The Last of Us HBO

Pedro Pascal is Joel<p> Game of Thrones/The Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal stars. 20 Images. Bella Ramsey as Ellie<p> Game of Thrones' Bella Ramsey plays Ellie ...

Though the trailers have given us a glimpse that much of the premise will follow along with the original game, chances are there are going to be a lot of shake ups along the way. In the The Last of Us: American Dreams prequel comic, we see that Ellie and her friend Riley were captured by the Fireflies, and the latter worked hard to join the group only to die after being infected through a bite. The Last of Us is based in a post-apocalyptic world where a mutation of the cordyceps fungus broke out and decimated the population. In the beginning, the Fireflies not only wanted to end FEDRA’s violent rule and return to a more democratic form of government, they were also a primary group actively searching for a cure. One major teaser dropped in The Last of Us trailers has been the introduction of the Fireflies, a major rebellious faction in the games that just about every character is tied to in some way or another. After the 2011 release of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us game, it didn’t take long for the concept to dip its toe in the world of the multimedia franchise.

HBO's super-sized series premiere saw Joel (Pedro Pascal) navigate trauma and find new purpose in Ellie (Bella Ramsey), plus some video-game callbacks.

People don’t love that sequence because it’s two minutes of CGI forming different shapes; they love it because it’s two minutes of CGI telling a story of sorts by establishing the geography of the series as a whole and of individual episodes, changing periodically to introduce new spots on the map or prepare us to return to little-visited places like The Pyke. While the idea of the spores rising into something resembling a city — i.e., a metaphor for how the world as we know it has been consumed by the mushrooms — is clever, it’s still ultimately just a bunch of shapes, and not interesting enough to go on for as long as it does. And we discover that Marlene needs Ellie to get to her other Fireflies out west because Ellie is somehow immune to the infection. Ellie is not as in command of the situation as Tess was, but we also quickly see that she is not afraid of being shackled to a wall by armed people who won’t explain why they want her. Then purpose arrives in the form of Ellie, a girl close in age to Sarah who needs passage out of the city. He is emotionally closed-off and efficiently brutal, and when his new charge Ellie is threatened by a soldier late in the episode, he has a PTSD flashback to Sarah’s death and turns absolutely savage in the way he beats on this man. [zombies](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/zombies/), though we do get the disgusting imagery of a dead body absorbed into a wall of fungus when Joel and the others traverse an underground tunnel late in the hour. (We are introduced to her surrounded by armed men after a beating, yet it is clear that she is in command of the room the entire time, and would likely have found a way out of her predicament even if a conveniently-timed Firefly bomb hadn’t given her an escape route.) He is existing rather than living, haunted by the loss of his daughter even more than the loss of everything else he knew, with few goals beyond getting through the next day. Before we get to that violent escape from Boston, we first have to establish the state of America 20 years after the zombie uprising. So I’ll be discussing this episode, and all the ones to come, solely on the basis of how it works as a television show. But before that, we have to watch civilization fall in the way it tends to in so many dystopian shows and movies. Instead, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are using those scenes to establish emotional stakes for Joel, and to make us deeply feel at least some of the pain he experiences when Sarah is shot by a panicked soldier on the night the world is wrecked.

The Last of Us TV show on HBO is full of Easter eggs and nods to fans of the franchise — everything from weapons to dialogue pulled straight out of the ...

The page it opens to is easy to miss, but may be a nod to the franchise — The Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” This could be reference to the long, winding road that will take Ellie and Joel across the United States, or maybe the long and winding road it’s been since a The Last of Us But there’s one scene in particular that stood out for its similarities to an iconic level in The Last of Us Part 1: Chapter 3, “The Outskirts.” Crawling through tunnels and debris, the trio has to dodge spotlights and flashlights from the military guarding the quarantine zone wall — spots in the game where it’s essential to play the game as stealthily as possible. Merle Dandridge plays Marlene in The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2, taking the role on a third time for the HBO adaptation. Our best guess is that this is a nod to the video game — in The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2, you get max three hits on your everyday melee weapons. Joel asks if Ellie is a “bigwig’s daughter” or something, and Ellie responds that it’s “something like that.” These few lines are pulled straight from the game, but in those scenes it’s Tess talking to Ellie when they’re escaping the zone. The phrase is graffiti on walls throughout Boston (and likely elsewhere), a symbol and motto for the revolutionary group the Fireflies — the people who are fighting the oppressive military in the country’s quarantine zones. For dedicated fans of the game, the appeal of The Last of Us is not necessarily in being [surprised by twists and turns of the story](https://www.polygon.com/e/23314304); rather, it’s to [see the franchise in a new light](https://www.polygon.com/e/23316913), picking out the little details that point back to the original media. The heavy wrench looks to be of forearm’s length and probably quite handy while they’re escaping the city, but Joel drops it right away. This scene sets up the horrors of the infected in a different way, giving some more context to show viewers what’s going on. There’s no real significance for the band in the game, other than a few posters, but the back of the T-shirt does foreshadow how the game plays out: Each tour stop is another location that Ellie and Joel will visit throughout their journey. In the video game, you control Sarah, and she’s looking through her house in the dark. It’s all in the third-person view, with the camera in the back seat.

