This review contains spoilers for the HBO series and game “The Last of Us”. 

Released to both an excited and apprehensive audience on January 15th, the HBO series “The Last of Us” is an adaptation of the Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment game by the same name, revolving around a spore-started apocalypse in the 21st century. Created and written for television by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, “The Last of Us” is a post-apocalyptic drama starring Pedro Pascal as Joel Miller– the grim, hardened father figure of the game, and Bella Ramsey as Ellie Williams– the angry fourteen-year-old girl who just happens to be immune to this apocalypse’s brand of zombification: cordyceps. 

Cordyceps is a real fungus that in “The Last of Us” has adapted to Earth’s warming temperatures and gotten into the food supplies. More specifically, it’s gotten into grain factories. Things like bread, muffin-mix, bagels and pancake-mix are carrying cordyceps and once all that food hits store shelves people buy it out, take it home and eat it, effectively infecting themselves with the brain-hijacking parasite. 

Once cordyceps take over the mind, the infected people are turned into the walking dead. The fungus spreads through the entire body and the mushrooms grow throughout the organs, forcing the infected person to move when the cordyceps in the infected brain wants it to. 

The first episode kicks off with the beginning of the apocalypse. The episode follows Joel’s daughter, Sarah Miller portrayed by Nico Parker, as she goes about her day and eventually in the middle of the night finds one of her neighbors eating the rest of their family. She runs into Joel as she escapes the house who kills the infected woman and they, along with Joel’s brother Tommy played by Gabriel Luna, get into Joel’s truck and attempt to flee. They run into trouble in town and we get the most fundamental piece of Joel’s backstory: the murder of his daughter at the hands of a soldier despite not being infected. This pushes his character arc throughout the game as he grows closer to Ellie, learning to open up and care for her as his own daughter and overcoming the trauma of losing Sarah in a deeply emotionally-driven story-line. 

From here we get a flash forward to twenty years later. FEDRA, the government organization, has a quarantine zone (referred to as the QZ by the characters) in Boston where Joel now lives with Tess, portrayed by Anna Torv, his smuggling partner. From here the story picks up a bit. Ellie is introduced chained to a wall in an abandoned apartment building being used by the Fireflies– the militia group revolting against FEDRA– where she’s kept under watch for unknown reasons. Marlene, played by Merle Dandridge, is the leader of the Fireflies in the Boston QZ and is the one keeping Ellie under surveillance. After several things and a lot of gunfire goes down and she, Joel and Tess sneak from the QZ to the outside where they begin their journey to the Massachusetts State House. 

The second episode begins with Ellie admitting to her immunity and with the new, shocking information, Joel and Tess agree after some arguing that they will still fulfill their end of the deal with Marlene and deliver Ellie to the Fireflies. Ellie, along with the audience, get their first look at Clicker’s, the extremely fast and deadly variation of the infected named after their signature clicking noise. After a narrow escape, they run into massacred Fireflies at the State House and it’s revealed Tess is infected. Tess decides to stay behind, blowing up the building and herself while Joel and Ellie run, showing off the terrifying nature of the infected and the brutal loss of who many show-only fans thought was going to be a main character. 

With two stunning first episodes that were faithful to the game while still feeling like their own unique creation, The Last of Us kicked off to a great start and garnered high reviews and praise from the public. 

Things take a brief turn in the third episode, but not in a bad way. Episode three features Bill and Frank, portrayed by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett, from a few days after the beginning of the apocalypse when the government rounds up small towns and guns them down to the present. Bill survives these small-town sweeps by hiding in a bunker beneath his house loaded up with guns and fortifies his rural town for years until Frank comes along and the two begin to have a relationship, eventually getting married by the end of the episode as they commit double suicide together in their old age and poor health. This is a change from the game, where they’re never specifically stated to have been in a romantic relationship and Bill remains alive to meet Ellie. Even hard-core game fans forgave these changes, though, because of how well HBO executed them. The writing, pacing and cinematography all hold up with the changes and the future episodes were altered to fit in the absence of Bill while still keeping up with the main storyline without any issues. 

Episodes four through seven cover a lot of ground (literally) as Ellie and Joel continue northwest through Kansas City where, in episode five, they encounter an anti-FEDRA group that has taken over the city led by Kathleen, portrayed by Melanie Lynskey, the vengeful sister of a dead brother who helped organize the revolt against FEDRA. While Joel and Ellie try to flee the city they meet a pair of brothers.

