Chernobyl's Craig Mazin's 'The Last of Us' is a promising and moving zombie saga: TV review

There is clearly something seductive about depicting the end of the world, especially if it comes from beyond human hands.

The people who live in "The Last of Us" are, in a way, beyond reproach: they are enduring a zombie apocalypse caused when the cordyceps fungus jumped on humans, turning many people into brain-dead vectors to share and spread their disease. There is a reassuring quality to this version of an ending: it seems, perhaps, nothing that could have been done differently, no preparation that could have been made. And some 20 years after the company fell, those who remain seem shocked at times, unable to believe what they have been through. While there's a lot of violence in the feud for the limited remaining resources on HBO's new dystopian drama, the characters we meet often come across as if they're victims of circumstance, cursed to remember what happened. they once had.

Which makes the main character Ellie a particularly powerful figure. Played by Bella Ramsey (a memorable royal child in “Game of Thrones”), Ellie is a teenager who has never known anything but the post-Fall world. Through her eyes, we see the landscape as, in fact, a weird normal: Raised from childhood to be part of the defense against the ever-increasing threat of the undead, Ellie is afraid of mushrooms, but not shocked by them.< /p>

It's this dynamic, and his relationship with his protector Joel (Pedro Pascal) that sustains "The Last of Us" throughout its run. Adapted from the popular video game of the same title by Craig Mazin of "Chernobyl" and game designer Neil Druckmann, "The Last of Us" may rely too heavily on footage of action, which emphasizes the strange surreality of the infected.(The show has a vivid visual imagination, but doesn't quite get there by conveying the grotesque monsters. They elicit our disbelief more than our fear .) But what lies behind the chaos is the budding bond between Joel, a rootless man who has promised to keep Ellie — who may carry immunity to the fungus in her body, but appears to be infected — on her journey. out of the quarantine zone and into safety. Through performances by Pascal and Ramsey and strong writing, this d dynamic shines with emotion and life.

Ellie and Joel experience different types of grief. Ellie, with a vague curiosity about a time she didn't live in, can hardly be surprised that those she loved are taken from her in a world she has always described as brutal. Joel, meanwhile, lived through the first day of the mass infection and lives in a sort of contained pain over the loss of his daughter. This girl is played by Nico Parker in the first episode of the series, an hour-plus demonstration of Mazin's gift in particular for demonstrating the breaking of processes. Here, as in "Chernobyl", we watch the characters slowly, then suddenly become aware that the world around them is collapsing.

And we also see glimpses of this world after the fall. While Ellie and Joel's relationship is well-defined — Mazin and Druckmann's series is too cleverly written for it to be simply and solely a surrogate girl arrangement — "The Last of Us" also draws its energy from the people it is with. they come into fleeting contact. Among a wide range of great actors are Murray Bartlett as a gay man who finds himself in a surprisingly emotional entanglement with a survivalist (Nick Offerman) who protects him; Melanie Lynskey as the driven and violent leader of the desperate; and the classmate (Storm Reid) who, in flashback, helps Ellie discover the fighter, and the young woman, that she can be.

The thumbnails of those Ellie and Joel touch - small groups in an America whose culture of mass has been erased – are nourishing, interesting and beautifully drawn. (Bartlett's episode in particular stands as a successor of sorts to "Black Mirror" at its best. Like that anthology series' "San Junipero" episode, it fuses a cool assessment of an unhappy future with open emotion about love's ability to transcend circumstances.) And...