[Editorial] THE LAST OF US Warns: Why Learn From History When You Can Just Repeat It?

[Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 1, along with the Season 2 premiere.]

In The Last of Us, survival isn’t just about dodging Clickers; it’s about dodging the gravitational pull of the past. Long after the fungal apocalypse has shattered civilization, the survivors aren’t just scavenging for bullets and canned peaches. They’re scavenging for meaning. And where do we instinctively turn when the world burns? Backwards.

Memory becomes the fallback mechanism, a soft place to land when the present is too brutal to bear. But in this world, memory doesn’t soothe. It lingers. It distorts. It infects.

The show is soaked in nostalgia, but not the warm-and-fuzzy kind. Nostalgia here is a horror story wearing hand-me-downs. From Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” to battered comic books, old Walkmans, and bedtime rituals that have survived the apocalypse like cockroaches, The Last of Us is haunted by the echoes of what used to be. Survivors hoard cultural relics not just for comfort, but as blueprints for how to live.

The catch? Those blueprints were drafted for a world that no longer exists. Rebuilding from the ruins sounds noble until you realize everyone’s just trying to resurrect the same flawed systems that collapsed in the first place.

Safe zones in the show aren’t utopias; they’re nostalgia machines. Jackson, the idyllic settlement Joel and Ellie encounter, isn’t a vision of the future. It’s a monument to small-town America, reassembled plank by plank, right down to the fairy lights and potlucks. It’s so familiar you almost forget the world ended. And that’s the point. Safety here isn’t real; it’s just the illusion of normality, polished until the cracks don’t show.

Elsewhere, FEDRA reboots authoritarianism under the banner of “order.” Kansas City’s resistance overthrows a tyrant only to crown themselves the new one. The faces change; the script stays the same. Everyone’s fighting to turn back the clock, and no one’s stopping to ask if the clock was broken to begin with.

And at the heart of it all is Joel, nostalgia’s most loyal foot soldier. His decision to save Ellie at the end of Season 1 isn’t a triumph. It’s a relapse. Ellie represents a chance for humanity to evolve past the apocalypse, and Joel, paralyzed by grief, rips that future away to rewrite his own past. It’s not selfless. It’s not heroic. It’s nostalgic. He isn’t saving her, he’s saving who he used to be. The show hands you his pain on a silver platter and dares you to sympathize, before twisting the knife: your empathy might just be the scariest thing in the room.

Even the infected are part of the metaphor. These aren’t just monsters... they’re people, frozen mid-scream, trapped in the grotesque embrace of a fungus that refuses to let them die. They’re nostalgia made flesh: permanently stuck, tragically preserved.

Meanwhile, the living are busy reenacting the old world, scavenging its language, stories, and hierarchies in a desperate attempt to feel human again. But the more they cling to the past, the less human they become.

Music in The Last of Us isn’t background noise. It's a weaponized memory. Every song is a ghost story. “Take On Me,” “Long, Long Time,” even Ellie’s guitar; these aren’t just emotional cues, they’re hauntings. Music doesn’t transport you. It tethers you. When Ellie plays, it isn’t self-expression. It’s a séance.

And Ellie’s relationship with the past is especially haunting because it’s not even hers. She wasn’t alive before the fall, but the cultural debris left behind still defines her. Her love of comics, arcade games, and bad puns isn’t just personality; it’s survival. She’s building herself from the scraps of a world that probably wouldn’t have accepted her in the first place. As a queer teenager born into collapse, Ellie is reconstructing a self from the very systems that would’ve erased her. Nostalgia is her inheritance, and like all inheritances, it comes with conditions.

This secondhand nostalgia is just as lethal as the lived kind. It blinds. It tempts. It whispers that preservation is the same thing as survival, and that old ways will still work in a world that’s fundamentally changed. But the show is clear: rituals—of protection, of resistance, even of love—when repeated without question, become cages.

The Fireflies claim they want to rebuild the world, but end up mimicking the militarism they were fighting to destroy. Resistance becomes routine. Ideology calcifies. And no one ever stops to wonder whether the world they’re fighting for deserves to be saved at all.

That’s the real horror of The Last of Us: even after the end of everything, we keep trying to remake the same world that failed us. Characters cling to systems and roles not because they make sense, but because they’re familiar. Familiarity masquerades as safety. But in this universe, safety is a lie. The real apocalypse isn’t fungal spores or crumbling cities; it’s the failure to imagine something else.

