Two years since it blew up the internet for being a video game adaptation that was — shock, horror (and there was a lot of that) — actually very good, The Last of Us (Sky/Now) is back. And it’s a return that invites a degree of “difficult second album” expectation, given how this thinking man’s Walking Dead was like a hit out of nowhere.
Fans can rest easy. As game adaptations go, this is the polar opposite of A Minecraft Movie; rather, the post-pandemic hellscape still has all its familiar scares and soul-searching, now with some bona fide bombshells thrown in. There are moments that will leave your jaw falling into your popcorn like few other shows.
The first two episodes come out of the gates as if the show’s writer Craig Mazin is playing the hits: there is the effortlessly soulful Pedro Pascal as Joel, struggling with his surrogate paternal feelings towards recalcitrant teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey); there is the plucked acoustic guitar over shots of a wintry Wyoming; and there are of course those hideous fungal monstrosities — zombies, for all intents and purposes — which really are still enough to given you tendril-sprouting nightmares. Yet what still strikes you most is that distinctively intelligent and mournful feel. Mazin, the man behind Chernobyl after all, ensures that his opus is primarily about relationships, not exploding viscera.
That said, let’s really hope cordyceps or other such fungi never start playing with our brains. At one point, the disquieting image of a cohort of mutants frozen into ice precedes a moment that obeys a basic screen rule: zombies are insatiably bloodthirsty. Such scenes betray the video game origins — and that’s also the case every time there’s another gun-led stalk through a gloomy derelict building —yet a siege featuring an almighty “bloater” is handled with an intensity not far off Saving Private Ryan’s opening scenes.
Things are five years on (series one spoilers ahead) and Joel and Ellie are settled in the snowy town of Jackson. She’s 19, as tough as a kickboxing champ and itching to become part of the community’s patrol. She is also, you will recall, apparently the one person in the world immune to the contagious spores responsible for the apocalypse.
That she is not talking to Joel — who is seeing a shrink, played drily and rather magnificently by Catherine O’Hara — initially leads you to assume this may be to do with series one’s brutal climax: that was when Joel gunned down the medics who were about to operate on Ellie to create a world-saving vaccine. She would have been killed by the procedure. He, however, couldn’t bear to lose the person he’d come to love as a daughter.
Similar moral questions course through series two: who do you save and why? How much do you prioritise personal reasons for such actions over ones that would benefit the group? The Last of Us elevates itself further in the other ways it explores human nature. A casually progressive view of sexuality — which underpinned the first series’ most celebrated episode (the story of Bill and Frank) — continues via Ellie’s feelings towards her straight friend Dina (Isabela Merced).
The complexities of an emerging love story are mined with care, although this storyline contributes to some uneven plotting during a central stretch where a sense of repetitiveness also sets in: more ruined landscapes, more communities that have resorted to militarist brutality or chilling religious cults.
But then an episode comes along that floors you with its tenderness: the sixth episode here is that knockout hour of TV. Suffice to say, the characters are in inner pain — none more so than Joel and Ellie — so when moments of joy come, they feel truly earned, glints of something precious in a rainy gutter. When it hits those big moments, The Last of Us again feels like something special.
★★★★★
The Last of Us series 2 is out on Sky/Now on April 14
