Last week on The Last of Us, the show did what very few shows are willing to do: kill the main character, in this case Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal). Fans of the video games were expecting this to happen. It was a huge moment, but it was almost overshadowed by a sequence invested strictly for the TV show: an attack by a horde of zombies on the walled settlement of Jackson, which is currently buried in snow.
Game of Thrones fans were instantly reminded of the season 5 episode "Hardhome," where Jon Snow defends the walled town of Hardhome from a zombie attack in the snow.
The Jackson battle in The Last of Us was almost too similar, At the least, it felt like showrunner Craig Mazin had the Massacre at Hardhome on his mind when conceiving the sequence. The Hollywood Reporter brought up the Game of Thrones comparison without mentioning "Hardhome" specifically, and while Mazin didn't outright confirm it was intentional, he didn't deny it either, and did admit to enjoying the "Hardhome" episode a lot.
"Certainly as a Thrones fanatic, I remember from watching 'Hardhome' and not thinking about how complicated and impressive the action was," Mazin said. "What I remembered was how moving and important the things that were happening inside the action were. That Wildling woman [Karsi], seeing her get turned, and seeing The Night King raise the dead and being like, 'Hey, you and me, Jon Snow, we’re on a collision course, my friend, and the more you fight me, the worse it gets for you.' The desperation, the total loss."
"That is really our philosophy about action. What’s the point? So in building this sequence, we were very ambitious because we just wanted to show how bad it could get. But always the question was: Why? What is this about, what does this change, and what does this mean for our people moving forward? Jackson is, as we see in episode one, is growing, it’s expanding. There is a certain cockiness. They don’t seem particularly worried about the trouble outside. They’ve gotten a little complacent. They have a New Year’s Eve dance. They’re going to therapy,. They’re refurbishing homes. They’ve got patrols down to a science. On the other hand, you’re like: Guys don’t you know you’re living in a TV show?"
Part of me wonders if the big battle sequence was spectacle in search of a point; it didn't happen in the games, no major characters died, and the action moves away from Jackson from this point on. On the other hand, who cares if it's spectacle for spectacle's sake when the spectacle is this spectacular? Joel's brother Tommy fried a giant zombie with a flame-thrower and a pack of dogs tore out of the throats of a bunch of others. What's not to like?
New episodes of The Last of Us air on HBO and Max on Sunday nights. There are only four more left in this season for a grand total of seven, down from nine in the first season. I actually enjoyed the quieter follow-up episode, "The Path," more. Check out our review here:
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