We get to know Sarah (and the pandemic) a bit more in episode 1 of the show than we do in the game.

That turns out to not be the case, but Joel absent-mindedly tossing the kid’s body into a fire shows how inured he is to the violence and chaos of his world, and how much growth he’ll have to do to become the man players know he becomes by the end of the game (and this first season). I knew that Bella Ramsey had been cast to play Ellie, but when I saw the little girl at the start of the flash forward — wearing a maroon shirt not dissimilar from the one Ellie is often pictured in — I thought maybe we were seeing a younger Ellie. - The game left it ambiguous, but strongly hinted that Joel and Tess used to be romantically involved. But the soldier isn’t so charitable to his dealer, and is determined to turn the three in. Joel snaps and beats the soldier to death with his bare hands. The Fireflies are a resistance group against the militarization of quarantine zones. The child is infected, and the militarized police force opts for euthanization. That scene is mirrored in the show, but even before that, Joel talks about how he barely wants to share a construction job with Tommy, and isn’t interested in anyone else’s help. All the while, Sarah attends school, and later seeks out a watch repair shop; she wants to fix an old watch as a gift for her dad. The brothers return right on time to whisk Sarah to safety after she wakes up in the night to find nobody home and the neighbors’ place in disarray. In the game, the original performance of this scene by Troy Baker laid the groundwork for the game’s tone. But first, we get to learn about the nature of the pandemic.

It's too soon to say whether HBO's big-budget video game adaptation will become a zombie classic. But it delivers one heck of an opening catastrophe.

So as I write about the show, I will be focusing on how it works as a television series, and not on how well it does or does not adapt the game. With a well-thumbed volume of “The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits” by his side, he waits to hear specific songs that signal whether it’s safe to venture beyond the Q.Z. Besides, I believe this show is a work of fiction, given that we don’t live in a 2023 where half the population has been taken over by fungi. [Bella Ramsey](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/arts/television/bella-ramsey-the-last-of-us.html)), a feisty 14-year-old who is the only known person to survive an infection — and, hence, could be the key to saving humanity. (In 2023, they are called “FEDRA,” for the Federal Disaster Response Agency.) And he smuggles drugs with his business and romantic partner, Tess (played by the magnificent Anna Torv, beloved of science-fiction/fantasy/horror fans from her days on “Fringe”). Set in 1968, the prologue features a TV interview with a scientist who explains that his greatest fear isn’t a “global pandemic” (a term that, in a moment of dark humor from Mazin and Druckmann, is defined by another guest for the blissfully ignorant ’60s audience) but rather a mind-controlling fungus that could one day thrive on a warming planet, turning humans into fiends. Beyond establishing the miserable conditions of 2023, Mazin and Druckmann must introduce the show’s other leading character: Ellie ( (“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”) Or think of the 2004 remake of Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” or the first episode of “The Walking Dead,” both of which begin as the heroes wake up in a nightmarish world that collapsed while they were asleep. But I’ll say this for the series’s creators, Craig Mazin (the Emmy-winning writer and producer of “Chernobyl”) and Neil Druckmann (a creator of the video game): They do deliver one heck of an opening catastrophe. We see during the escape that Joel is willing to ignore other people’s suffering, or even to inflict harm wantonly, in order to protect himself and his family. And we discover that the government’s response to this crisis can be as destructive as the crisis itself. Most of the Texas scenes are from Sarah’s point of view, too, although there are sly hints throughout that something bigger is happening.

Though based on the 2013 video game series by PlayStation Studio, Naughty Dog, it's immediately clear that the show, written by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil ...

The two make a plan to find Robert and confront him in order to find out where the battery ended up. In the chaos, the guard points his rifle at Ellie, and Joel jumps in between them, unarmed, to try and talk him down. - There’s a clear shot of dust in the light in the first scene in Joel’s apartment. Fortunately, as it turns out, the guard is the one Joel provided pills to earlier in the episode. Tess escapes to see that a FEDRA vehicle has been bombed, and that a sniper is on a nearby rooftop, firing on FEDRA soldiers. A guard notices the child, and rushes to assist as he collapses. As Joel tries to explain that neither of them are infected, the soldier radios for instructions on how to handle the situation. Just as the monster is about to pounce, it’s shot by a soldier, who then keeps Joel and Sarah at gunpoint. As Sarah gets outside, Joel and Tommy careen onto the scene in their pickup truck, and Joel kills the infected woman with a wrench, without hesitation. Joel is painted as being forgetful and preoccupied with his work and his need to keep his family afloat, though has a clear lighthearted side, and is very open to playfully jesting with Sarah and Tommy. Post title credits, the episode then jumps ahead to a suburb of Texas in 2003, where single father Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), a building contractor, and his teenage daughter Sarah (Nico Parker), are starting their day. One of the guests begins to talk about the very real concept of parasitic fungi – organisms that infect, kill, and control the body of their host to further spread their existence.

We zip forward to 2003, ten years before the opening of the game, and get a really nice sequence with Joel (Pedro Pascal), his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and ...

