Post-Apocalyptic Parenting
Joel, Ellie, and what Dad does during the end times.
In anticipation of The Last of Us returning to our screens this weekend, and in the spirit of Naughty Dog’s constant re-releasing of the games, I’m happy to share this remastered version of an essay I wrote after the show's first season wrapped. So far, HBO’s adaptation has hewn close to the game’s narrative, and the showrunners have indicated the remainder of the story will be spread across at least two seasons (having already been renewed for at least one more). Having made it through the oft-gruelling sequel, I have a good idea of what’s in store over the next seven weeks—and a hunch where they might choose to end it—as we see the impact of Joel's momentous decision during 2023’s finale.
This essay contains mild spoilers for the show's first season, but I promise not to ruin anything coming down the pipeline.
James Cameron is threatening to subject us to five Avatar movies. FIVE. The third will hit cinema screens in December, but I think I’m done. Did you see Avatar: The Way of Water? The visuals were stunning, a world you’d hope to get lost in, but every time a character opened their perfectly rendered CG mouth it dragged me out. That story. What a pile of horseshit. During the 2023 Oscars, James Cameron could have, theoretically, robbed Best Picture from Everything Everywhere All At Once—a triumphant exploration of intergenerational trauma and emotionally devastating rock-based storytelling. The core theme Cameron insisted on bludgeoning us with throughout the sequel was the role of the father in keeping his family safe. It’s not just dad’s job, as we all know. But Avatar made it seem so, reminding us of Sully’s devotion to his family every thirty minutes: “A father protects. That's what gives him meaning.”
Thank heavens for The Last of Us, which returns to our screen this weekend. It isn’t the easiest show to sell as a joint watch with your partner, a way to wind down after a long day dealing with uncontrollable terrors in your own home: “You know, from the creator of Chernobyl, that horrifyingly bleak retelling of a nuclear disaster.” Perhaps an alternative approach might work: “It’s based on that horrible video game I was playing, the one with the groaning monsters, about a global pandemic that brought on a zombie apocalypse.”
It’s been two years since I watched the first season. Alone. I’d been cautiously optimistic during its development, following casting announcements closely, seeing reports that a man who’d played an iconic masked bounty hunter would partner with the young female lead of a Stark-supporting house. I’ve spent my life being burned by videogame adaptations—Bob Hoskins as Super Mario, Jean-Claude Van Damme as Street Fighter’s Guile, anywhere Uwe Boll points his camera—and was worried. This was a game I adored. I’ve played through the original three times, twice before having kids, and once after; the tragic opening hitting even harder after becoming a father myself. It was the first game that felt written for adults by adults. Not the Scorsese pastiche of Grand Theft Auto or its many terrible imitators. A world apart from Night Trap, the interactive movie from Sega that led to a US Senate hearing on violence in videogames in 1993, or Heavy Rain, the 2010 game that opened with the nightmare scenario of a father losing his son in a busy mall, which then launched a thousand memes with a prompt of “Press X to Jason,” a crass button push intending to convey the intense drama of searching for a lost child through mashing a Playstation controller.
The Last of Us was different from the get-go. It remains an honest-to-god masterpiece, a creative triumph that used the medium to put you right there: advances in motion capture and voice acting meaning you could feel, through the riveting performances of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, how it felt to look after a child under your protection. It was a game that would temporarily activate a neurological circuit that would later awake in full after the birth of my own children—a change in perspective after having made, as Elizabeth Stone once said, the momentous decision to “decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” The game grappled with what it meant to be a dad and how it might feel to grieve the loss of a child. To feel a duty of defence towards a virtual character, one outside of your control—a step beyond dozens of frustrating “protect the girl” missions gamers had been subjected to for decades, where one stray bullet would mean an instant reset to the last checkpoint. Outside of Ico, such examples were few and far between during those years spent with a controller in my mildly sweating palms.
Like many, my obsession with gaming started young. Games were a perfect childhood escape; hundreds of universes to visit, explore and conquer. Then we grew up. People who had been playing games started making them, and they were gifted new tools for telling stories—more horsepower, higher polygon counts, and increased capabilities to deliver cinema-level dialogue and soundtracks. This purple patch unleashed new narratives created by a faction of increasingly capable and ambitious developers—led by Konami’s Hideo Kojima, the initial trailblazer for the videogame as a narrative force. Developers became dads—with men making up 61% of the gaming industry—so inevitably, themes of fatherhood bled into these virtual worlds.
Neil Druckmann, the writer and creative director behind The Last of Us, became a dad during the development of the original game and cited this experience as a formative impact on the tale. Where he went, others followed: God of War rebooted in 2018, placing Kratos—one of the most brutal and merciless men in all of mythology—at the mercy of his short fuse, learning to keep his anger in check, hoping to break the cycle and give his son a better chance. Like The Last of Us’ Joel, Kratos navigates the world from a default stance of protection, assuming a siege mentality by default, still struggling to deal with the residual trauma that shackles him.
