There was enough groundwork and layering to make sure you really cared about what happened to Sarah, which made her fate that much harder to watch. Her gaze was ours, and she was the vessel through which we experienced the increasing sense of foreboding – from the sound of emergency sirens to a hurried shop owner forcing her to go home. The Last of Us afforded her depth and character development in the forty-odd minutes that we were granted her on screen, she took up most of the space. How else were we to believe that Joel would go from cuddling up on the sofa with his daughter, to heartlessly casting a lifeless young body into a fiery pit?Īnd yet, despite her clear narrative purpose, it still managed to feel like there was more to Sarah. What happened to Sarah ostensibly looked like 'fridging' – her life and death served as a means of driving the show's central male character towards his fate as a hardened, unfeeling anti-hero. In most cases, storytelling such as this would have us clambering to the top of our soapbox to scream that female characters are more than just a plot device. From this point onwards, his every thought, every decision and every moment is experienced through this context of grief. Sure, on the face of it, HBO's new apocalyptic series follows a path well-tread flesh-hungry zombies, the crumbling of society as we know it and people forced to make extreme decisions under even more extreme circumstances.īut in Sarah's death, it quickly became clear that The Last of Us sits in a more relatable and human space.įor Joel (Pedro Pascal), the loss of Sarah (played brilliantly by Nico Parker) becomes a gaping hole, an unconditional love lost forever. The Last of Us episode one spoilers follow.Īs we watched Joel clutching onto his dead daughter Sarah, holding her close to his heart with an unspeakable and overwhelming pain etched across his face, the tone of The Last of Us was set.
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