I’m not much of a zombie fan. Their stories have been done to death (Hah!), especially with “The Walking Dead” and its spinoffs and various clones dominating for more than a decade - and blowing their best twist, hope, in the first season. Precious little new material has been released about zombies since George Romero’s original “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), and much of what films do that is “new” is often not good. When the original, “Director’s Cut” ending is put back on Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” (2007), that film is truly provocative, but the theatrical ending was audience-tested crap. The original “Evil Dead” (1981) and its sequels, “Evil Dead 2” (1987) and “Army of Darkness” (1992), did an excellent job parodying zombies, but even that well has run completely dry as evidenced by “Ash vs. the Evil Dead” (2015-2018) abandoning smart satire in favor of schlocky jokes and gross-out practical effects.
All of that to say that my hopes were low going into the first episode of HBO Max’s “The Last of Us.” Add to that the fact that the property is based on a videogame - no matter how well-respected - and I was prepared to give up long before the end credits. I’m thrilled to say I was completely wrong.
The best thing the writers did was to move the focus of the stories off the zombies and onto nuanced, three-dimensional, human characters. We spend almost the entire first episode getting to know Joel (played with incredible range by Pedro Pascal) and his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker). When the virus begins to hit, it builds slowly around the characters, ramping up the tension and (smartly) keeping the ravenous hordes at bay and off-screen for much of the time. The storytellers are confident in their presentation, saving the slavering undead for brief moments of shock that help us understand the threat without overly indulging our appetite for gore. Instead, the camera focuses our attention on the main characters and their emotions, and it helps draw us into their lives in a way that “The Walking Dead” never could (at least not for me).
Once the story jumps ahead 20 years to our current time, we’re introduced to Ellie, played brilliantly by Bella Ramsey, and the human drama only gets more intense. Joel is a shell of the man we met at the start of the first episode, and Ellie is a monster in her own right, supposedly abandoned by her mother, being trained to rule as a thug over the unwashed masses, tossed aside from one “caring adult” to another, and on the verge of being shot because she was infected. It’s hardly a spoiler to mention that she’s immune to the infection, and thankfully they move past that “twist” almost immediately. The entire first season focuses on Joel and Ellie’s growing relationship, with the zombies only showing up enough that we don’t forget them, and it is that relationship that increasingly drives the action of each episode.
Because I’ve never played the PS5-exclusive game, I have no idea how much of what appeared is because the videogame is that good or because the writers were that adept at translating the game into such an engaging season of television - but that doesn’t matter. Season 1 of “The Last of Us” is an incredible drama that is high on tension, moderate on gore (especially compared to other zombie shows), and at the top of its game for writing and acting. I highly recommend it.
The Bechdel Test for “The Last of Us”: 1) The show has numerous women in major roles; 2) those women frequently speak with each other over the course of the season; 3) and when they speak with each other, they discuss a variety of topics, mostly focused on how they can all stay alive. There is no romance (and therefore no man for Belle Ramsey’s Ellie to pine over), and the emotional arc follows the father/daughter relationship between the two main characters, giving each of them plenty of opportunities to bond and grow.