*No Trolley Problem Meme Intended*
1001 times The Last of Us (TLOU) sets up a Trolley Problem to humanize the person who chooses to save 1 person *SPOILERS*
Picture this. A zombie apocalypse show in 2023: 14 years after the Zombie Invasion lead by The Walking Dead (2010) and Zombieland (2009) making the undead a household craze on par with Epic Meal Time and flash games where you kill Justin Bieber (and all your classmates). A video game adaptation: after recent failures like Uncharted (2022), with Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland doing a Mark Wahlberg impression, Mortal Kombat (2021), and Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).
The Last Of Us (2023) broke the mold of both trappings of video game and zombie TV adaptation garnering critical and commercial success with its first season. It shows that even with the Walking Dead finally getting canceled last year, the undead rose again—only this time as mushrooms. And with the usual conservative gamer backlash the show took on a sort of granola polish to the conservatism that’s baked into the zombie genre while maintaining some of its core components: liberal society collapsing into total chaos over a weekend, rugged individualism succeeding over government responses to a pandemic, family above all, stoic and strong male protectors, paranoia of all outsiders, and the inherent violence of humans halting collective solutions.
***SPOILERS BELOW***
Of course this was all on display Sunday when the HBO show’s first season concluded. Joel (Pedro Pascal) the strong silent type who lost his daughter, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) the hardened young girl that might be our last hope, give us an age-old question to ponder. If your daughter-stand-in could save humanity but would have to be sacrificed to do so do you let her? Or do you kill every man, woman, and child standing in your way including the doctor who may or not be the only person who knows the science behind this???
One of the classic tenets of conservative and neoliberal perspective is setting up a premise where all possible decisions are varying degrees of bad, and where thinking beyond the options presented is merely idealism. Enter The Trolley Problem, a dorm room philosopher’s game centered around this situation:
A trolley is barreling down the tracks, ahead there is a junction where one set of tracks has a group of people tied down, the other side only one person tied onto the tracks. You, the philosopher king, have a lever that decides which way the train will go. Do you let the train run over one person or a group of people? Quick, exhale that bong rip and choose!
There is no room for idealism, no room for alternatives, no room for revolution, no room for thinking of a world without a train barreling into someone. Might as well make the better morally corrupt choice because the people in charge only have compromised choices.
Character development in The Last of Us (2023) could best be described as who are they going to save in this week’s Trolley Problem. In nearly every episode a new character comes and we get to see them make a decision, and weirdly enough given the premise, the show acts as a thesis on defending the person that decides to save only one person. This finale is a culmination of all the TPs foreshadowing the question our hero Joel would be presented with and ultimately the decision he would make. Just look at which side characters the show decided to humanize beyond maniacal raiders, nearly all of them get a Trolley problem and they all choose one person. Family over the collective.
Log Nuclear Bunker Republican
The third episode of TLOU gives a fleshed out story to a gay relationship briefly explored in the game. This backstory is for the tin foil hat conspiracy minded Bill (Nick Offerman) who’s life is given meaning when he is able to protect his lover Frank (Murray Bartlett). Truthfully this episode is one of the most actually affecting romantic stories in recent TV. Also, at its brass tax it is Bill’s Trolley Problem.
Bill’s world is a recreation of suburban middle-class life (hot water, fine wine/dining, gated community, caches of guns) amidst the horrors of apocalypse complete with the same paranoid suspicions of your neighbors only given deeper meaning because he has someone to protect. In the middle of the episode Frank sarcastically says Bill is living in a fantasy land where “9/11 was an inside job and the government are all nazis” to which Bill responds, “The Government ARE all nazis.” All of Bill’s intense paranoias prove true as the government DOES wrangle up his non-sick neighbors and kill them when there is no space for them in a Quarantine Zone.
And yet Bill could open his suburban compound up as Frank seems to want, give a community a chance to grow like a strawberry patch. But the episode ends with Bill’s parting words to Joel in the form of a letter highlighting his true motivation and the moral truism for “men like us”—finding the ONE person worth saving and protecting them. Not only is the paranoia and skepticism of others justified, it IS their basis for survival. Because what if you saved multiple people and some of them turned out to be bad?
Kansas City Commune!
Maybe the most egregious of the conservative politics of TLOU comes in episodes 4 and 5 where they show us the Quarantine Zone of Kansas City. The QZ has just been liberated from the fascist government control of FEDRA by a ragtag group of revolutionaries declaring the city in the name of the people (with an interim cadre in power). But would you believe that, sometimes the mob overthrowing the government is more oppressive than the fascists in charge before? Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) enters as the face of the revolution, ruthlessly killing a group of accused FEDRA collaborators even after the “rats” cooperate with the revolutionary guard, at least the fascists feigned support of due-process for prisoners. She runs the area like a ruthless police state with paranoid xenophobia towards all outsiders, which we are introduced to in the form of raiders attacking Ellie and Joel when they enter the city. Before the revolution, at least the fascists had pushed the infected out of the city and underground (Kansas City seems to be the only major city without infected).
Kathleen is the only leader of the people given much screen time and her Trolley Problem comes in as the humanizing offscreen backstory for the cold blooded killer. She had a brother who was a charismatic leader of the rebellion who was turned over and executed by the traitorist “Henry” who she now has a deep vendetta against and will set aside all other needs of the commune to kill.