Nostalgia, in the end, becomes moral justification. Joel kills to reclaim a piece of his old identity. Kathleen leads her people into disaster, driven more by the past’s ghosts than the future’s needs. Characters make catastrophic choices, and the audience is complicit because we’ve been trained to value certain emotions (grief, love, loyalty) above all else, even when they steer us straight into ruin. The show doesn’t let you off the hook. It forces you to ask: when does emotional logic cross the line into ethical failure?

At its core, the show makes one thing painfully clear: nostalgia isn’t neutral. It’s a survival mechanism, a smokescreen, and a seduction. In a world wiped clean, people don’t build something new; they rush to rewrite what they lost. But maybe the true horror isn’t the end of civilization. Maybe it’s our refusal to admit civilization needed to end.

Because the scariest thing about The Last of Us isn’t the infected, or the murder, or the grief. It’s the rerun. The same mistakes, the same power structures, dressed up in new clothes. We’re not watching the apocalypse. We’re watching the sequel. And the question the show leaves hanging, like a body in the hallway, is this: when survival demands evolution, is nostalgia the real extinction event?

And now, with Season 2 cracking open the gates, the loop begins again.

Joel and Ellie are back in Jackson, a town built on the fantasy that the old world can be duct-taped back together. It’s the American Dream reconstructed from apocalypse rubble: houses with porches, kids riding horses instead of bikes, potlucks, patrol shifts, and the comforting hum of small-town routine. But peel back the layers and the truth is hard to miss: Jackson isn’t a new beginning. It’s a museum exhibit. The apocalypse didn’t kill the world; it just gave it a facelift.

Joel, for his part, slips seamlessly back into the "dad" role. The moment the shooting stops, his grief gets neatly recast as parental devotion. He calls Ellie his kid like muscle memory, hands over a guitar like an olive branch, and pretends, with alarming ease, that they’re just another family in just another town. The apocalypse trained him to survive. Jackson allows him to forget. And forgetting, in this world, is the most dangerous luxury of all.

Meanwhile, the rituals of the old world return on schedule. Joel trades a baggie of weed to his therapist, Gail, as payment for a session, because even in the ruins, the barter system has found new ways to mimic capitalism’s old dance: services for goods, trauma for tender. He teaches a child named Benji about the monsters outside the walls, carefully passing down the one lesson this world has truly mastered: shoot first, ask nothing. The indoctrination has already begun.

Ellie, though, isn’t buying it. While Joel settles into his makeshift domestic bliss, she starts to drift, haunted not by what she’s lost, but by the creeping sense that she never had anything to lose in the first place. The moment the chase ends, their relationship collapses into the most classic dynamic of all: overprotective father, restless teen. It’s almost funny, until it isn’t. Turns out, even the end of the world can’t kill off bad habits.

But Ellie’s disillusionment cuts deeper than teenage rebellion. Jackson, to her, feels less like safety and more like a trap, a too-perfect reconstruction of a world she never belonged to. She mocks its small-town charm with Jesse, jokes her way through the fairy lights and community barbecues, and needs to be intoxicated just to sand down the sharp edges of the life she’s expected to fit into. For Ellie, Jackson isn’t home. It’s a stage set.

Because Ellie was born post-collapse. She has no "before" to miss. Think of her like a pandemic baby: hardwired to treat human connection like a biohazard, raised on scarcity, silence, and suspicion. The other survivors are trying to rebuild what they lost, while Ellie’s trying to figure out if she ever wanted it in the first place.

That’s the cruel irony. Joel can pretend the past is something worth restoring. Ellie doesn’t have that luxury. For her, nostalgia is secondhand, a hand-me-down emotion, stitched together from other people’s stories, songs, and ghosts. And that kind of nostalgia is just as dangerous. Maybe more.

Because here’s the real twist: even when the monsters stop chasing you, the past still finds new ways to hunt you down. Nostalgia doesn’t die in the apocalypse. It rebuilds the apocalypse.

Season 2 has barely begun, but the shape of things to come is already clear. The world didn’t end. It just hit "repeat." The same grief loops, the same power structures reboot, the same mistakes wait patiently in the wings for their cue. Civilization isn’t gone; it’s on autopilot.

And if history’s any clue, the sequel is always uglier than the original.