Warning: some spoilers for the current series of HBO’s The Last of Us ahead
Those who tuned into the most recent episode of HBO’s ratings winner The Last of Us would have encountered many things: panic attacks, mooncups, monkeys roaming around a university campus. One thing you definitely won’t have seen is a marauding horde of the undead racing towards our protagonists, Joel and Ellie. Or, likewise, a small gathering of the undead. Or even a solitary “lurcher”. Episode six of The Last of Us was an entirely zombie-less episode.
An absence of zombies on another show – Succession, Peppa Pig, The Wheel with Michael McIntyre – wouldn’t be much of a surprise, but The Last of Us is nominally a zombie show. Granted, zombie pedants (that’s living people who are pedantic about zombies, rather than particularly finicky members of the undead) might quibble with that description: the “infected” in The Last of Us are living creatures taken over by a parasitic fungus, rather than deceased creatures that have been reanimated and made “undead”. But for all intents and purposes, they are zombies: they look like zombies (bar the odd gross mushroomy extrusion), act like zombies, and carry the same threat as zombies.
But what is interesting is how relaxed – uninterested even – the creators of The Last of Us seem to be about showing us this threat. Huge stretches pass where the infected are entirely absent, or are even unspoken about. Certainly showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann understand the power of dropping a “runner”, “stalker” or “clicker” into proceedings. Yet what seems to really preoccupy the show is less the infected and more the ruined world that the infected have inadvertently created, as well as the societal structures humanity – what’s left of it – has built in that ruined world, from militaristic government agencies (the dreaded Fedra) to rebel militia groups and even, in the most recent episode, a surprisingly normal-looking commune, complete with Christmas trees and screenings of Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl.
Endless encounters with mushroom-headed monsters would distract from all this fascinating world-building and – for those of us wanting something a bit more rarefied, a bit more HBO – would relegate the show into slightly more trashy genre territory. For me, the weakest moment of the series so far was when it lurched fully into this generic fare in episode five, as a vast horde of infected, including a giant “bloater” with superhuman strength, burst from the ground and laid waste to Melanie Lynskey and her militia. It felt cartoonishly OTT in a show that has otherwise paid such careful attention to mood and detail. It felt, for a brief moment, like a zombie show.
It’s a good thing that for, the most part, The Last of Us isn’t really a zombie show. Because culturally I think we’ve just about run out of interesting things to say about zombies. Granted, so many interesting things have been said using zombies over the decades since George Romero unleashed them upon cinemagoers half a century ago: they’ve served as an analogy for consumerism, cold war paranoia, race relations, and, of course, mass contagion. And they’ve been repurposed in surprising ways too: in comedies, romances, period dramas, even heist movies.
But there’s only so many times you can see a dishevelled figure shuffling towards the screen, eyes rolled back in their skulls, before the impact wears off somewhat. The zombie has become so culturally codified, such a cliche, that finding something new to do with them is becoming increasingly difficult (though props to The Last of Us with its novel and really quite stomach-churning “mushrooms flowering out of people’s heads” twist). I’m sure someone inspired will find a completely fresh way to approach rotting monsters. But for now I’m glad that The Last of Us is largely giving them a wide berth.
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