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New Escapist Column! On How “The Last of Us” Finds a Fresh Angle on Familiar Clichés…

I am doing weekly reviews of The Last of Us at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Sunday evening while the show is on, looking at the video game adaptation as the show progresses. This week, the show’s penultimate episode.

The Last of Us belongs to a genre that has been well-explored over the past few years, the post-apocalyptic horror. It’s a narrative template that has been thorough excavated and interrogated across a wealth of media. Audiences are familiar with the language and the logic of these kinds of stories, and there are perhaps only so many variations upon the archetypal theme. This what makes the season’s penultimate episode so compelling. The Last of Us wades into a familiar post-apocalyptic set-up, but finds a way to explore it that plays uniquely to the show’s strengths.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

New Escapist Column! On “The Last of Us” As A Study of Evolving Masculinity…

I am doing weekly reviews of The Last of Us at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Sunday evening while the show is on, looking at the video game adaptation as the show progresses. This week, the show’s sixth episode.

The sixth episode of The Last of Us, Kin, is steeped in the iconography of the western: there’s a frontier town, two indigenous characters, and even a horse on the railroad tracks. However, there’s also a sense that Joel and Ellie have reached the end of their push westward, their journey from Boston to Jackson. In that sense then, the show explores the legacy of the western in American consciousness, particularly the genre’s archetypal portrayal of masculinity. What does it mean or Joel to be a man or a father? How does that reconcile with the image he has cast for himself as a cynical and weary outlaw? Can he move past that?

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.