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The Final of Us is bumming everybody out. Principally as a result of the HBO sequence’ juggernaut first season ended on Sunday, starting the lengthy arduous await a second season. But in addition as a result of The Final of Us is admittedly freaking unhappy. The sequence started with a person watching his daughter die, and ended with him taking pictures his means via a makeshift hospital to make sure one other child didn’t meet the same destiny. In between, everybody died or killed (or ate) somebody, and wanting some homosexual gardening, there have been few odes to pleasure. 

And actually, regardless of chatter on-line decrying the present’s dour denouement, that was the purpose. 

Look, I get why curling up on the sofa to stare at a giant pile of bleak isn’t everybody’s favourite factor to do. Banks are collapsing, Joe Unique desires to run for president—doubling down in your Sunday scaries with The Final of Us just isn’t a selection everybody desires to make. However this isn’t a shortcoming of the present or its storytelling. It’s a matter of choice.

Additionally, regardless of the darkness, The Final of Us stays a type of escapism. Bleak as it’s, it’s nonetheless fiction—fiction a couple of pandemic worse than the one at the moment raging that’s supposed, on some stage, to present viewers the chance to consider one thing else. Granted, it largely makes them ponder what occurs when humanity decides the one option to save lots of people is to slaughter many extra, however nonetheless.

In different phrases, The Final of Us doesn’t commerce in darkness for darkness’ sake. It’s not a DC Comics movie attempting to be edgy. It’s not even Squid Recreation, which in a means was much more miserable in its “oh yeah, that might occur”-ness. Because it stands, the world just isn’t contaminated with a zombifying fungus, but it surely’s full of people that will do something to remain alive and/or generate income. If something, The Final of Us is a parable for what may occur when that Cordyceps fungus is launched into a spot that always prizes rugged individualism over neighborhood.

Sure, there are most likely scriptwriters on the market who would have steered to Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin that they inject a bit emotional reprieve, one episode that ends on a contented observe. However if you happen to imagine, as Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi does, that The Final of Us is a commentary on the various flaws of American exceptionalism, then these in search of slivers of hope are destined to be left in the dead of night.

All of this got here to a swirling conclusion in Sunday’s finale. Within the remaining moments, Joel (Pedro Pascal) realized that the Fireflies would possible kill Ellie (Bella Ramsey) looking for a remedy for the Cordyceps fungus. He shot almost each Firefly in sight to avoid wasting her. Some of us argue he went too far, slaughtering many individuals to avoid wasting one; others really feel his actions have been justified. However the level isn’t to determine whether or not he’s “proper” or “improper.” The purpose—as my colleague Adrienne So famous over Slack this week—is {that a} society that may kill a toddler to avoid wasting itself possibly isn’t value saving. Anybody who learn Ursula Ok. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Stroll Away from Omelas” is aware of this.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not Joel is a hero or villain. What issues is what his actions replicate. As Hadadi famous, “The Final of Us has painted a portrait of an American identification incompatible with drastic change.” When the pandemic hit, all the nation’s selfishness and individualism remodeled into one thing much more virulent than earlier than. It’s bleak, but it surely additionally feels that means as a result of it’s acquainted.