The show maintains authority by understanding humanity — its ugliness and sacrificial nature, both.
The show maintains authority by understanding humanity — its ugliness and sacrificial nature, both.
H BO’s most recent high-budget offering, The Last of Us, is a postapocalyptic thriller that provides the tired genre a shot in the arm it hasn’t enjoyed since Negan’s barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat connected with Glenn’s skull in the waning days of The Walking Dead’s dominance, some seven years ago.
Is The Last of Us worth your time? I say yes. The show treats mature themes of loss and grief with more deftness than the pulpy genre often allows, and the world is a rational one in how society restructures itself — there’s an internal logic that the writers have tried to preserve. While this may seem like a small thing, we’ve seen too many shows embarrass themselves by ignoring a character’s incentives and history to pursue a writer’s earworm or an executive’s desire for checklists (The Witcher, Ted Lasso, Game of Thrones, etc.).
Originally a Sony PlayStation–exclusive video game developed by Naughty Dog in 2013, The Last of Us seems an odd fit in the current media landscape — but it works because at its core is a compelling story, not merely a horrific spectacle. Decisions have consequences, gender dynamics are stressed, and simply cowering behind walls is unacceptable to the American spirit. Filmed in Alberta from the summer of 2021 to 2022, The Last of Us knows to whom it speaks and, unlike most of its peers, has something interesting to say.
Starring a worn Pedro Pascal as a single father and Gulf War combat vet named Joel, who does cement work with his idiot brother, Tommy, the story begins during the Bush years — 2003, specifically. A heart-rending scene bridges the gap between this beginning and 20-some years in the future — to a world with a post-Soviet flavor akin to Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033.
Forcing this titanic change is a fungus: a functionally indestructible organism that treats humans as a host on which to feed and through which to communicate with itself. The obvious (and often lurid) physical degradation of a bog-standard zombie requires a greater suspension of disbelief, but a living host that can treat humans like marionettes, supplementing and replacing sinew with alternative growths, works. One may occasionally think, “That’s dumb” — but less often than expected, and there could be a good reason for why a scene plays out the way it does.
Without giving away too much, the Joel a viewer meets after the intervening years is broken in almost every way that matters (emotionally, sexually, in terms of his executive decision-making). A Houston resident in ’03, Joel is dumping bodies onto a Boston funeral pyre in ’23. His brother is missing, and with every day Joel delays in obtaining transportation — that rarest of commodities — his brother’s death becomes more likely. The viewer isn’t sure of what happened; all one can know is that the man we knew at the show’s opening is now shattered and confined, though, importantly, not suicidal.
In a fantastic imagining of a fallen Boston, the 2023 safe zone is a bulwark against immediate death, but functions like federal prison — with an economy to match it. There is no market outside of work details, but as anyone who has lived in such conditions can tell you, a substitute will arise in the shadows. Cigarettes, information, and favors become the de facto currency — just as a can of dip or a Monster energy drink do aboard an aircraft carrier.
Another laudable aspect of the world the writers have built is that there are good reasons why women dominate nearly every position in the show — namely, the men are dead (literally, or, like Eliot’s hollow men, emotionally), having lived on the front lines of repelling fungi-addled hordes for years. As with the female welders of the Second World War, the labor division between the sexes is askew, and their representation never comes across as diversity hiring.
The girl who may save mankind from the fungus is a perfect example — she’s all sorts of screwy. Some may find her annoying, but that’s because she was raised in a military academy and is prone to the sort of anti-social outbursts that we see from kids held indoors for years in today’s world. She has a right to be insufferable. Everything is wrong.
While the show has only aired its first two episodes, its trajectory promises a dedication to storytelling and quiet revelation that is often missing from many other TV offerings. It’s not high art — gun fights and objective-based missions that betray its video-game roots abound — but The Last of Us does what good television should: entertain and excite without stomping ideology into its audience. It’s violent but not pornographically so. It’s dark but not sadistic.
The unreality of the premise belies how the show maintains authority by understanding humanity — its ugliness and sacrificial nature, both.
As Dune has done for science-fiction, and Lord of the Rings for fantasy, at its best, The Last of Us manages to lift low-brow escapism to a higher plane. We can only wait to see if the show continues to hold atop those gyres. Or, perhaps like all other zombie media, the best part is the first metaphorical hundred pages, with increasingly ridiculous plot developments mutating to defend its continued existence thereafter.