The Blindboy Podcast - The Last Of Us

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

An essay on the world and philosophy of The Last Of Us game, ahead of the TV series Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don your galoshes at the court of the septic prince. The mudlarks are gone stone mad from the smell of knowledge. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast and to this very special bonus episode. This is a sponsored episode. I rarely do sponsored episodes, I've only ever done one. This is my second sponsored episode. I only do sponsored episodes when A. The thing that's sponsoring me is something I really

want to speak about and B. I'm afforded a level of creative freedom and this episode is sponsored by NOW who are showing The Last of Us. Not the critically acclaimed video game but the new TV series based on the critically acclaimed video game which is a TV series that I'm incredibly excited about and I can't wait to see. And it is streaming weekly on NOW with an entertainment membership. Here's why I'm so excited about seeing The Last of Us TV series. I'll be honest, because it's written by Craig Mazin.

Obviously, I adore The Last of Us video games. They're incredible. But this is a TV series we're talking about. TV series and a video game are two different things. But this TV series, like I said, is written by Craig Mazin. Who is Craig Mazin? He wrote Chernobyl. Do you remember Chernobyl from 2019? In my opinion, the best piece of TV in the past five years. And I became obsessed with Craig Mazin as a TV writer. Not just because Chernobyl was so incredible but as I watched Chernobyl I also listened to Craig Mazin's accompanying podcast

about writing Chernobyl and he spoke about the process and the reasons behind every scene and the motivations of the characters and it made me realise this is a master. This person is a master at the craft of writing TV. Also, he wrote Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, which I'll be honest, that's not really my cup of tea. But what I found fascinating was Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 are quite different to Chernobyl, incredibly different,

but it made me greatly admire the skill of a writer who could wear two completely different hats. That the same person who wrote Scary Movie could write something as human and emotive as Chernobyl. Because what made Chernobyl so phenomenal for me was how it changed my brain using a device known as the unreliable narrator. There's scenes in Chernobyl, especially the scenes concerning the Soviet politicians, the people in power who were responsible and accountable, where their entire worldview, their attitude towards accountability for a massive disaster, their utter collective refusal to acknowledge that a nuclear meltdown was happening, how all of them together believed a lie even though there was a nuclear meltdown happening. It forced me to think the way that they were

thinking in order to engage with Chernobyl the TV show. And it inadvertently prophesied events that we saw in real life a year later with the coronavirus pandemic. As I watched people believe conspiracies, blaming coronavirus and 5G towers, or people believing that wearing a face mask was not for public health reasons, but a grand conspiracy to control society. But a year before all of that, Craig Mazin nailed it in Chernobyl. And not only did he nail it, he would explain how he did this

in his accompanying podcast. And this is the person who was writing The Last of Us. So that, for me, that's the selling point. That's why I'm going to watch it and why I'd like ye to watch it too. It's like finding out that an album is going to be written by Prince if he was still alive. But aside from that, aside from Craig Mazin's involvement as a writer, it's being produced by HBO, who are known for making the best TV in the world, let's be honest. The Sopranos, The Wire, Carburethusiasm, and Chernobyl.

And all those shows are available to see on now on the Entertainment Membership. And then finally, after all of that, it's based on something which is considered one of the best video games ever made, and I'd agree. Now, I don't want to call it the best video game ever made because it's like saying who's better Bob Dylan or Prince. You can't. You don't. The uniqueness and creativity and ingenuity is too high to be ranking and I would say that about The Last of Us both the video games. Now do you need to have played The Last of Us video games to enjoy The Last of Us TV series? Absolutely not.

No, you don't. To be honest, the actual initial premise of The Last of Us, the premise isn't particularly novel. It's something we've seen before many times, with cosmetic tweaks to the details that make it its own thing. Basically, it's a post-apocalyptic zombie story. We've seen that before but The Last of Us

is quite clever and unique in how it does it and the world that it builds is very unique. The Last of Us is set in America 20 years after the collapse of human civilization and human civilization

collapsed because of a pandemic, but not like a virus a fungal pandemic that turns people into zombies but the fungus in The Last of Us it's a real life fungus that exists today

but it doesn't infect humans in real life it affects mostly insects the fungus is known as cardyceps i think i've done a podcast on this fungus before about three years ago but it's one of the most fascinating funguses because it turns ants into zombies now i'm talking about real life now so in the jungles of brazil for instance if you were to find an ant's nest so a colony of ants now this colony of ants exists and is powerful because it's a colony it's a little civilization of ants all working together in their nest. But cordyceps is a fungus. And what happens is it will infect one ant. And what it does is the fungus gets into the brain of that ant

