The Last of Us strawberries are a symbol – here’s what they mean

Naughty Dog built The last of us On a bedrock of sci-fi tropes, showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin slightly reconstructed for their HBO adaptation. Many of the references are obvious: Joel and Ellie are successors to the well-known Lone Wolf and Cub Protector/Latecomer dynamic while the zombie speaks for itself of all. but The last of us Episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” marks a new outlier on a tropical timeline that feels far less obvious: the power of a sweet, sweet strawberry at the worst of times.

In “Long, Long Time”, Doomsday Prepper and Cordyceps Survivor Bill (Nick Offerman) finds his world rocked when Frank (Murray Bartlett) shows up at his door. What starts as a meal turns into a loving, long-lasting relationship filled with romantic highs, heated fights, and the sweet touches of normal-time marriage. While the episode was praised for deepening the in-game portrayal of Bill and Frank’s unspoken relationship and their tearjerker in-game ending, it’s the little moments that really make them sparkle. The one that caught my eye: Frank Tess (Anna Torv) trades a gun for some strawberry seeds and surprises Bill with a manicured garden to crack open the shell of his loved one. Bill bites down on one of those post-apocalyptic strawberries and dammit, it’s juicy. Bill’s face says it all: This is the stuff. strawberries

The scene is easy to read: the strawberry in all its glory – aromatically sweet, tart on the tongue, maybe even a little flaky – is the fruit of a bygone world. New life, the strawberry, grows from the decay of a fungal growth. And not only is the soil fertile enough to support rebirth, in this case the missing ingredient was love. The bite of a strawberry into it The last of us is a glimmer of hope.

Druckmann and Mazin aren’t the only ones finding solace in the strawberry. In 2021, writers Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Aleksandar Hemon found humanity in the form of strawberries The Matrix Resurrections. In this long- awaited sequel, Neo reunites with his old pal Niobe in IO’s thriving underground society. Since Neo was last separated from the Matrix, humanity has brought back life beneath the scorched skies, extracting the code for familiar parts of everyday life and reassembling the digital parts into genetic code. While nothing is real in the Matrix, this reverse engineering process allows IO scientists to recreate a true luxury: the strawberry.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Twenty years ago The last of us or The Matrix ResurrectionsPeter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens remixed JRR Tolkien’s own reflection on the joys of Middle-earth to make the strawberry even more important to two hobbits on an impossible mission, at least for a moment feels apocalyptic. In the return of the KingIn one of the deepest moments of the journey to destroy the One Ring, Sam asks Frodo to revive his spirit through sensory memory.

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo?” he asks. “Soon it will be spring. And the orchards will bloom. And the birds will nest in the hazel thicket. And they will sow spring barley in the fields below… and eat the first strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Frodo admits he can’t. He can’t feel much of anything. To which Sam basically replies: Fuck it, let’s go. There’s no greater motivator on the hills of Hell than the strawberry. (Funnily enough, in Tolkien’s manuscript for the return of the KingSam nudges Frodo to remember the taste of rabbits, and only in The Gray Havens chapter does the author reflect on the Shire’s delicious strawberries and cream – Jackson and his co-authors have the delicacy for their version of the scene used .)

The strawberry-as-a-symbol craze has already gone beyond the fruit itself. At HBO last of us

-like the post-apocalyptic drama of 2021 station eleven (based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel), Jeevan (Himesh Patel) calls his ER nurse Siya (Tiya Sircar) as a virus pandemic begins to explode across Chicago. Your warning comes immediately: It’s too late to run – take cover immediately and barricade the door. But amidst the spiraling anxiety, Siya also finds time to reminisce about her childhood with her brother. This could be the last time they ever speak to each other, so why not narrate the time Jeevan “threw up strawberry yoo-hoo on Jenny Kemkin”?

Later in the episode, Jeevan crawls for food in a last-ditch effort to survive, but lingers when trapped in a memory vortex. strawberry… Yay…

Image: HBO Max

There has always been no lack of strawberries as a symbol of purity let’s-eat-strawberries-not-people-messaging by Soylent Green to several Shakespeare plays to the Bible, at least based on some interpretation. Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 drama Wild Strawberries, in which a sick doctor reflects on his eventful life and prepares for death, feels particularly connected to the collective understanding of the strawberry as the fruit of good times; the title in Swedish The Donut Stand is literally “the wild strawberry field”, but figuratively an idiomatic term for a place or moment associated with a feeling of great happiness.

But in a strip of post-apocalyptic fiction, the more classic depiction of the strawberry as a purely organic entity feels more like what Bergman was chasing: a symbol of what was, tasted again, but only as a fleeting bite. The last of usTropiness from it all, leans right in and takes a bite out of the feeling.