This post contains major spoilers for the season finale of "The Last of Us."

As it bookends Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie's (Bella Ramsey) journey through a post-apocalyptic United States, this week's season finale of "The Last of Us" is sure to divide audiences as the game did in 2013. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann's adaptation of one of the gaming industry's most beloved stories has mostly struck a good balance of staying faithful to the most essential beats of the game, while keeping enough room for new additions and interpretations.

The result has largely been a massive success, solidifying the series as one of the more popular HBO shows on the air right now, and a shoo-in for the title of the best video game to live-action adaptation so far. In fact, we've been arguing that the strongest moments in the show have largely been born from diverging from the original source material. Without gameplay sequences, the show has been given unique opportunities to go deeper into certain characters and themes, and retroactively lays the groundwork for season 2 of the show with the roadmap of the game's sequel, "The Last of Us Part II."

Sometimes, this comes at the cost of the HBO series feeling less subtle and ambiguous, compared to the original game's commitment to minimalism. Other times, the medium of television allows some aspects of this story to shine in a new light. The season finale of "The Last of Us" tackles one of the most provocative scenes in video game history — Joel's murderous rampage through the Salt Lake City Hospital — and greatly improves upon it, bringing the story closer than ever to Druckmann's original intent for the piece.

A Cycle Of Violence

In the original game, the player controls Joel for the majority of the story. This perspective is only broken at pivotal moments of the narrative, including an introduction to the game involving his late daughter, Sarah (played in live-action by Nico Parker), as well as a famous perspective shift as Ellie in the Winter chapter. We're wired from the shooter games that came before that our player-character, Joel, is someone that we should innately trust and align ourselves with, even at multiple times in the story where Druckmann explicitly alerts us to question that trust.

When fighting bandits, he admits to Ellie that he's "been on both sides." When we are reintroduced to Tommy (portrayed in the show by Gabriel Luna) in the Fall, he admits that surviving with Joel in the early days of the apocalypse was a traumatizing experience for which he seeks penance. Compared to the wounded vulnerability of Pedro Pascal's take on the character, game Joel is even more stubborn and cold. Yet, it's obvious that most players, including me, grew to love him by proxy of his commitment to protecting young Ellie.

This extends to all the violence the player performs throughout the game's action sequences. While there are plenty of moments where the player can sneak past infected or hostile hunters, ultimately the act of killing is inevitable. Despite the initial shock factor of the graphic death animations and detailed gore, it eventually becomes a numbing gameplay loop. Kill enemies, loot for supplies, and repeat until the next cutscene. There's a monotony to the violence; a sort of daily routine reality for Joel and Ellie. Understandably, this is less the case in the series, where there's less room for constant action sequences. We'll get back to that later.

The Original Hospital Scene Was Intended To Subvert Video Game Tropes

Unlike many other games with multiple endings and branching paths, "The Last of Us" is a linear story, and the player is more of an actor when controlling a character rather than an active participant. When the character makes a choice, it takes priority over our agency as the player. But, the lack of freedom is not a flaw in Druckmann's design or Naughty Dog's house style, it's actually the core design philosophy.

When Joel reaches the Fireflies in Salt Lake City and makes the choice to slaughter his way to the surgery room to choose Ellie over the fate of humanity, you, as the player, are forced to play out Joel's actions, as you have no control over the character's internality. As highlighted by Forbes in 2013, the hospital sequence is supposed to raise questions about right vs. wrong, point of view, and actively challenge the player about how they feel about Joel as a character. It's a clever subversion, a meta-commentary on video games as a medium, and how violence is the main mechanic with which to interact with the world. At least, that's the intent of the scene.

Despite the game's strict linearity, there is actually one hidden choice the player can make in "The Last of Us." When Joel breaks into the operating room, there are three doctors in the room while Ellie lies on the operating table. No matter what, Joel will kill the main surgeon; either the player will be hasty and shoot them on their own accord, or will try to approach the surgeon only to be forced to watch Joel stab him. The other two doctors can be spared, but many players do not actually know this.

Interaction Creates A Subjective Experience

In 2013, Neil Druckmann and gameplay director Bruce Straley spoke with Kotaku about the interactivity of the operating room level, and revealed that there was a great range of how players approached this scene. When asked about the stats, Druckmann shared:

"I don't know the numbers, it's interesting. Sometimes people don't realize they can shoot all the doctors, and sometimes they don't realize that they don't have to shoot the doctors. And sometimes like, 'Hey, I don't care, I just went in there guns blazing, how dare they do what they're doing!' And some people were disgusted that they have to shoot the first doctor."

So what's going on with the players choosing to relish in Joel's murder? There are a few explanations. I theorize there are many players that couldn't fully grasp Joel's character shift into his old brutal ways in this scene, and because most of the hospital level is mechanically indistinguishable from other combat sequences in the game, there's very little in the game's design that telegraphs Joel's rampage of the hospital as tonally different than his acts of self-defense.

Again, it's easy to become numb to digitized violence, especially because you experience it in so much excess. When the hospital scene lands, it's an intelligent meta-commentary on the nature of video games and interactivity. When it doesn't land, it exposes an inherent weakness within the medium: how is a player to feel guilty for passively engaging in the game's mechanics?

For many players, it wasn't as easy to see the entire weight of Joel's actions, which is why it's so crucial that television — a medium with no direct interactivity — allows for a sense of objectivity.

There's No Loot Or Player Gratification To Be Found Here

As mentioned, there's far less room for action set pieces and general violence in the pacing of the HBO adaptation of "The Last of Us." As a hardcore fan of the original game, I've felt this has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. While the mortal danger of existing in the apocalypse is not always felt on screen, it also makes the key moments of violence in the story feel especially powerful. The last episode perfectly exemplifies this with Joel's torture of two men and Ellie's murder of David; two moments that were already poignant in the game, but feel fully realized in the show as dramatic turning points for their respective characters.

In the finale episode, once Joel fully regresses into the killing machine he once was, the audience feels a noticeable divide between this man versus the one we watched shed tears in the Jackson commune. There's no loot to pick up or headshot indicator to give the player satisfaction, nor any gray area justification of self-preservation. With no direct involvement in how this scene plays out, there's no player-character bias. In the show, Joel's murder spree is exactly what Druckmann envisioned: senseless, tasteless, and excessive.

Ambiguity is a beautiful thing, and I'd argue it's one of the game's main strengths. It's not that there isn't any merit to how the scene was designed in the source material, but this set piece in particular just feels way more realized in the show.

In The HBO Adaptation, Every Moment Of Violence Counts

Obviously, there are some players (and now, audiences) that are going to be more aligned with Joel's choices and motivations than others, and that's fine — art is not about moral judgement, and fiction is a space to safely explore these hypothetical situations. For me, the beauty of Joel's choice is that I find it monstrous and selfish on paper, but it's also a decision that I believe most humans would realistically make in the same position of power.

But, there needs to be the right amount of nuance on both sides for the moral dilemma at the core of "The Last of Us" to truly impact viewers. With this new take on Joel's hospital shootout sequence, it's impossible to not feel a little disgust at what he's doing, no matter how much we love Pedro Pascal in real life.

Narratively, there's a real value to this adaptational change. If a fan who's a hardcore Joel defender watches this sequence and becomes a little insecure in their position, then the creation of "The Last of Us" as a live-action show has added something of value to the story.

Read this next: How Ellie's Room Decor In The Last Of Us Points To The Larger Story

The post HBO's The Last of Us Pulls Off An Action Scene The Original Video Game Couldn't Quite Nail appeared first on /Film.