious time, and it stains the world-weary faces of those who remember it themselves. It’s in the wide-eyed wonder of those who can only imagine what life was like.

Scenes like this not only capture the horror of losing civilization, but the tragedy of forgetting it ever existed — of losing our history. So much of the poignancy in Ellie’s story lies in her ignorance toward the world that was. We consider from her perspective how marvels like flight would feel as unattainable as myth. And in that reframing, we see the ordinary in an extraordinary light, if only for a flickering moment.

There’s an eerie sort of appeal in the shows and movies that depict such dismal realities. For some viewers, this dark material only keeps them mired in their own worst thoughts. But at best, these portrayals can teach us to be grateful for what we have. They can make it easier to sit with the darkness we inevitably encounter in life.

The conversation between Joel and Ellie serves as one of the show’s most poignant reminders of the remarkable innovations we take for granted today, and how this electronic ecosystem we’ve created is at once more fragile and more miraculous than we often realize.

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