A Glass Darkly
HBO’s The Last of Us is the rare video game adaptation that works—inviting us to reflect on human purpose in grey spaces.
Review by Jake Casale
Two months ago, my television screen darkened as the credits rolled on the first episode of HBO’s The Last of Us. I stared, not believing what I had witnessed. Then came the stirrings of an emotion I hadn’t expected to feel – softly at first, before quickly growing and crescendo-ing into such a bizarrely cathartic fit of laughter that I’m glad my roommate wasn’t around to witness it.
Relief. Relief! It didn’t suck.
Lest you think I get twisted into knots over any old prestige drama clearing my quality threshold, I had a unique investment in The Last of Us not sucking. The show is an adaptation of the 2013 video game of the same name, a game that one of my friends describes as the closest thing video games have to a seminal text. To say that it changed the medium is an understatement. Crafted by publisher Naughty Dog, The Last of Us opened people’s eyes to the possibility that video games just might stand a chance at elevating themselves to art, in no small part due to its gripping, harrowing, and tautly woven cinematic narrative. It’s no wonder that someone thought it might lend itself to a bankable television enterprise.
Except… adaptations of video games are terrible. Near-universally. I thought that if any game could succeed at jumping mediums, The Last of Us had the best shot, but what if it crashed and burned?
Thankfully—mercifully—it does not. In fact, the showrunners leveraged the strengths of television to draw out new layers of The Last of Us that complement the game’s achievements, while making its world accessible to people who would never pick up a game controller.
The show is set in a dystopian version of our world, where an outbreak of mutated cordyceps fungus has infected much of the human population, turning them into zombie-like cannibals. In the United States, most of the remaining population lives in squalid conditions under harsh military watch in quarantine zones (QZs). The plot follows Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler in the Boston QZ, whose daughter was killed on Outbreak Day, twenty years prior to the show’s main action. Joel is tasked by a renegade group of freedom fighters (the Fireflies) with escorting 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out of Boston for undisclosed reasons. Yet this quick drop-off assignment quickly becomes anything but, as Joel learns that Ellie is immune to cordyceps infection. When Ellie’s receivers fall victim to the infected, Joel finds himself escorting her much further than he expected–across the country, in search of a Firefly base where scientists may be able to discover the secret of Ellie’s immunity. Joel is ostensibly along for this ride as a begrudging promise to his deceased smuggling partner, more concerned with finding his missing brother out west than Ellie’s ultimate fate, but as the unlikely pair makes their way through the ravaged country, the stakes are reshaped for both of them.
As in the game, the center of The Last of Us is the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Joel eschews the stereotype of the hardened survivalist as the series takes care to show his backstory up front, endearing him as a heartbreaking figure whose life shattered in one horrific moment from which he never recovered. Ellie, by contrast, is a tough personality wrapped around a core of wide-eyed inexperience; raised in a military school, she knows little of the world beyond the QZ nor before the outbreak. Despite these starkly different backgrounds, Joel and Ellie both live out of a deep hunger for purpose in a world that feels cold, indifferent, and brutal.
This hunger is the driving narrative force in both show and game; in the latter, a product of a field in which gameplay design is historically prioritized over writing fully-realized characters, it felt revolutionary. Plus, with the game being a game, the player gets to guide these three-dimensional characters through each step (literally!) of their journey, sharing the weight of their choices. The combination of these ingredients generally inspired in players a poignant and fierce identification with Joel and Ellie. Television doesn’t work that way, but the show’s writing, combined with pitch-perfect performances from Pascal and Ramsey, demonstrates that even in the absence of the player-character connection that drove the game to capture the zeitgeist, The Last of Us in television form still provides a story worth feasting on.
We get the sense that, as the final destination approaches, both Joel and Ellie are becoming more whole as people, a contrast to many other dystopian narratives that show the progressive hollowing of core characters.
The adaptation takes advantage of the medium jump to allow new textures of the narrative to manifest. In particular, Pascal’s understated performance shines through in the little moments, illustrating the depth and impact of Joel’s suffering in ways that build on the foundation laid by the game. His PTSD, for example, is explored more deeply in the show through a few well-placed sequences in the sixth episode. Ramsey’s Ellie, meanwhile, winks more at a reinterpretation than extension of the source material. She is given substantially more opportunities to express the character’s inner darkness, in what (spoiler alert) feels like an intentional attempt to signal where her character will go in successive seasons, a bridge the game’s sequel was criticized for neglecting. Like a new spice added to a familiar dish, these changes drew out a fresh understanding of Joel and Ellie’s motivations without obliterating what I had known before.
As delightful as Pascal and Ramsey are, they do share the stage with several other characters (both allies and foes) along the way, each of whom has their own goals in this post-apocalyptic world. Part of the show’s arresting gravity is tracing the indelible marks that these encounters silently leave on Joel and Ellie, shaping their own burgeoning raison(s) d’être. The supporting cast is also where the show charts its own course in some of its most generative ways. In the game, players experience the entire story from Joel and Ellie’s perspective; the other characters are all filtered through their eyes. The show gives us the benefit of departing from the duo at points to see heretofore unknown glimpses into other characters’ experiences. In select episodes, these departures absorb most of the runtime, giving the show a near-anthological feel. Despite a few resultant pacing issues here and there (I’m also not convinced one new character was a necessary addition), I found these deviations an enriching experience overall. Perhaps ironically, as someone familiar with the source material, more intimate knowledge of the supporting players deepened my appreciation for their contributions to Joel and Ellie’s development.
Indeed, we get the sense that, as the final destination approaches, both Joel and Ellie are becoming more whole as people, a contrast to many other dystopian narratives that show the progressive hollowing of core characters. But this presents an ambiguity that sharpens in the last episodes, when a series of decisions faced by the pair prompts the question—will Joel and Ellie’s unique manifestations of wholeness buoy one another, or clash? And if the latter, what is the right response? The show mirrors nearly beat-for-beat the game’s unnerving half-answer; when all is said and done, we’re not totally sure. In this, though it employs a slightly different toolkit, the show doubles down on its commitment to the central conceit that makes the game work: the characters and their actions are at once deeply sympathetic, yet resist categorization into clean moral boxes. The Last of Us, then, grapples with the disturbing unknowability of the human heart, the exigencies of making decisions while we, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “see through a glass darkly.” In this life, we all face questions of where we will root our purpose, what sacrifices we will make for it, and what consequences we’re willing to risk for those sacrifices. Apocalypse or not, no one escapes such difficult choices.
How, then, will we go about making them?
Jake Casale lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 and has worked on public health/health systems strengthening efforts both domestically and abroad. He currently works as an analyst for digital health company Cohere Health.
The Last of Us was created by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann for HBO. It can be streamed on HBOMax.
