In the post-apocalyptic diseasescape of the new dramatic thriller “The Last of Us,” on HBO, survivors are offered the choice between a regimented existence in scattered quarantine zones under a repressive police state and near-certain death beyond their borders. Inside the government’s densely patrolled walls, it’s believed that only the nihilistic sort—slavers, marauders, terrorists—would risk infection by the creatures that wiped out civilization two decades ago: mutated parasitic fungi called cordyceps, which hijack their human hosts and turn them into zombies. The infected, who slowly hybridize with the parasites to become more impervious, may well be ineradicable as a species. When the mutation is first discovered, in Jakarta, a petrified mycologist advises, “Bomb this city and everyone in it.”
Cities were shelled in an effort to stamp out the cordyceps, and small towns were replaced by mass graves. A fascination with panicked brutality links “The Last of Us,” co-created by Craig Mazin, to his previous series, “Chernobyl.” On the autumn night in 2003 that the cordyceps arrive in Austin, a construction worker named Joel (Pedro Pascal) attempts to flee in a truck with his teen-age daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), and his younger brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna). He denies help to a young family stranded on the side of a road and is soon repaid exponentially for his hard-heartedness when a soldier is instructed via walkie-talkie, with no explanation, to execute Sarah. In the present day, Joel, now a skilled smuggler, plans to break out of a Massachusetts quarantine zone with his partner, Tess (a soulful Anna Torv), and head to Wyoming in search of Tommy. The pair are reluctantly convinced by the new order’s resistance movement—whose leader Tess scornfully calls “the Che Guevara of Boston”—to transport a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsay), to a scientific base out West. Immune to the cordyceps, she may hold the key to a vaccine. (If such a breakthrough comes to pass, one can imagine a second season of the show that contends with the characters’ bafflement at the widespread mistrust of a lifesaving jab.)
Genre-savvy and satisfyingly tense, “The Last of Us” is adapted with affectionate but not deferential fidelity from the 2013 video game of the same name. Neil Druckmann, who wrote and co-directed the award-winning third-person shooter, created the TV series with Mazin. I have never played The Last of Us, and, for viewers justifiably leery of video-game adaptations, one of the highest compliments I can pay the show is that I wouldn’t have guessed that Joel and Ellie’s mordant, spiritedly macabre adventures first began in pixelated form. (Provocatively, a late sequence structured like a conventional shooter game makes us reconsider the morality of the gunman.) Audiences unfamiliar with the source material are more likely to be reminded of other popular series. “Game of Thrones” is an obvious influence, not just in the casting of the two leads, who played fan favorites on the medieval-fantasy juggernaut, but in its character-driven stakes and seductive evocations of brute force as a sometimes necessary evil. “Station Eleven,” the defiantly optimistic portrait of a Shakespearean theatre troupe wayfaring through a post-pandemic Midwest, is another precursor, in images if not in tone; the Ozymandian sights of nature’s reclamations in “The Last of Us”—ducks and frogs swimming blithely in a flooded hotel lobby, or a herd of roaming giraffes seemingly escaped from a zoo—conjure that same beauty of perseverance amid desolation.
Mazin and Druckmann eventually carve out their own niche between the relative sunniness of “Station Eleven” and the self-conscious grimness and shock-for-shock’s-sake violence of, say, “The Walking Dead.” The show’s rough-hewn center is the surrogate father-daughter bond between Joel and Ellie, but the series works best as an anthropological travelogue of post-catastrophe subcultures, teasing out the disparate ways that survivors rebuild mini-societies and create new alignments of power.
Between the monomaniacal militias and the self-cannibalizing cults, a deserted preschool classroom, constructed underground, stands as a brightly muraled testament to the blind hope that many parents still nursed for their children, while a heavily guarded commune risks the messy ideals of equality and coöperation even in the face of existential peril. These long detours are often accompanied by rather moving vignettes centered on minor characters. An early highlight is Bill (Nick Offerman), a smugly paranoid, hyper-competent prepper who relishes the mostly unpestered solitude of near-extinction, until the arrival of a hungry trespasser (Murray Bartlett) forces him to grapple with the loneliness he’s tried to deny. Scott Shepherd is as terrifying as any of the spore-heads in his role as a soft-voiced pastor who preys on his followers’ need for solace and guidance. A peevish husband and wife in their silver years, isolated in a snowy hinterland, illustrate the inevitability that, in the end, nothing endures but co*ckroaches and bickering old couples.
The sole disappointment among these secondary figures is played by Melanie Lynskey, who turns in perhaps the first bad performance of her career as Kathleen, a rebel leader fixated on revenge. An underwritten character created for the series, Kathleen serves as a cautionary tale for Joel—grief transformed them both into stronger, sharper, and, in many ways, baser versions of themselves. With Ellie, Joel is offered a path toward redemption, as well as a chance to become more than the sum of his gruff heroics. He’s still the dutiful dad who sacrificed neighbors and strangers alike to protect his daughter. The series, like the game, asks when that patriarchal protectiveness—the subject not only of this story but of so many cinematic masculine fantasies—verges on something darker.
But “The Last of Us” does lightness just as well, and it is that willingness to embrace the full humanity of its characters, including their ardor for material comforts, that gives the series its earthy relatability, despite Joel’s laughable spryness as a fiftysomething roughneck and Ellie’s gothic childhood as an orphan in a post-apocalyptic military school. When Joel and Ellie pack provisions from a rare well-stocked home, she makes sure to prioritize toilet paper—a big improvement from the pages of old magazines. There’s a refreshing honesty to the show’s approach to menstrual needs, too, not least in the “f*ck yeah!” that Ellie exclaims, stumbling upon an ancient box of Tampax in an abandoned store. The show’s occasionally clunky dialogue hampers the formation of an organic through line for Joel and Ellie’s relationship, but the scenes of mutual teasing, or of Joel’s recollections of what the world was like before, feel as crucial as the ones in which they save each other’s life for the umpteenth time. Passing the shattered remains of a downed plane, Ellie marvels at the thought of human flight, an experience that Joel tells her felt far from miraculous. Later, seizing the opportunity to shape her ideas of the past, he reassures her about his own former line of work: “Everybody loved contractors.” Acting opposite an understated Pascal, the button-eyed Ramsay shines as the shrewd but sheltered Ellie, a snarky, friendless teen desperate to find a worthy target of her loving mockery.
The expansive imaginings of survivalist adaptations are matched by the production’s eerie visual allure, not least in the marine pulchritude of the cordyceps’ character design. Multicolored fungi bloom across the faces of the infected, leaving intact the mouths and teeth with which they attack, as they join a teeming, growing army that appears to know no natural death, and only lies dormant, waiting. For all the narrative’s graceful swerves and clever surprises, its greatest reveal may be that the characters find reasons to go on despite the immense evolutionary advantages of their predators and the realization of our most savage instincts.♦
An earlier version of this article misattributed the description of a resistance leader as “the Che Guevara of Boston.”
