Thoughts: The Last of Us Season 1
In 2019, Craig Mazin broke millions of people with his gritty, surrealistic take of a true disaster in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, and it received Emmy wins for directing, writing, and limited series. Now he is back to break even more hearts by bringing the critically acclaimed 2013 video game The Last of Us to HBO. The show is co-created by the original writer and co-director of the video game Neil Druckmann, and follows Joel, a smuggler tasked with escorting Ellie, a teenage girl across a post-apocalyptic US that has been ravaged by a 20 year fungal outbreak. While the infection is what caused the outbreak to decimate the world, it’s the people who survived that are the real threat.
The series is led by Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) as Joel and Ellie respectively. Their on-screen chemistry under the direction of Mazin and Druckmann is what ties the series together as terror awaits them around every corner. Without getting into too many spoilers, the show is at its best when it veers away from the game directly in order to help build the desolate world, and heightens the tensions when they come across new factions. The infected people are never the real threat; it’s the people they meet along the way that thrust our protagonists into more dangerous situations as they navigate trusting strangers or the consequences of their actions. The Last of Us also has a great ensemble, including Nico Parker (Dumbo), Anna Torv (Fringe), Gabriel Luna (Matador), Nick Offerman (Parks & Rec), Storm Reid (A Wrinkle in Time) and Scott Shepherd (The Young Pope), just to name a few.
As far as video game adaptations are concerned, this is one of the best ways to adapt from one medium to another. The show takes what is presented in the games and expands on details, while also remaining faithful to the key points and narrative factors that made the story such a memorable experience. This is proven with great episodes like “Long, Long Time” and “Endure and Survive,” where the key elements from the game are preserved, but an with world building not seen in the original telling. However, it does feel like Joel and Ellie’s journey was cut short with the series only having 9 episodes instead of 10 or even 13 like some other HBO shows, where you can spend more time with these characters and see their bond grow stronger. Not that I wasn’t invested in the ending, but rather you spend more time with characters in video games with all their constant dying and dialog and restarting levels and solving puzzles that could have been substituted with more episodes of just Joel and Ellie surviving on their own without the help of other people.
If you haven’t played the game, or even if you have and want to relive the experience with 10 years of changes, then make sure you check out The Last of Us on HBO or HBO MAX. It’s a series filled with emotional highs that will keep you on the edge of your seat in a world ravaged by an ever-spreading infection. This series is exactly the kind of story that video games have been telling for over a decade now and it’s about time the creatives behind those projects share to the world what gamers have already known.