 Henry, played by Lamar Johnson and Sam, played by Keivonn Woodard are being hunted due to Henry’s involvement in ratting out Kathleen’s brother to FEDRA. This interesting sibling dynamic that takes place is made more compelling by the fact that Sam, the little brother, is deaf. Henry is desperate to escape Kansas City and they’re so close to making it out when a sniper calls in their flight, bringing Kathleen and the rest of her rudimentary army thundering down on them. 

This is where we not only get to see just how deadly Joel is with a rifle, it’s the audience’s first look at Bloaters- the grotesquely huge, terrifyingly strong, and both rarest and most dangerous stage of the infected. 

This being the first appearance of the Bloater is a change from the game and is tied to episode three. In the game with Bill surviving the trio get stuck in a school with a Bloater and Joel has to essentially solo it, but that’s cut out likely to save time in the constraining forty-fifty minute episodes. It doesn’t change much but the show leaves out a lot of smaller scenes like this, notably ones with infected. Not episode six, though! 

As the Bloater bursts out of the subway tunnels with hundreds of other infected as Kathleen closes in on Henry, ready to shoot. She fails to get him and our attention is turned back to Joel as we watch him pick off all the infected going after Ellie one by one, solidifying not only his care toward her as a daughter – however begrudgingly he may be about admitting it at this point – but also the total trust Ellie has in him as she keeps running, not looking back as Joel protects her from the sniper’s vantage point. The beautifully shot scene is only complimented by the strong colors from the fires, well-done costumes for the infected and the well-developed relationships tying everyone together in an emotional net that snares the audience so they keep watching. 

The end of the episode holds another small but devastating detail. Sam was infected during the fight, turning overnight into an infected so when Ellie wakes up the next morning she finds Sam sitting with his back turned to her, perfectly still. 

This is because as long as he cannot see her, he/the cordyceps that have taken over him won’t attack her. 

She had tried to heal him, rubbing some of her blood onto his wound the night before but this fails to prove as a cure when she approaches Sam and he attacks her. Henry, after shooting Sam, kills himself in front of Joel and Ellie. This is a direct parallel to Joel, who we later find out attempted suicide a few weeks after losing Sarah. This connection makes the dialogue exchanged between Joel and Henry even more powerful as Joel recognizes what Henry is going to do before the audience does and tries to stop him but fails. 

Small details like this that might be overlooked are what really ties the show together and makes it so much more thought-out. 

Episode five is a flash back to Ellie’s life before she met Joel. She was being trained by FEDRA to be a soldier and her friend Riley, played by Storm Reid, recently disappeared. Riley appears in Ellie’s room at night and tells Ellie she’s joined the Fireflies. The two sneak off to a mall where Riley’s been living, and we watch Ellie’s anger melt away as she spends time with the girl she clearly has a crush on.

It’s a brief pause in the tense main story-line as the two girls hop from store to store in typical teenage fashion, joking around and flirting with each other as they go along. Eventually Ellie figures out that Riley is leaving for another QZ, to which she reacts with both sadness and anger. She runs off but after hearing a scream she promptly comes sprinting back to where Riley is sitting in a Halloween store. She’s pressed on one of those decorations that screech to draw Ellie back and convince her to at least enjoy the last of the mall. Ellie does, which proves a tragic mistake when an infected comes to attack them, biting both of them before they’re able to kill it. Together they wait for death to come but, at least for Ellie, it never does. 

Episode six continues with Ellie and Joel’s journey as they reach Wyoming three months after the events of episode five where Joel reunites with Tommy at a fortified mountain-town that withstood the apocalypse. 

The steady world-building of “The Last of Us” is very well-done as the show continuously expands on the many, many different sides of the survivors from people like Kathleen’s anti-fascism group to individuals like Bill and now to the homestead tucked away in Wyoming. The scenes in the homestead feel almost weirdly normal, from Ellie receiving a diva cup instead of having to scavenge for tampons to them having things like fairy lights hung up in the main lodge where a movie is later projected. It shows how humanity has continued and provides a stark contrast to the religious commune we see later in episode eight. 

But before episode eight there’s a monumental scene showing Ellie and Joel arguing as he decides to leave her, instead having Tommy bring her to St.Louis, where the Fireflies have a hospital. He tells Tommy he can’t take care of Ellie with how old he’s getting and being half deaf. She gets angry with him, shouting at him for abandoning her when she’d only be more scared without him. She hits him where it hurts and brings up Sarah, saying she’s not his dead daughter. He closes himself off to her, agreeing with the fact she’s not his daughter and he definitely isn’t her dad.

While the dialogue is changed from game to show, it’s still a gut-wrenching scene that was well adapted to fit the way Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey portray the characters. Thankfully, Joel makes it up to Ellie and joins her the next morning, and the two set off on a horse to St.Louis. 

