You aren’t ready for how good HBO’s The Last of Us is

The Last of Us is a new HBO show based on the video game series of the same name. It’s a zombie show, which we’ve had plenty of over the last decade. A horrible catastrophe has befallen the Earth. Millions of people were turned into violent monsters, society collapsed, and the remaining few try to pick up the pieces.

This is a well-worn premise, but it’s clear that people have never really gotten tired of zombies: The Walking Dead ran for 11 seasons, Kingdom put a period spin on the genre, and All of Us Are Dead is one of the hottest new shows on Netflix. We can’t get enough of flesh-hungry buggers. But how will The Last of Us stand out amidst all this competition?

Having seen the first four episodes, I think I can provide some answers. First, the show is earnestly invested in its characters and makes you root for them. Second, it finds a way to make the familiar trappings of the zombie genre feel fresh again. And third, HBO has spent a ton of money and applied a lot of polish to make the show look, sound and feel fantastic.

2023 has just begun and I haven’t seen the full season yet, but I’d be surprised if The Last of Us didn’t turn out to be one of the best genre shows of the year, if not one of the best shows period.

If Joel and Ellie don’t get a happy ending I will set my whole life on fire

Here’s how The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin described his approach to storytelling when speaking to The Hollywood Reporter:

"I’m not … how do I put this? I’m not interested in the zombies! I care about people … and one of the nice things about television is you get to begin and end [characters’ stories] over and over again, and beginnings and endings are the best."

The idea that a show should be about people first isn’t unique to Mazin, television, or zombies. The Walking Dead was about people first; the zombie apocalypse was just there to force them into difficult situations so we could see what they were really made of.

The same thing is true of The Last of Us. I quickly became invested in Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a hardened survivor of the apocalypse and a precocious teenager respectively. The plot is straightforward: Ellie is immune to the zombie contagion, which makes her potentially important to the future of humanity. Against his will, Joel finds himself having to escort her across a zombie-ridden United States so a group of scientists can use her immunity to create a cure.

The setup is simple, but The Last of Us comes alive in the details. Joel and Ellie have a classic odd couple dynamic. Joel is emotionally closed off while Ellie is excited by everything she sees; she was born after society collapsed, so she’s awestruck even by things we take for granted, like buckling a seatbelt in a real-life working car. It takes a few episodes for these two to get quality time alone together, but once they do, their rapport is very engaging.

And it’s not just skin deep. The Last of Us digs into its characters. The first 20 minutes of the premiere episode show what happened to Joel on the day of the outbreak; it ends with a heartbreaking climax that essentially serves as his origin story. And while Ellie has a feisty and quippy side, she’s also a young woman who has seen way more than she should. There’s a violence in her that’s compelling on its own, and doubly so once Joel notices it and their relationship starts to change.

So I fell for these two pretty fast. But The Last of Us spreads the love around. I won’t give away spoilers, but the third episode moved me close to tears, and we spend the bulk of it with a pair of characters who don’t appear beforehand and I imagine won’t appear afterwards. The Last of Us loves characters wherever it can find them. If it keeps up this empathetic streak, this show could wreck me by the time it’s over.

How do you make zombies scary again?

Mazin said he’s not interested in the zombies, but obviously The Last of Us has them, and speaking as a guy who has seen his fair share of zombie stuff, they’re pretty memorable.

Every zombie outbreak has to have a gimmick. What causes this particular plague of undead? Is it a virus? A spell? Was hell simply full and Satan started sending people back? In The Last of Us, it’s a fungus; a foreign organism grows inside the body and overrides the brain, like that one parasite that turns ants into…well, zombies:

Is this scientifically plausible? I have no idea, but the show convinces me that it is, and that’s all that really matters. The first two episodes begin with prologues where science-y types walk us through the dangers of this kind of invasion. Intellectually, I was satisfied; it didn’t contradict anything I’d learned in 8th grade biology, which is good enough for me. Emotionally, I was chilled, and ready for adventure.

The fungal gimmick makes for some fun visuals. The classic zombie is a literal walking corpse with skin flaking off and body parts loose and dangling. The zombies on The Last of Us have been hollowed out from the inside by an invasive agent; they have tendrils creeping out of their pores and sometimes swallowing their faces. It’s striking, disgusting, and occasionally beautiful, as when Joel finds one zombie slumped dead in a dark room, the multicolor fungus inside him having spread onto the wall.

That signature HBO coat of polish

Speaking of the look of the show, this is HBO post-Game of Thrones: they spent the money they need to make The Last of Us look great, and the crew has the skill to follow through.

Most of the visual splendor comes in the premiere. There’s an action scene about a third of the way through that made me let out an involuntary “whoa.” At the very end of the episode, as Joel and Ellie set out under cover of night into an abandoned city, we see what’s become of civilization in a flash of lightning: the skyscrapers don’t just stand abandoned and decaying; they’ve collapsed and are falling into each other. There’s an eerie grandeur to it.

The show eases off the visual effects a bit once the plot gets rolling and we become invested in the story for its own sake. But the show is always nice to look at, and I haven’t seen the full season; I’m sure HBO is saving some spectacular sequences for later.

But those sequences won’t work if we don’t care about the characters, and that’s where The Last of Us wisely spends most of its time. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey have great chemistry. All of the actors bring their best. Special mention should be made of the acting in Episode 3, but again, I don’t wanna give too much away.

The show isn’t perfect. The premiere in particular feels a little awkward in the way it’s structured; I thought its best stuff came early and it spent the rest of its lengthy runtime on setup. But I still wanted to watch the next episode soon after. If The Last of Us stays as strong for the remainder of the season, it could be an artistic success, a critical darling, and a smash hit.

The Last of Us premieres on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, January 15.

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