One of the most jarring impacts of the last three years of the COVID pandemic has been the shaking to the core of the once cosy sense we all shared that civilisation with all the trimmings is inviolable, unbreakable and that it can withstand and endure anything.
Granted, the world didn’t fall to pieces around us, but a good many of the things we took for granted from freedom of movement to food availability and good health suddenly ceased to look as certain as they once had and we were faced with the agonisingly awful truth that the world around us may be more fragile than we realised.
The Last of Us, based on the long-running and much-loved cinema-realistic videogame by Naughty Dog which takes place in a disastrously broken world of zombie-creating fungal infections, may predate the grim reality of a world shorn of its sense of security and safety, but its relevance to our manifestly changed reality is a profound one.
In the HBO Max adaptation, which is set twenty years after a worldwide pandemic of a parasitic fungus Cordyceps has turned most of humanity into instinct-driven, new host-seeking misshapen monsters, humanity, or what’s left of it, is still trying to come to grips with the wholesale rupturing of civilisation in just about every form.
All that is left are urban centres under authoritarian rule, in the US anyway where the series and game is set, and scattered individuals out in the now-lawless extremes where slavers and raiders make short work of those people who somehow manage to avoid infection.
Life is hanging on but barely, and as we meet survivors like Joel (Pedro Pascal in yet another reluctant father role which he executes on with real emotive though understated intensity), his partner, in smuggling and in love, Tess (Anna Torv) and the young woman who will play a massive role in determining the future trajectory of their lives, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), it’s clear that survival is the key mode for humanity rather than actually living and thriving.
It’s bleak, it’s dark and honestly, The Last of Us, terrifyingly unnerving with the series going right to the heart of how horrific it would be for anyone to endure what these survivors have gone through in a world which is now avowedly inimical to the welfare of Homo sapiens.
It’s that last observation which goes right to the harrowing heart of The Last of Us whose first episode is a masterclass in building tension and scene-setting.
At its core, The Last of Us explores how people would react to their world being upended in comprehensively terrifying fashion, beginning with the first half an hour or so of the episode where predictions made on a talk show in 1968 that a warming world could lead to fungi going rogue and dooming us to extinction, come true in 2003 in 24 bluntly destructive hours.
What begins as a whisper of contagion, of reports of people going violent out of nowhere and attacks multiplying, perpetrated by once peaceful people like Joel’s invalid next door neighbour, becomes a fully fledged crisis which envelops Joel, his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) who, —– SPOILER ALERT!!! —– like in the game does not survive the initial descent into uncivilised, bloodthirsty hell, and Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and ends life as they know it.
Those initial scenes, which go from disquietingly portentous to outright nightmarish so fast that no one can quite grasp what’s going on around them, are electrifying in the way they build hair-raising, world-ending tension, so adroitly well in fact that when the other apocalyptic show does drop, it’s almost a relief that the waiting is over.
For the audience anyway; for the people caught up in this inexplicable hell, not so much.
For them, the world ends brutally quickly and it’s clear even twenty years later, that the scars remain fresh, bloody and easily ripped apart.
Joel may be surviving with his smuggling and his itinerant work in what’s left of Boston which has clearly seen far better days, but he carries the burden of his daughter’s loss, the sudden disappearance of Tommy who isn’t responding to radio messages, and the ever present throat of infection that never really goes away.
What makes this first episode such an enrapturingly, thrilling, and yes, disquieting right to the core of your being ride is that it never once forgets that scary though the zombies are, the real story is with those who have managed to keep their humanity intact.
That’s a victory of sorts for sure, but again and again in taut, brilliantly told narrative, we’re exposed to the fact that there’s a grief and an excoriating sense of loss that comes with still being alive and kicking.
The omnipresent threat of becoming a zombie aside, and it’s real and existentially hollowing, people face a loss of their freedom on every level, stripped of choices about where to live, what they can eat, where they can go and a great many other things.
Some, like Joel and Tess, who agree to transport Ellie to a facility somewhere west that may be able to use her immunity to save all of humanity’s rump population – at the time of the episode, Ellie hasn’t turned into a fungal host despite being bitten three weeks earlier, a remarkable outlier where transformation usually happens well within 24 hours – barely scrape by, grabbing back autonomy where they can while others such as Fireflies rebel leader Marlene (Merle Dandridge) are hellbent on remaking their land in a democratic mold from the autocratic government agency known as FEDRA which controls what’s left of urban left in the country once known as the United States.
Reactions differ but the effect is the same – people, even twenty years later, are shellshocked by their graphic change of fortune, and the collapse of the world as they knew and loved it, and while they cope as best they can, the trauma remains, even multiplying if that’s even possible.
As a portrait of humanity under terminal duress, both at the beginning and in the midst of trauma, The Last of Us‘s first episode is superb storytelling, its narrative focus on loss, pain and grief amplified by gritty, cinematically rich visuals which underscore how much has been lost and how far our once-mighty, skyscraper pocked, museum-littered land has fallen.
As pilot episodes go, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness” is brilliantly engaged television, a story that shows the most horrific before and after images ever, and which remembers that even in a world full of monsters and death, the real focus should be on how people are coping, or rather are not, and how easily humanity, thinking itself strong and untouchable, can fall from its evolutionary pedestal, possibly never to return (Ellie may be the key to that but even that isn’t certain at this stage).
Last of Us promises to be what The Walking Dead franchise has aimed for but only rarely achieved – an apocalyptic monster-driven but all too human horror show in which we are focused, terrifying monsters aside (and yes, they are compelling and you cannot look away), on people and how they cope with the end of everything with no real hope that there will be a new beginning …