Can we come out unscathed from a viewing of
The Last Of Us
?
Nothing is less sure.
A fortnight ago, HBO's adaptation of the famous apocalyptic video game offered the history of the series a sublime episode of humanity and audacity.
Through Bill and Frank, two survivors who found in each other's arms tenderness and meaning of life, the series chronicled the loneliness of survival and time passing in a world in ruins.
Posted on Amazon Prime 48 hours in advance so as not to compete with the great sporting and cathodic celebration of the Superbowl, the fifth episode of the saga, entitled "endure and survive" (translated into French as "survive everything price"), is another stab in the heart.
Where the spectacular action knows how to fade behind the most visceral emotion and a dizzying moral ambiguity.
Where two secondary characters leave a definitive impression despite only a few minutes of screen presence.
Read alsoThe Last Of Us on Amazon Prime Video: the zombies of the apocalypse
Welcome to Killer City
“Endure and Survive” intertwines with the events of the previous episode and goes back a few days.
Before the hail of bullets that welcomes Ellie and Joel and stops their road trip.
The face of the public enemy number one that Kathleen (Melanie Lynksey), the leader of the Kansas City resistance, was looking for is revealed.
What sort of collaborator is Henry?
Like Joel, someone who would do anything to get his fellow traveler to safety.
In this case his deaf little brother Sam. The African-American kid takes care by painting the walls of the attic, where they hide, with colorful frescoes where a young superhero fights La Fedra, the military authority which governed the city by terror, rapes and summary executions for 20 years.
Hence the nickname Killer City.
From their hideout, Henry watches Joel and Ellie escape from the ambush set for them by Kathleen's men.
Henry sees the duo as his chance to escape the city.
He and Sam track Joel and Ellie and wake them up, guns drawn.
This muscular contact does not put the grumpy Joel in the best mood.
Especially when Henry reveals to him that his revolver is empty.
Henry has no gift for self-defense.
The market is clear and risky.
Henry provides an escape route from Kansas City, Joel provides military expertise.
The plan: to sink into the tunnels of the city, deserted since the Fedra drove out the infected, buried outside the city.
While Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Henry stare at each other, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Sam sympathize on their passion for comics and his drawings.
Time for a few laughs, they become children again.
Their complicity relaxes their chaperones, softened in spite of themselves.
Underground utopia
Henry's plan seems the right one.
No attacker hides in the darkness of the tunnels.
The group even finds refuge in an underground shelter.
Empty of its inhabitants.
Probably became infected years ago for having at one time or another broken the rules of the community, always optimistically predicts Joel.
Places filled with toys allow Ellie and Sam to find a little carefree.
And to Henry and Joel to confide.
The African American sees clearly in Joel.
Even if the latter refuses to admit it, he became attached to Ellie.
"
Before her, you were someone's father and you won't forget that"
, points Henry who confesses his crime.
He reported the leader of the resistance, Kathleen's brother, to Fedra authorities for medication to cure Sam's leukemia. Even though his motive was noble, cowardly Henry, he became a traitor and a villain in " selling” an altruistic man.
Is he so different from Kathleen for whom the end also justifies the means?
Ellie and Sam regain brief moments of innocence.
HBO
One of the recurring motifs of
The Last Of Us
emerges .
An altruistic gesture can lead to damnation.
Being human is a perpetual sword of Damocles.
Man is a child of chaos and violence.
Liberation, collaboration, resistance, collapse stem from the same unleashing.
The series also nuances Kathleen's thirst for revenge, deprived of her protective and benevolent older brother.
A kindness that lost him.
"
It's not him who freed us from the Fedra, it's you,"
points out the right arm of the quadra who, despite his soft voice, is as intractable as the military.
Executing regime informants after dangling them a fair trial to extract confessions from them.
Survival has a price.
A colossal threat
In
The Last of Us
, the lull could never last.
The exit in the open air seems to be carried out without incident until the moment when a sniper aims at the quartet.
Joel goes in his direction to neutralize him.
Arrived in the old house, he faces an old man.
Joel is ready to spare her, but this Kathleen sympathizer does not let his guard down.
Joel has no choice but to shoot.
And understands via the crackle of the walkie-talkie that Kathleen and her troops surround them.
His desperate cries urging others to flee are masked by the roar of vehicles arriving on the field, strewn with abandoned cars.
A shot from Joel sends a snowplow-type truck into a house that catches fire.
Kathleen circles the trio.
Henry is ready to give himself up if she spares Sam. But no mercy.
“In this world, children die every day
,” Kathleen replies.
Twenty years of fungal zombie invasion have rewritten the natural order.
As well as the tolerance threshold for premature death.
The triumph of resistance is short-lived.
Clicks are heard.
Under the truck, the ground is subsiding.
The infected buried by the Fedra found the surface, led by a “Colossus”.
New to the nomenclature of the series, this infected is endowed with inhuman strength.
Like a wrestler, he sweeps and crushes the obstacles in front of him.
Kathleen understood.
His clique of undead attacks Ellie and Sam who have taken refuge in a car wreck.
Ellie manages to free herself to rescue Sam.
The Monster Within
Against all odds, the quartet manages to take shelter.
The adults catch their breath while the children play.
But Sam is pensive.
Does brave Ellie know fear?
The teenager tries to lighten the mood before admitting that she
is “afraid of ending up on her own”
.
Sam wonders if
"even if transformed into a monster, we remain inside"
.
Then shows Ellie her scratched leg.
He was infected.
Refusing to denounce him, Ellie tries to treat him by painting his wound with her blood which she adorns with medicinal virtue since the infection has never developed in her.
Frightened, Sam asks him to watch until the end of the night by his side.
When he wakes up, Sam is sitting motionless on the corner of the bed.
Full of hope, she approaches.
But when she gets to his level, he leaps on her with a shrill cry.
Despite her faith and generosity, Ellie could not overcome fate.
Sam has transformed.
Alerted by the screams, Henry and Joel come running.
Put in play by Henry, Joel cannot intervene.
Henry points his gun at the struggling children before pulling the trigger.
Sam collapses.
The killing of a certain form of innocence.
Then Henry turns the gun on himself.
He who had sacrificed so much for his younger brother cannot bear to have failed and to have had to shoot him down.
With the disappearance of the two brothers, yet another thin flame of hope is snuffed out.
When Joel and Ellie could finally hope for companions and regain faith in their neighbors.
Face even more closed, Ellie leaves on the grave a little note heavy with guilt: “
I am sorry
” As with Virgil, the two heroes can only “
go dark, in the solitary night
”.
