The Surprising Definition of Love in HBO's 'The Last of Us'

In a Queer Cinema Catchup video essay, I took the time to explain how the first season of the HBO television series The Last of Us uses queer love stories to suggest something important about love as a universal concept. Unlike many great stories, The Last of Us doesn’t contend that love conquers all. In fact, it often argues the very opposite in showing us just how depraved humans can get in the name or as a result of love. In balancing these acts of atrocity against the moving, yet opposite queer love stories featured in episode 3 and episode 7 of its first season, The Last of Us seems to posit that love is just what we humans do, whatever the circumstances, whoever we are, to whomever we are attracted. In other words, its expression might shift, but love remains necessary to our lives. Often beautiful in that necessity, occasionally terrifying, always powerful, but rarely successful in accomplishing what we most need in apocalyptic times: survival.  

I haven’t played the first the Last of Us video game, but I’ve heard it ends almost identically to the TV series, with a bit of an exception.  As TV viewers, we watch Joel learn that he’s brought Ellie all this way for a surgery that may find a cure to the cordyceps zombie-like infection at the expense of her life. We see him make the choice to raze every person in the building to rescue Ellie, even though it is very likely against her wishes and sense of meaning and purpose. He does this because he loves her. In the video game, there’s more of a choice, but it’s not the one you might think. No matter what, in the gameplay Joel will rescue Ellie, but he’ll either murder everyone to do so, or he will take a more covert path with less bloodshed to save her. The choice is the players because the player is Joel, and that player gets to decide how much death is justified by Joel – or the player’s – love. It's interesting to me that game presents no choice to leave Ellie to her fate. Joel’s love and the result that will follow because of that love is a given in both the game and the show. Almost as if the narratives want us to see that the beautiful motivator of love does not always generate beautiful or even moral consequences.

Joel’s choice might be somewhat grey. An almost too perfect ethics question that we can enjoy debating – do you kill (or allow the killing of) your one, specific beloved for the sake of humanity? Or do you kill to save her? And should you if that beloved would want to sacrifice herself?  A possible answer might lie in the way The Last of Us defines love as a monstrous motivator elsewhere in its first season. In episode 4, we’re introduced to Kathleen, the leader of the Kansas City resistance to the military-run FEDRA who apparently hunts a man named Henry with ruthless abandon. Our protagonists Joel and Ellie accidentally encounter Henry. They learn that Henry betrayed Kathleen’s brother to FEDRA, resulting in his death, in order to obtain medication for his own little brother, Sam, a child who has leukemia. Put more simply, Henry harmed to save the one he loves just as Kathleen intends to kill to avenge the one she loves. Perhaps these choices, too, are a bit grey. Something we can disavow but understand. Henry wasn’t so at fault. He was helping a child. Kathleen perhaps was more at fault, but someone was taken from her. We can recognize the human in these actions, even if they are crimes we ourselves would not commit. Not even out of love. Right?

Still, The Last of Us pushes the idea even further in episode 8, “When We Are in Need,” where our characters must confront a man we’re meant to see as a monster who has no shades of grey: David. The episode quickly reminds us about this show’s stance on love when Ellie first encounters two men in David’s group while out searching for food for her and an injured Joel. These men initially seem like helpful strangers who have the penicillin Joel needs to survive. They then slowly reveal the truth: a man in their camp passed away at the hands of “a crazy man traveling with a little girl.” Their nice guy act was a trick; they’re posing as safe people to get at the ones who harmed their own. Just like Kathleen.

The episode then further embraces its dark vision of by showing us for the first time the true, dark lengths Joel will go to save Ellie. Ellie escapes and goes back to a sick Joel, only to have to flee and try to draw the men away when the men come back looking for Joel. Some of them kidnap Ellie, while others find Joel. Though weak, Joel revives himself for the sole purpose of torturing the kidnappers to find out Ellie’s whereabouts and then kills them for good measure. From there, we go even darker. We meet our monster: David. David not only locks Ellie in a cage and seems to be sexually interested in her, which is predatory, as she is a child and his captive, but he also has been feeding his people the flesh of their deceased members without their knowledge as food has grown scarce. Ellie’s horrified but can see the survival logic behind this choice. Davide seems to sense her reaction, prompting him to say: “You have a violent heart, and I should know.” He goes on to suggest cordyceps aren’t evil: “it’s fruitful. It multiples. It feeds and protects its children. And it secures its future with violence if it must. It loves.”

