From The Last of Us to The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal has become Hollywood's go-to actor for playing father figures. Need a dad? Pascal's your guy!
Yet that privilege comes with a terrible burden, because everyone keeps asking Pascal's characters to make a nightmarish choice: Save your child, or save the world?
The first instance of a Pascal character facing this dilemma comes in the Season 1 finale of The Last of Us. Joel (Pascal) learns that the Fireflies can cure the Cordyceps fungus (yay!), but only if they kill Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to get access to her brain (boo!).
Then, in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic (Pascal) discovers that Galactus (Ralph Ineson) will spare Earth from total annihilation (yay!) on the condition that he and Sue Storm/the Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby) give up their newborn son Franklin (boo!).
Each dilemma puts a twist on the trolley problem, an ethical thought experiment first posited by philosopher Philippa Foot. (The actual term "trolley problem" was later coined by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson.) In the experiment, a runaway trolley is barreling towards five people, certain to kill them. If you pull a lever, you'll divert the trolley to a different track, killing one person instead. Do you do nothing and let five people die, or take action and doom one person yourself?
The Last of Us and The Fantastic Four: First Steps dial the stakes of the trolley problem way, way up, both in terms of scale and emotional involvement. After all, on one set of trolley tracks, we have the entire world. But on the other trolley tracks, we've got Ellie and Franklin, children who mean the world to Joel and Reed. Over the course of The Last of Us Season 1, Ellie becomes a daughter figure to Joel, an especially poignant connection after he lost his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) at the start of the series. Meanwhile, Franklin is Reed's only child. In the opening scene of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, he and Sue even discuss how they'd long given up hope of having a kid, making Franklin a miracle baby (even without the whole resurrection powers thing).
So, how do each of Pascal's characters face down these eerily similar conundrums? Extremely differently, to say the least, but totally in keeping with the theme and tone of their respective projects.
Take a look at The Last of Us. Between the game and the show, there's already been years' worth of discourse over Joel's choice to save Ellie and massacre the Fireflies. Should we condemn him for robbing the world of a cure, even if he saved someone he loved? Would a cure have been possible given the minimal resources the Fireflies have? And what would Ellie have wanted?
These are all external factors that could have influenced Joel's decision, but the truth of the matter is, it all boils down to him doing what he did throughout Season 1: fight to protect the person he cares most about in the world. There's not even a question of considering the millions of people who lay on the other trolley track, because there's no world in which Joel doesn't choose Ellie. Like the entirety of The Last of Us Season 1, his choice is pretty brutal, but it's rooted in the love and connection that managed to surface in a desolate apocalypse. Any parent would do the same. Still, the consequences are severe — and we've got a whole gut-wrenching Season 2 to prove it!
In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Pascal's Reed takes a wildly different approach to the trolley problem the film presents him with. Reed is adamant that he and Sue won't give Franklin to Galactus, but that doesn't mean he hasn't thought about it. He even declares sacrificing Franklin to be ethical and mathematical, which understandably upsets Sue. Way to put your foot in your mouth, Reed! (Although I'm sure that with your super-stretchy abilities, that's really not that hard to do.)
Of course, it's in Reed's nature to overthink every possible scenario. That means an ethical conundrum like a trolley problem is, to borrow some lore from another summer superhero release, his Kryptonite.
But there are two things the trolley problem doesn't account for, and those are superpowers and super-advanced teleportation technology. That's right: Reed reasons that he, Sue, Ben Grimm/the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Johnny Storm/the Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) don't even have to choose between trolley tracks. Instead, with the combined help and resources of the whole world, they can just teleport those tracks (aka the Earth) to another part of the universe, leaving the Galactus-trolley to continue unimpeded. At least, until he finds another planet to add to his galactic buffet. Sure, why not?
If the track teleportation fails, there's always another option for solving the Franklin versus Earth trolley problem: Teleport the Galactus-trolley itself by luring it to a teleporter in Times Square! That's the kind of lateral thinking Foot and Thomson surely didn't anticipate when creating and naming the problem.
Reed and the rest of the Fantastic Four's approach of protecting everyone on Earth from Galactus — including would-be sacrificial lamb Franklin — is in keeping with The Fantastic Four: First Steps' overall feeling of optimistic heroism. Here, everyone deserves to be saved. (The same goes for Superman, which sees Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet) helping humans and squirrels alike.) It's not a matter of choosing which track the trolley should barrel down; it's a matter of moving the tracks entirely so no one get hurt.
As a lone wolf with no superpowers stuck in a post-apocalyptic world, The Last of Us' Joel simply doesn't have Reed's trolley-problem-altering resources. He still does the best he can, but no offense to him, I know which Pascal character I'd call to help me out if I'm ever faced with a trolley problem of my own. Reed had better keep those teleporter gates handy.
