Inspired by the video game of the same name, the HBO series, which takes place in an apocalyptic future, is nevertheless firmly anchored in our time. Expertly distilled “hooks” in each episode make us never want to let go. We counted five.
In music, a hit is often called “hookA hook that captures the listener’s attention and never leaves it, works their ear, memory and plays as the song returns. From one episode to another The Last of Us , inspired by the video game of the same name, seems to be structured in the same way, with hooks that return from one episode to the next, keeping the viewer on their toes and ultimately guaranteeing the success of the series. So we’ve counted 5 hooks, delightful and powerful, that constantly reinforce the series’ narrative and its formal beauty, as well as its anchoring in the era. Explanations about how this series captivates us.
In the video, Penn Badgley looks back on his relationship with his character on the series you
1. Childhood or what to do with our children in case of apocalypse
the history of The Last of Us actually begins with an act that is not the appearance of a fungus that takes hold of the bodies, but the murder of a young girl who is killed while she and her father, the series’ male protagonist, try to escape. He dies killed by a man in uniform who has nothing to do with the zombie. In this series, beyond the monstrous creatures and the mold taking over the bodies, he openly says that his horizon is how “normal” beings, humans, treat their children. It immediately evokes a much stronger and more insidious terror than the monsters carry. And this is then found in the relationship between Joel, the father of the girl killed before his eyes, and Ellie, the young girl he must guide and protect on a journey across the country.
Encountering another duo of an adult and a child, in this case a father and a son, during their journey further highlights the way adults monopolize and treat children. In this, the series keeps its viewers, who never stop wondering how long Ellie will survive and how her childhood appearance will transform. The issue is all the more brutal because Ellie is a carrier of the fungus but is immune to it. Till when ? And why? Many things are held in this balance, which evokes what comics and movies like X-Men have worked with as metaphors; adolescence is a period of change that is often incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it or are no longer experiencing it.
This disturbing strangeness, in the Freudian sense of the term, is really the core of the series; Faced with the possibility of an announced apocalypse (the series opened with some pretty strong communication, essentially, that a mushroom scenario is likely due to global warming. ), what are we going to do with our children? How will they survive? Who will accompany them? We look The Last of Us first, to understand it and, perhaps, to repel fate as well.
Faced with the possibility of the declared apocalypse, what will we do with our children?
2. Ransom or how to atone by doing something after surviving
What can adults do about child abuse? They are looking for salvation. Joel is forever on the hunt. her silence and the violence she shows hides the wound of losing her daughter. And the viewer is interested in whether this character, symbolically dead when the child dies, will be able to come back to life, come to life. His quest across the country to protect a child he initially disliked is built around the establishment of a relationship between them. The spirit of voyeurism binds the audience. how will the relationship be built? Will Joel accept Ellie? Will Ellie save Joel?
What is interesting is not so much the finality as the process between them. what connects the series is the way they exist and develop. And we fear as much the fragility that unites them as the attacks they bear. Will they finally start a family? That’s the whole point of one of America’s most popular series engines. Sopranos To: Euphoria How a group makes a family, even dysfunctional. Especially dysfunctional.
3. Nostalgia or “it really was better before?”
Check out episodes 3 and 6. we see preserved, enclosed, enclosed places where the world has been reconstructed as it was. Identical? Not completely. Episode 3 features several men who find each other after the end of the world and survive in a suburban town typical of 90’s or 2000’s soap opera America, but completely abandoned and surrounded by the power grid. Their life is the circle Desperate Housewives completely deconstructed and brought back to meet their needs. In episode 6, we see a city that has been completely preserved, but which has come out of another era, the Western era, and where the inhabitants seem happy; as if to survive in America. The Last of Us, that is, to the future, there was a return to the past. Nostalgia, as we know, is one of the traits of the 2020s, will it save us?
This fungus already exists in nature, but does not affect humans. For now.
4. Guilt or why we didn’t react sooner instead of watching TV series
hard to watch The Last of Us without feeling guilty for the ills of the present time; the series is clearly built on the fears of the 2020s, related to the expansion of the range of viruses, the emergence of new and uncontrollable diseases, the revenge of nature, the cyclical climate of global warming, declared shortages. He draws a possible diagram of humanity’s future, particularly with the scientific caveat set at the beginning of the series: the fungus in question already exists in nature but does not affect humans. For now. Look The Last of Us, it tries to face what lies ahead, what we seem to believe, and the ways in which we might survive. Or not?
5. Ecological quest or how the planet will take revenge
What matters in a video game is often the process of play, the exploration and discovery of both the emerging landscape and one’s own ability to survive in the video game universe. The Last of Us it starts like this. The creation of the first scenes of the first episode is similar to how all classic video games begin; characters are thrown into uncharted territories that open up as the characters progress and how they interact as well as kill each other.
Search and discovery of the unknown. it’s also how one of the most compelling sagas in literature and film was created. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. At a certain point in the story, the goal of the quest doesn’t matter, what matters is how to move forward, and if we continue to do so. The audience is kept in suspense by the ingenuity of the characters, the way they proceed and survive. Which is surprising, in a very “interesting” way The Last of U:This is a permanent revelation of the changed American landscape after the cessation of life. a trip across the country is an opportunity to shoot completely liberated nature, but also destroyed cities. As if the evil came from urban metropolises and stayed there, but nature was saved from it.
The Last of Us could be the bible of the 2020s generation
in this The Last of Us is undoubtedly the series that best represents the ecological theories born in the 1960s and 1970s, which advocate a return to nature, an abandonment of cities. Must be subscribed to articles and chronicles to view series Catalog of the whole country, a pioneering publication published between 1968 and 1974, which provides all the instructions for surviving alone, in self-sufficiency, and being self-sufficient. This influential magazine over the years seems to have found there a space of fiction that makes full use of its theories. In 2005, Steve Jobs said so himself Catalog of the whole country was the Bible of his generation. The Last of Us could be the bible of the 2020s generation.
Source: Le Figaro