A definition of The Last of Us’ version of zombies that also serves as a depressing metaphor for humanity in the game, the show, and our own the-planet-is-on-fire world. All of our hearts, according to David and maybe the show, are violent. Look what it makes us do. After all, Joel races back ready to murder to save Ellie, though she’s already saved herself. And yet his words of love as he pulls away from the horror and toward the only safety they really have (one another) –“it’s okay baby girl, I got you” – are so sweet. How can we reconcile that gentler version of love with the depraved one driving our characters’ actions?

Well, there is a point of contrast in The Last of Us’ violent love and it in comes in the form of the show’s queer couples. Most famously, the first season centered an entire episode (episode 3, Long, long Time) around the characters Bill and Franks’ many, many years together, securing the series several award show nominations and awards for a love that sparks and endures in the face of the apocalypse. Their story concludes when, for reasons that have nothing to do with cordyceps, an elderly, ill Frank asks Bill to help him die and they end up marrying and committing suicide as one. In a letter he writes to Joel, Bill says protecting and living with Frank gave his own, previously misanthropic life meaning. In other words, for Bill, and presumably for Frank, there is no meaning in life without the other. It’s beautiful, heartbreaking, heart stirring, the best kind of love story. That just so happens to be queer.

The exact opposite, but no less meaningful love story that just so happens to be queer plays out some four episodes later when we finally learn a bit more about Ellie’s backstory before she and Joel crossed paths. We meet Ellie while she’s in a FEDRA boarding school, resistant to authority and wondering where her best friend Riley has gone. When Riley shows up and takes her to an abandoned mall, Ellie is delighted, then angry when she finds out Riley has joined the rebel fireflies and plans to move to Atlanta to assist their efforts. We suspect Ellie might have a crush on Riley, which is ultimately confirmed when Ellie begs Riley not to leave and then kisses Riley after she agrees to stay.

Their exchange post-kiss (Ellie: I’m sorry; Riley: sorry for what?) is a lovely moment of queer coming of age representation, but it is set against the backdrop of a world overrun with zombies, so the tragic inevitably intervenes: both girls get bit, which matters crucially to the larger plot as we know Ellie will survive and realize she has immunity, ultimately connecting her to Joel as his precious, humanity-saving cargo. But in this first moment post-bite, Ellie doesn’t know she has immunity. Both girls believe they will turn. In a reverse to Bill and Frank, Ellie and Riley decide to suck up as much life and love as they have in whatever little time remains to them. They, like, Bill and Frank find meaning in life because of love and make the opposite choice – to live fully together, even if it’s for mere seconds. A no less beautiful, heartbreaking, heart-stirring, love story that just so happens to be queer.

It seems absolutely intentional that the writers of The Last of Us crafted these episodes as two sides of the same, gay coin. The question is why. Did they just like the literary symmetry of it all? Perhaps, but I think it goes back to the definition of love baked into the fabric of this show. A kind of thesis statement we can embrace or discredit but that is the truth, at least in the world of this narrative.  Quite simply, love isn’t good or bad. It isn’t what will save us. But it is – if we had to choose a single word for its definition - human. We’ll kill for love, sacrifice our own lives for it, believe in its meaning even when we are in The End Times or our own personal end of times, face-to-face with the fact that it all might end in and be for nothing. That the Last of Us decided to showcase the noblest, gentlest, most life-affirming version of love via two, separate queer couples further solidifies its stance for me because it is taking those who are outside ‘mainstream’ norms and saying, here, here, is love, too; the kind we most want to believe in and hope for; the sort that makes us cry and ache found in people who very likely are different from the majority of the audience watching this show; viewers who statistically probably don’t share  these characters’ sexual orientations.

Love is not good or bad but has the capacity to inspire actions that are either good or bad. Love is human. That is what The Last of Us is trying to tell us, or so say I! What say you? Let me know your thoughts by emailing queercinemacatchup@gmail.com and please check out our other videos and episodes.