Kathleen’s right hand man of the guard at the end of episode four, when the cadre leaders see that there is a huge pulsating infected blob underground that is causing minor earthquakes in the foundation of the city. It’s clear they have a pressing problem with a potential new pandemic of Infected. The man asks her, hey maybe we should take care of this first, Henry is just one guy with a kid and he’s not really a real threat. What if we saved the people by letting Henry go. To which she responds by questioning his commitment to the revolution and that everything must be dropped to kill Henry, lest they risk it all. Of course this ends with the infected volcano erupting and killing all the militia leaders right when they are about to kill Henry. Symbolically kill one guy and his deaf brother to satisfy a personal vendetta or save thousands.
Guy with the deaf kid
Henry himself also gets a TP when him and his little brother are on the lam in Episode 5. They are secretly hiding out from the revolutionary guard before coming upon Joel and Ellie, basically threatening them into joining forces to escape the city together. Slowly he reveals to Joel why he is the target. You see, his little brother is deaf and in need of specialized medication to stay alive but he lives in the Kansas City QZ amidst civil unrest towards the QZ FEDRA government. FEDRA comes to him and tells him they will give him the meds if he turns over the names and locations of the rebellion leader (Lady Stalin’s brother Lenin), he does this. He then gives a big mic drop at the end his speech to Joel, saying, “I’m not saying what I did was right, I’m a traitor, but what would you do?” And family man Joel, the real, tough-but-fair moral journey character looks at Ellie (his surrogate daughter) and you can tell he knows that family is the correct choice. *Puke Emoji*
“The Commune” on stolen land
Maybe the funniest allegory for the “communist” Kibbutz Israeli-settlements only in rural Wyoming the writers wrote into the show in Episode 6. No really, they said this was about Israeli settlements. Shows Ellie and Joel seeking out Joel’s brother who they know went to Wyoming. They run into an indigenous couple who they hold hostage to give them directions, which despite being held at gunpoint they graciously give, telling jokes to these people threatening to murder them. They also say, don’t go over the river, everyone who does dies and it’s not by Infected it’s by something even scarier. And when Joel and Elli cross the border of the West Bank river they are ambushed by the scariest thing of all the IDF HUMANS!! They are taken captive and ultimately when they realize they aren’t Palestinian Infecteds they take them into their settlement settlement.
It’s revealed Joel’s brother is here! And he’s married to the woman you think is in charge, only it is revealed nobody is in charge, they are doing communism. Joel’s brother briefly interjects as the good ol’ boy Texan to say “uhhh it’s not, uhhh, communism” to which his wife says, “No it’s a commune and this is communism.” HAHA, yes conservatives can also be tricked into doing communism as long as you exclude and kill off the indigenous people living outside your walls.
Cannibal Christians
In penultimate Episode 8 we get our next little foray into the culture war. The show plays on the expectations of Ellie being a little girl in peril needing to be saved by her father figure, only that’s not what happens. Ellie dodges certain death from the villains, kills a bunch of bad guys in increasingly brutal ways, and is only “saved” after Joel finds her and comforts her emotionally as she is in the midst of an intense trauma response after she saves herself. This features some of the best child acting thus far, and really succeeds in its resonance for developing (or destroying) Ellie as the child being protected by a parent. On the other side Conservatives, like the guy who played Dwight Schrute, were mad about “anti-Christian bias” when it turns out the nice pastor is an abusive, cannibal pedophile that *gasp* doesn’t actually believe in his gospel.
But like the subversion of the child in peril trope, this one presents us with a subversion of the Trolley Problem. We are presented with Dave (played by Nolan North) who finds Ellie alone after she kills a deer to eat. They trap her and the community wants to have her and Joel killed, but Dave sees the “violence” in her and that she could be a potential cult leader like him. Here we get a foil as we can see another path Ellie could go down, leaving her family in Joel to choose a collective life in an initial community banded together amidst the apocalypse. Dave in many ways is the first uncomplicated villain of the show amongst humans, he preaches salvation through the church but in reality he actually worships the fungus spores that spread the chaos and violence that created the conditions for him to take power. Dave, of course, is faced with his rolley Problem in that the people of his community are starving to death. He could save a few of his strongest and closest men, or continue to try and save the entire collective by doing what in the show’s estimation is some of the only true unambiguously immoral act. As the embodiment of evil in the show, Dave chooses the collective decision of resorting to cannibalism by eating the dead members of their society. The only people more evil than Dave’s cult of course being the Donner Party and the Uruguayan Rugby team that crashed in the Andes.
Despite the bankrupt ideology behind the Trolley Problem, it does serve a purpose. It’s a narrative tool meant to subvert expectations and artificially heighten tensions. The old Hollywood cliche of the damsel tied to the tracks, what if there was another group of random civilians tied to the tracks also, and the person holding the lever to stop it wasn’t a villain, it was YOU! Yes *you*, in our individualized world are the main actor in a universe of bad choices. Don’t think about stopping the trolley, it’s just moving too fast. Remember we’re all alone, and maybe it's bad that there’s no way to help, but it’s better this way, because *you* get a choice.