and spreads from its brain to the ant's muscles all over its body and eventually kills the ant. But even though the ant is dead, it's still moving. The ant is a zombie. It's a dead ant that's walking because the fungus is controlling its brain and muscles. And what the fungus does to this ant, the other ants can't tell the difference. They just think, geez, what's up with him? He's a bit strange. So the ant that's infected with the fungus, he leaves the colony. This ant walks away from the colony. Now it's a vehicle. It's a vehicle whose brain is being controlled by this Cordyceps fungus and now the ant's body moves, not for its own survival or the survival of its colony but for the survival

of the cordyceps fungus so the ant leaves the nest climbs up the trunk of the tree and starts going higher and higher up to an area in the canopy of the rainforest where an ant has no business and the fungus is doing this the fungus is driving the ant's brain and muscles. And once the ant gets up to a certain height in the rainforest, where the humidity is just right for that fungus to grow, the fungus forces the ant to bite down onto a leaf. And now the zombie ant, who's dead but but moving is latched onto a leaf and the leaf is placed perfectly just above where the full ant colony is below and that ant's jaws lock and the fungus grows through its skull

and it grows out like this big long horn from the ant's head and then it spreads its spores. And all the spores rain down onto the ant nest below and infect the entire colony. And then all those ants travel out as zombies and infect the whole rainforest. And that's the Cardyceps fungus. One of the most fascinating funguses in the world, I think, because it turns ants into zombies. Well, the premise of The Last of Us is,

what if that happened to humans? What if a Cordyceps fungus just evolved and now it attacks the brains of humans and controls the brains and muscles of humans and turns humans into zombies? What would that look like? What would that do? And it's a very clever premise because just like colonies of ants are tiny little cities,

this collective effort of multiple organisms working together towards the one colony, human civilization is a bit like that. Human civilization is quite like a colony of ants or a colony of wasps. Western civilization in particular where we have those hierarchies. I'm even fascinated by the fact that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are called wasps. These civilizations that are rooted in the Protestant monarchical traditions of like the Brits or the Germans, the way that monarchical society is structured a little bit like a wasp's nest or an ant's nest, with a queen at the very top and then different structures underneath that,

all effectively working for the benefit of the colony but ultimately the queen. When the last of us asked that question, what would happen to the fabric of human civilization if there was a fungus that infected our brains and caused us to act, not in the interest of the colony or the civilization, but in the interest of the fungus? So The Last of Us takes place 20 years after that has happened in America and this for me is the beautiful thing about The Last of Us you'd call it a dystopia a dystopia being a terrifying vision of the future but really what The Last of Us is is what you'd call a critical dystopia now as I arrived at that hot take I was thrilled at myself I was patting myself on the back saying to myself well done

blind boy that master's degree has really paid off the last of us is a critical dystopia but then sadly my take was not as original as I thought other people have referred to the last of us as a critical dystopia so I was a bit disappointed by that but I didn't read anybody else's takes on it because that would remove the fun of the process for me. So a dystopia is like quite a negative apocalyptic miserable vision of the future but a critical dystopia is a dystopia which still retains an impulse of a utopia. A utopia being a beautiful vision of the future. So you might be thinking, how could an imagined future where society has collapsed and there's pockets of zombies around the place,

how could any of that retain any utopian impulse in it? How could any of that be positive? But here's the thing. It is utopian if you stop looking at it from the perspective of humans. This is what makes The Last of Us so phenomenal. Nature is thriving. You walk through these cities in the United States that haven't functioned in 20 years.

And you can smell it and taste it and feel it. It's so green. Nature has taken back the cities. And it's eating it and it's beautiful. Humans are left to try and survive. The fungus is attacking humans, but everything that isn't a human is doing fantastically. And this is where I'm assuming

someone like Craig Mazin as a writer for the TV series is going to focus in on for the world of The Last of Us, because that for me was the best part of the whole game. It asks the very misanthropic question of, what if all the humans died? What if all the humans died? What if there was a fungus that killed humans? What if that happened? What would the world look like? And that's a very courageous question for a piece of art to be asking because the answer that you see in The Last of Us is nature doesn't care. Nature doesn't care that humans are dying. Nature is thriving.

Skyscrapers are covered in ivy. The rivers that were once contained in concrete to flow perfectly through cities have burst their banks and wetlands have emerged and marshes and zebras and elephants have broken free from zoos and they're wandering the former streets of US cities and they're doing great and the reason I hark back to Craig Mazin's last project Chernobyl and what makes this what makes him so perfect as a writer. In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster was a real thing. The Chernobyl disaster was horrendous,

as you can tell as it was dramatized in the Chernobyl TV series. And people at the time thought, well, this is going going to Chernobyl in Ukraine will be unlivable. It was a nuclear disaster. It will be completely unlivable. Almost 40 years on no one could have predicted what actually happened. So yeah humans

can't live in Chernobyl right now and obviously of course the war in Ukraine is happening. But before the war in Ukraine humans can't live in Chernobyl and obviously of course the war in Ukraine is happening. But before the war in Ukraine, humans can't live in Chernobyl because it still has a high amount of radioactivity. But Chernobyl, the disaster, accidentally became a massive project in rewilding.