In this case, the writers and producers had to condense a 15-hour game into a 10-hour season of television. It doesn’t always work out (many movie adaptations of video games aren’t exactly great), but things can’t stay always precisely the same as they were in the source. Deviating from Joel and Ellie’s story to tell another one in this universe — something that wouldn’t be possible for the game to do — is an exciting change. I enjoyed the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which is nothing like any of the games, and I’m interested to see how the Gran Turismo film shakes out, given that it’s about someone who’s very skilled at those games becoming a real-life racing driver. In the same way, a movie that adapted any of the core Mario games exactly would quickly fall flat. We get to see some of what Sarah’s day-to-day existence is like in the hours before the outbreak occurs. Changing how the infection spreads from spores to fungus, for instance, means that the actors don’t have to wear masks in some scenes. They hit the story beats they needed to while changing things up enough to surprise fans of the game and, at least in some places, make the narrative work better in another medium. Things that work in a novel may not in a film, and retelling a game beat-for-beat in a TV show doesn’t make a lot of sense. The cold open is a scene from a ‘60s talk show, which is immediately a new twist. Thanks in part to some of the different paths it takes, HBO’s adaptation of the 2013 game is off to a stellar start. Even when it’s a game that’s as cinematic as The Last of Us.

The first episode of The Last of Us on HBO establishes a new world for the video game series, with plenty of differences and similarities.

The two make a plan to find Robert and confront him in order to find out where the battery ended up. In the chaos, the guard points his rifle at Ellie, and Joel jumps in between them, unarmed, to try and talk him down. - There’s a clear shot of dust in the light in the first scene in Joel’s apartment. Fortunately, as it turns out, the guard is the one Joel provided pills to earlier in the episode. Tess escapes to see that a FEDRA vehicle has been bombed, and that a sniper is on a nearby rooftop, firing on FEDRA soldiers. A guard notices the child, and rushes to assist as he collapses. As Joel tries to explain that neither of them are infected, the soldier radios for instructions on how to handle the situation. Just as the monster is about to pounce, it’s shot by a soldier, who then keeps Joel and Sarah at gunpoint. As Sarah gets outside, Joel and Tommy careen onto the scene in their pickup truck, and Joel kills the infected woman with a wrench, without hesitation. Joel is painted as being forgetful and preoccupied with his work and his need to keep his family afloat, though has a clear lighthearted side, and is very open to playfully jesting with Sarah and Tommy. Post title credits, the episode then jumps ahead to a suburb of Texas in 2003, where single father Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), a building contractor, and his teenage daughter Sarah (Nico Parker), are starting their day. One of the guests begins to talk about the very real concept of parasitic fungi – organisms that infect, kill, and control the body of their host to further spread their existence.

Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann was working on it to make sure it was faithful to the game. Chernobyl's Craig Mazin was writing it. It was on HBO. And when early ...

Fanboys made a big deal out of a quote where she said she was told not to play the game, implying that would make her performance unfaithful. While everyone remembers the breakout performance she gave in a few scenes as young Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, she was a somewhat unknown quantity here. Hell, even one of the same actresses shows up to play the same role she had a decade ago (Marlene). HBO, even going through massive cutbacks in the David Zaslav era, has clearly unleashed the floodgates to give The Last of Us whatever budget it needs. Even getting my hopes way, way up ahead of the premiere of The Last of Us last night, even counting the series as one of my favorites in video game history, it actually exceeded my expectations. Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann was working on it to make sure it was faithful to the game.

In its first 25 minutes, the HBO adaptation of 'The Last of Us' achieves an energy the game longed to emulate.

For those with a strong attachment to the original work, the last decade was essentially building up to this moment, and what transpires in the TV adaptation is something close to a (The remake with more modern tech, released last fall, is only somewhat better.) Since this is a game, it’s also a sequence with a fail state. It’s really something to see a prestige TV show literally translate a scene from a game that was, in its own way, already emulating a prestige TV show. The plane crash, for example, is an invention for the show; in the video game, Sarah and Joel are knocked out when another car slams into theirs. The HBO remake of the outbreak sequence is striking in how it fully realizes what the original work was simulating. Playing the game, you can feel The Last of Us strain to use its elemental tools to achieve the kind of cinematic storytelling it’s going for, even as it’s ultimately successful. The camera assumes a view from the back seat, mimicking Sarah’s perspective as the family tries to get out of Dodge. (Though one could possibly argue Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, which does a ton of world-building through background elements that the camera often glides by, came quite close.) The very first character you control is Sarah, whom you guide through a splendid sequence that evokes the feeling of being a child alone at home. John Hannah plays the more portentous of the duo, laying out the mechanics of what will eventually drive the apocalypse in this universe: mind-controlling fungus, previously a phenomenon contained to the insect world, pushed by climate change to evolve such that it makes the jump into human beings. As someone long familiar with the source material, the choice is exciting: the HBO version places a premium on leaving room to breathe. This wasn’t necessarily the case in the source material. However, back in 2013, the game was still doing its best with the tools it had within the context of its medium.