They get held up when Joel gets stabbed while fighting four scavengers from the religious commune in an empty town and Ellie barely gets him into the cellar of a house before he passes out from blood loss. With Ellie left alone to try and drag Joel back from the brink of death, she sews his wound shut and goes out hunting where she meets David, played by Scott Shepherd, and James, played by Troy Baker, the preacher and his right-hand man of a cannibalistic religious commune who promise her penicillin in return for some deer meat.

James goes to fetch the penicillin while David stays with Ellie and he reveals that he knows Joel killed a member of his commune. Ellie now knows she has to run but Joel is nowhere near healthy enough to move, so the next day she gets on her horse and attempts to draw the group that has come from the religious community’s attention away from Joel. Her horse is shot and she’s captured by David, who returns to his commune with James while the other men stay in the area to hunt down Joel. 

While locked in a cage, Bella Ramsey delivers one of if not the best adapted line in the entire show where Ellie screams at David that she’s the little girl that broke his finger after he tries to gaslight her into joining him in a very gross, pedophilic-feeling way that has both the audience and Ellie shuddering in disgust. By now Ellie has also discovered that they’re cutting people up to feed everyone in the community and she’s terrified David is going to chop her up and eat her, which he ends up attempting to do. Just as she’s being wrestled onto the cutting board, Ellie grabs a hold of a butcher knife and kills James, then sprints for the door before she’s trapped in the burning building with David since the doors are locked. David catches her and tries to rape her, and for a moment he’s overpowered her before she gets hold of a knife and turns on him, killing him by stabbing him over and over with it. Her guttural screams raise goose-bumps as blood hazes over the camera and we all but see rage roiling off her in waves as she brings the knife down over and over as the building burns around her. 

It’s the most fantastic performance Bella Ramsey ever could have conjured up, absolutely destroying any doubts anyone had about her capability to play Ellie as she delivers the jaw-dropping scene perfectly.  

Cutting back a bit Pedro Pascal also dishes up a fantastic performance as the penicillin revives Joel and he takes down the men still hunting for him, torturing them for information on where Ellie’s taken. Pedro Pascal really sells the anger-fueled adrenaline Joel is feeling in that situation as he kills the men after getting the location on his map where the commune is. This ruthlessness and protectiveness over Ellie sets up the ninth and final episode beautifully as they reach the Fireflies’ hospital and Joel finds out the only way to create a cure is to kill Ellie and figure out exactly what makes her brain resistant to cordyceps. 

It’s devastating watching Joel finally open up to Ellie just as she shuts down after David’s assault. He tries to cheer her up, talking openly about his daughter to her and cracking jokes she’d normally love but is now unresponsive towards. Their dynamic switch only gets sadder after Joel’s rampage through the Firefly hospital where he kills almost everyone inside to rescue Ellie. It reminds the audience just how deadly Joel is while also accomplishing the hard task of blurring the line between justifiable and unjustifiable violence in an apocalyptic scenario.

The tone of the scene differs from the game where it’s a lot more ruthless, but the show presents it to be almost melancholic with the music drowning all other sound out as Joel methodically takes out Firefly after Firefly. While an interesting twist on such a climactic scene, the sorrowfulness of the adaptation feels a little underwhelming when compared to the source material. It’s still good and holds up, but it would have been nice to see a little more action as Joel makes his way to Ellie, especially with how deftly he kills the doctor and later on Marlene. 

The season ends the same as the first game as Joel makes the decision to lie to Ellie about what really happened in the hospital, telling her it was hit by raiders and that there were other immunes like her but the doctors were unable to find a cure. She watches him for a long moment before accepting his lies, but the audience can tell deep down she knows he’s lying but can’t bring herself to acknowledge the alternative. 

Joel is a father-figure to her, the only person she can fully rely on and trust in the complicated world she’s living in. She doesn’t want to let him go even when his actions are unforgivable. 

All in all, the first season of “The Last of Us” is a solid 8.5/10. It’s a well-crafted show with stellar writing, flawless cinematography, great acting and a story-line that feels fresh and compelling. It’s an incredible adaptation that, while different from the game, doesn’t feel any less fleshed out. The soundtrack plays a part in that as the mix of original music and old pop songs craft a musical narrative fitting to the plot. For example, Joel is a fan of Linda Ronstadt, one of the top-selling female rock artists of all time mostly active through the 70s-90s. 

The season might have been better if it was more drawn-out, for instance being an eleven episode season instead of nine to give more time to subplots originally in the game, but overall the final product holds its own as one of the best adaptations in recent years. The translation from game to show feels like a love letter to the original work in the best way.

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