Animals are thriving in Chernobyl. They researched into it. So in 1986, a huge amount of radiation was spread around Chernobyl when the reactor exploded. But within a year, most of that radiation decayed rapidly. And within a month, it was only a few percent of the initial contamination. But humans weren't allowed in. And the animals returned

and between 1987 and 1996 there was a massive explosion of population in boar elk and deer and wolves and a return of biodiversity and the city of Chernobyl crumbled. It was eaten by grass and trees and moss and ivy and fungus. And the forests of Chernobyl, which were planted with pine to be extracted and exploited for logging, the pine forests of Chernobyl have given way now to more natural woodlands, forests of trees that are native to the area and this is now massively improved biodiversity. The entire ecosystem of the forest from the trees to the soil to the roots to the fungus to the rivers that flow through it to the groundwater, these natural native forests that have emerged because humans

aren't around are now cleansing the radioactivity from the soil. And Chernobyl, 40 years on, has become the world's largest unintentional rewilding project, and it has smacked humanity into the face. It has smacked us into the face because of our arrogance, our human arrogance. This idea that if a disaster like Chernobyl happens where nuclear waste is spread amongst an area, it's like, oh, that would be terrible. It'd be awful. Yeah, for humans, terrible for humans, but nature has shown us it doesn't really care about us now obviously i'm not saying the explosion of a nuclear reactor was a good thing for animals it wasn't lots of animals were harmed there were birth defects it impacted dna but nature is recovering and it's recovering

pretty quickly and it's not recovering from nuclear disaster it's recovering from humans humans aren't around and nature is thriving and nature is eating buildings now I don't know this for sure but I would I'd make a hunch

that when the creators of the Last of Us video game were designing the universe when they were designing what would the united states look like 20 years after human civilization collapsed i guarantee you they were looking at photographs of chernobyl because that's the main example that we have in reality of what happens when human civilization collapses in a city. Chernobyl was the only visual reference we had and when you look at the world of The Last of Us and you see apartment buildings that are completely overtaken by gorgeous moss and ivy and trees it looks like what Chernobyl looks like now. That's what I'm most excited about for the

Last of Us TV series because that was the most exciting part of the game for me. The world, the critical dystopia and the utopian, a utopian question from a misanthropic point of view of what if humans were gone? Maybe it's for the best. And there's multiple times in the game where that's what I felt. When I'm in the ruins of a giant capital city, and it's just so beautiful, and there's so many green areas and rivers, and I can smell the vitality of life, it makes me ask that question of,

maybe human civilization collapse is, on the long run, a good idea. And then I ask that question of maybe human civilization collapses on the long run a good idea and then I ask that question and then I'm pulled back because ultimately the central driving narrative of The Last of Us is human survival so you have that wonderful sense of conflict there you see the world of The Last of Us is divided into what's called quarantine zones. They're quite oppressive, dystopian places, heavily militarised compounds where small groups of humans

who aren't infected live, like old-school medieval walls. And beyond those walls is the world where there are infected people zombies but they tend to only come out at night and they don't live in the vast

lush plains that have now revealed themselves they live in the dark dingy basements of old buildings surrounded by spores and fungus and the central characters in The Last of Us. It's a fella called Joel. Joel is a man in his 50s I think. He's a hardened survivor. He's a tough man. He's a traumatized individual. In order for him to survive as long as he's had to survive.

He's had to shut off feelings of joy, feelings of happiness, feelings of love. He's a hard person and Joel is given the task to smuggle a young girl called Ellie who's 14 out of a quarantine zone on a journey all the way across the United States. But it turns out Ellie is actually immune to the fungus. She's the holy grail. Because there's no cure to this fungus. Once someone is attacked by one of these zombies, you become a zombie yourself. But Ellie appears to be immune to this.

So Joel and Ellie go on a big long journey across the United States. With the big question of of can Ellie save human civilization is she the vaccine now none of this stuff is spoiler warnings and also this TV show is based on an incredibly famous video game which has been out for 10 years so none of this gives away like the

plot, it just gives away the premise. Now I haven't seen the TV show yet but I'm going to describe just the opening scenes of the video game and if even that's too much for you and you don't want to know anything just stop listening and go and watch The Last of Us now. But when you play The Last of Us video game, the opening scene of the video game, the first thing that happens is it's set in 2013, just when the fungus pandemic happens and society is collapsing.