If the classic role of the father is to protect their children from danger, Joel is seen to fail within the first minutes of the game (and show). Druckmann said his writing is driven by "simple stories with complex characters," and whilst the show never mutters the Z word—apparently, it was banned on set—it soon becomes much more than a weekly zombie fest: the dark twin of the mushroom zeitgeist; a changing climate that already contributes to a terrifying future none of us can predict; the evolving nature of truth, and the lies that we tell ourselves, and each other. It owes as much to Cormac McCarthy’s hard-hitting, post-apocalyptic and zombie-free downer The Road as it does to George A. Romero’s Living Dead trilogy. Because, at their heart, both the show and McCarthy’s book are about how it feels to be a father and the lengths we’ll go to protect our children from harm—chronicling the opening of your heart, the love you learn to take in, the grief when it’s brutally taken away from you, the piercing pain of imagining this happening to a child of your own. To lose a child and spend your life dreaming of a parallel world where this didn’t have to happen—then seeing how that pain can ossify, sucking every avenue of light out of your life, being swallowed by darkness, making you feel incapable of feeling love again. To have something like this fundamentally shift your worldview, the watch you wear stuck in time, a permanent reminder of the moment you lost everything you loved. And to see light on the other side of a tunnel, stretching back two decades, realising the lengths you’d go to to ensure you never went back into the darkness.
A decade ago, this game offered an early insight into how being a father might feel. The show's first season brought this to life for a wider audience, and by all accounts, the second season (currently sitting with 92% Fresh on your favourite tomato-scoring site) carries the torch. The show is engrossing, but nothing comes close to experiencing this story with a controller in your hand, imploring you to protect the life of the teenage girl who has fallen into your orbit. And protect her you must, over and over again. This feels hardwired into the role of fatherhood—that’s what dads have always done, it was often the extent of their role. But how much resonance can we find in that perspective today, in a world where we’re expected to be so much more for our children, and when our physical strength means very little to evolving dangers we’re protecting our children from?
The grooves of these roles run deep; the father hunts, the mother nurtures. But they’re undergoing a seismic, once-in-a-epoch shift. They were already changing in 2013, when I placed that Blu-ray disc into an ageing Playstation 3 and was first introduced to Joel and Ellie, unaware of the ride I was about to embark upon. They’ve shifted even further in the years since the story became a TV sensation, as fathers spend more time at home—some of them working, others taking the role of primary nurturer themselves, part of the one-third increase in stay-at-home dads since the beginning of the pandemic. It isn’t enough to put a roof above their heads anymore, food on the plate, to shield them from danger. Fatherhood means more today than it ever has. This is something we should be celebrating—but it can instead leave us feeling lost.
Joel is a father in the classic mould. He protects. He provides. He presides. That’s what fatherhood meant for his dad and the thousands of dads before him. But this time around, it’s different. It has to be. Brutal protection comes with a cost, and it raises children to believe strength and security are the only things that matter. As anyone who has watched the show's first season—and as those who’ve played the sequel will understand to their core—our children learn from those closest to them; they are guided by what they see us do, not the tales we tell. A father’s determination to protect his child, whatever the cost, will instil those same beliefs in her; his trauma will be passed along rather than being buried in the ground where it belongs.
The sequel shifted the playable character from Joel to Ellie; the second season will likely echo that change in focus. I’m looking forward to watching, where I’ll continue to ponder the same question I had upon playing the game years ago: has Joel been a good father to Ellie? Perhaps the better question is what his journey reveals about fatherhood itself: he embodies both the virtue and vice of paternal love pushed to extremes. His choice at the end of the first season becomes the fulcrum on which everything balances—a decision made from love, yet one that ripples outward with consequences the second season promises to explore. It's the central paradox of parenthood: we would do anything to protect our children, but our protection can become its own form of harm.
This quandary makes The Last of Us resonate far beyond its genre trappings. In a world where traditional masculine strength matters less, the show asks us to consider what remains essential in fatherhood: not just safeguarding our children from danger, but preparing them to face it; not fighting their battles, but teaching them when to fight their own, and—just as important—when to step away. As we witness the next chapter of Joel and Ellie's journey, we confront our own questions about what it means to love as a parent in an age of uncertainty—not with Cameron's self-important "A father protects," but with the complicated truth that protection, in its purest form, often means letting go.
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How did you like this week’s issue? The links and an all-new essay will be back next week.
I originally played this before becoming a dad but never got round to finishing it, will need to revisit this and try to push through this time now that I am a dad and it may hit different. I played God of War while we were expecting our first child and it definitely opened up more of the story to me in different ways.