Episode three abruptly cuts away from the early stages of Joel and Ellie’s journey to give us a depiction of the apocalypse as it’s been experienced by Bill, a “prepper” living alone in his idyllic and now heavily fortified burgh, even finding love in Frank (Murray Bartlett), a refugee who got caught in one of his traps. Many stretches of the game that staged memorable battles with hordes of zombies-like Elie and Joel’s run-in with Joel’s smuggling contact, Bill (Nick Offerman), outside of Boston-are reconceptualized in the terms of prestige television. For her part, Ramsay imbues the 14-year-old Ellie with a nuanced combination of grown-up disillusionment and childlike naïveté that lends this The Last of Us a sense of pathos even when it’s missing most of its other marks. The series then flashes forward two decades, and while Pascal doesn’t quite read as a fiftysomething man, he compellingly wears the weight of two decades in his troubled but soft-featured face. The first episode opens with a prologue set at the outbreak of the apocalypse, in which Joel loses his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker). On the other hand, Pascal and Ramsay succeed in breathing new life into their characters. The same details that can be so immersive in the game become mere window dressing for the apocalypse here. The show’s production design takes many cues from the game, but the result is environments that can feel too manicured-the overgrowth on abandoned cars a bit too carefully placed, the moss in a patch of sunlight streaming through a collapsed roof too neatly lit, and the moments that pause on such sights a bit contrived in their attempt to aestheticize decay. The journey there becomes a tour of the various mini-dystopias that have sprung up in the two decades since society collapsed. In the second episode of the season, after the initial job to hand Ellie over to the Fireflies on the outskirts of Boston goes belly-up, he resolves to help her find her way to a medical facility in Utah. Initially treating Ellie with the same gruff cynicism with which he greets the rest of the world, and dismissive of the hope that others see in her, Joel gradually warms to her, even caring for her as a surrogate daughter. Old contacts of Joel’s in the Boston quarantine zone contract him to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies, a partisan group looking to overthrow fascist military rule and rebuild a democratic society. Twenty years after the zombie apocalypse began, Ellie is the world’s new hope, the first person to anyone’s knowledge who’s resistant to the fungal Cordyceps brain infection that caused the zombie outbreak. Joel (Pedro Pascal), a hardened middle-aged smuggler eking out a life in post-apocalyptic America, reluctantly agrees to escort a teenaged ward, Ellie (Bella Ramsay), across the zombie- and wacko-infested country to a safe location in exchange for supplies. In its broad outline, The Last of Us treads ground that already felt familiar in 2013. Co-created by Druckmann and Craig Mazin ( Chernobyl), this eminently faithful adaptation, despite some powerful performances, is evidence that The Last of Us is ultimately just great as a game, as the parts of it that most resemble a prestige drama grow thin when the gameplay is extracted. Thus, some kind of adaptation to a non-interactive medium, overseen by Neil Druckmann, the game’s writer and creative director, seemed inevitable, and HBO’s The Last of Us series proves that the terms of such a debate may be false. The game’s prioritization of its characters’ antiheroic arcs-rendered through meticulously staged motion capture-along with its episodic structure and on-rails story progression, made it possible to either laud its narrative ambition or accuse it of aspiring to be something more than a game. The resemblance of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us to a prestige TV or film drama has been the object of both praise and derision since its release in 2013.
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