And Joel is in his 30s and he's living in a house, in a normal house in 2013 with his daughter, who's 12 or 13. And in the opening scenes of the video game, when the chaos happens, she's shot. His daughter dies. Then it's 20 years later, in 2033, he's in his 50s.

He's a hardened man who's just spent 20 years surviving and now all of a sudden a 14 year old girl is in his care and he hasn't grieved for his daughter at all because he's been in survival mode for 20 years there's been no point in grieving and here's one thing I'll say about The Last of Us video game it's the only video game I've ever played that worked as legitimate therapy you play

as Joel and there is no way to play this game without allowing yourself to feel love and protection it's not possible and you know from my past my podcast over the past few months that I've been returning to therapy and an issue that I have is my dad died when I was 20 and this was very very painful for me so deeply painful that I shut off quite a lot of emotions primarily I have difficulty around sadness and tears and the more vulnerable emotions and I find a reliable comfort in anger and the certainty of anger because it can motivate me and the process of playing the character of Joel and his relationship with Ellie as his protector and how you have to love and protect this character this 14 year old girl

who's in your care the softness that you have to let in the tears that you have to cry to play this video game were legitimately beneficial to me in processing my own grief the narrative of the last of us was so powerful that it helped me to process grief in tandem with the central protagonists and what that does then is that confronts you with the beauty of what it is to be a human that's the beauty of being human humans are a virus on the earth human civilization has earth. Human civilization is really not a good thing for the planet and nature. We exploit and extract. Collectively, we have done horrible things to the planet and nature would really, really benefit if we weren't there. And on the one hand, the last of us shoves that in your face. Look at how beautiful everything is that your civilization has collapsed.

And just when you're about to agree with that, you viscerally feel love and care and compassion and survival and selflessness. These beautiful things about being a human. Now I'm not saying those traits are uniquely human, animals might have these too, but as a human we can reflect upon these

things and hold them outside of ourselves as the experience of meaning. And this is, this is what I'm referring to when I'm saying that The Last of Us, the world is a critical dystopia. Like if you think of a cyberpunk dystopia, a horrendous vision of the future like Blade Runner, there's very little hope in that vision of the future. It's a warning. This is what will happen. It's apocalyptic. It's going to be terrible. The future will be bleak with no hope. The Last of Us is a dystopia that has the heartbeat of a utopia. Like, yes, humans are a

plague on nature. Yes, humans are defacing the earth. But we do that as humans when we turn away from feelings like love, compassion, generosity, reciprocal behavior, harmony with nature. When we turn away from these innate human things and turn instead to greed, consumption. That's what has nature fucked. That's what has the world fucked. Modern humans have been on this earth for 50,000 years. We've only started destroying the earth in the past two or three hundred. Mass consumerism, capitalism, colonization, greed, viewing nature not as something to be feared or to be harmonizing with,

but as something to extract resources from. That's what's destroying the planet. Hunter-gatherers who were the exact same as you and I, they weren't destroying the planet. Indigenous communities that live in a way that's more in harmony with nature, they're not destroying the planet. The capitalistic system of the global north is destroying the planet. The cities that are crumbling under ivy and trees in the last of us are what were destroying the planet and the behaviors that caused those cities to exist and

what caused the the heart to beat within those cities so what the last of us does is it presents this dystopian future where civilization has collapsed with this utopia of nature taken over and then it presents us with in order to survive here can't just shoot your way out of it can't just fight your way out of it you must allow yourself to feel love and connection for other people you're not going to progress in this narrative in this story by shutting off vulnerable emotions and holding on only to anger hardness and fighting there must be love and compromise so the big question that the last of us asks us it's not necessarily what if humans didn't exist it's what if humans didn't exist in a way where greed and exploitation are given higher importance than love and compassion what would that society look like could we all still survive and And nature could survive too.

And that's the little utopian heartbeat at the core of the dystopia within The Last of Us. And that's why I call The Last of Us... I don't want to say it's more of a novel than a video game, because that's disrespectful to video games as a medium. The Last of Us is a video game that's a novel and if you put a gun to my head and said what is a novel? A novel to me is a body of work where the reader experiences personal transformation. That's what I think a novel

should do. The Last of Us does that and I reckon Craig Mazin is the person for the job. That's why I'm so excited about the TV series. I know he can do it. I know well that he can do that and from seeing the trailers it looks quite faithful to the actual video game too. So that was a little essay. That was an essay about the philosophy of The Last of Us which is being turned into a TV show written by Craig Mazin and also Neil Druckmann who wrote the video game it's gonna be starring Pedro Pascal who was in The Mandalorian and Game of Thrones Bella Ramsey from Game of Thrones Gabrielle Luna and True Detective and Nick Offerman from The Resort and Storm

Reid from Euphoria it's streaming weekly and if you want to see it, get yourself a now entertainment membership to watch The Last of Us.