Photograph: HBO/Warner Media/2022 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching The Last of Us, which airs on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK, HBO in the US and Binge and Foxtel in Australia. Do not read on unless you have watched episode one.
Hello and welcome to The Last of Us episode recaps. We’ll spare you the enthusing about why the 2013 video game adapted for this series is the greatest of all time, and get right to it.
We kicked off in 1968, with John Hannah (ageing beautifully, may I add) sitting on a talkshow, explaining how pandemics work and why we shouldn’t be afraid of bacteria or viruses, but fungi. Add in climate change, he said, and the results would be truly catastrophic.
Roll credits, and we’re in somewhere near Austin, Texas, in 2003, to meet Joel (Pedro Pascal) on his birthday, his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), and his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna). We heard about a disturbance in Jakarta on radio – ominous – and learned Joel works in construction – handy.
It’s idyllic – and all the more so because we know it won’t last.
A birthday to remember
Even before the zombie outbreak, things weren’t going brilliantly for Joel. His daughter stole the money for his present from his wallet, he had to work a double shift and was late getting home, forgot to pick up a cake, then his daft brother called to say he’d been locked up by the police for getting into a bar fight.
A dream in comparison to future birthdays, though. After Joel smashed their neighbour Mrs Adler’s head in with a spanner, he, Sarah and Tommy tried to escape the area in their pickup truck as all hell broke loose around them. Anyone who has played the video game will have been dreading what was coming next, as the trio desperately tried to find a way out, then crashed and were confronted by a soldier. Bye bye, Sarah, we hardly knew you, though I imagine Nico Parker has a promising career ahead of her.
The escape scene, from Sarah’s perspective, was uncannily similar to the same moment from the game, detrimentally so. This series seems smart enough to ignore the pitfalls most video game adaptations fall into, so let’s hope those shot-for-shot redos are used sparingly. After all, if you’ve played the game, you’ve seen it before; if you haven’t, it’s stylistically unnecessary.
Twenty years later
Boston, 2023, and the world is wrecked. John Hannah’s worst fears came true, and a mutated cordyceps fungus, helped along by a climate crisis, has swept the planet, leaving billions either dead or worse – zombiefied.
Fedra (the Federal Disaster Response Agency) have established quarantine zones for survivors, but rule with an iron fist, executing those who try to flee. Naturally, there’s a hidden economy in contraband drugs – and just about everything else. Plus, a band of rebels, the Fireflies, has sprung up, hoping to overthrow Fedra and bring about a new democracy.
Inside this QZ, Joel – searching for his brother, now in Wyoming – and his friend Tess (Anna Torv) have become expert smugglers, but it’s only after being crossed by Robert, who has stolen a battery they were expecting and sold it to the Fireflies, that things really get going.
Meanwhile, Marlene (Merle Dandridge) has a 14-year-old girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) locked up, only we’re not yet quite sure why. Marlene needs Joel and Tess to smuggle Ellie out of the QZ, in exchange for the gear they need, and lots more besides.
They accepted the mission, only to encounter the Fedra soldier Joel had sold pills to earlier in the episode. Little did he realise that Joel is not a man you should point a gun at. And finally, the big reveal – the reason Ellie was being held captive and is deemed so valuable by the Fireflies is that she was bitten by an infected some time ago but hasn’t turned into a zombie. We’ve got a unicorn on our hands.
Overall
A hugely promising start, with a lot of setup to get through. I want to try to keep comparisons and mentions of the video game to a minimum and treat this as a separate entity – it has to work as a standalone, not just for fans of the game who know what’s coming – but so far, this series has done an amazing job of transporting the characters to screen. Whether Pascal can fully capture Joel’s brutality remains to be seen, but if anyone can, it’s him. It’s early days, but so far, Bella Ramsey is Ellie, a perfect, contradictory mix of innocence, naivety, brattishness, street smarts and swearing.
Notes and observations
The way Mercy, Joel and Sarah’s neighbour’s dog, was looking at the lady in the wheelchair … why is it always dogs who notice things before anyone else? We should pay more attention to dogs.
The DVD Sarah hands Joel is Curtis and Viper 2 – a film franchise referenced throughout the games.
We got our first mention of Bill and Frank, characters we first met in the game via a series of letters written to each other.
Ellie, with her knife and the way she noticed that Joel’s watch was broken, is an all-too-painful reminder of Sarah.
The song that kicked in over the radio at the end and played out the episode was Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode. A classic from 1987, and, if that code Ellie cracked is anything to go by, a sign of big trouble ahead for Bill and Frank.
What did you think? Did you enjoy that opener? What about Pedro Pascal as Joel? Have your say below, but please avoid spoilers from the game …
