HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ or How to Travel Cross Country Post Apocalypse

In 2013, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us caught the imagination of the video game world by storm. A cinematic masterpiece it had pretty much what it takes to make a really good video game – plot, action, dialogue, character development, gameplay mechanics… you name it, TLOU had it. So, it didn’t come as a surprise when the game received a live-action adaptation, especially today, when video games are increasingly getting adapted to screen.

HBO’s The Last of Us created a phenomenon much like the game, now available to a completely new audience. It has spread far and wide much like the mutant Cordyceps fungus responsible for the zombie outbreak in the world of TLOU.

As far as video game adaptations go, TLOU is arguably one of best, especially in the live-action category. The showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have actually delivered, unsurprising since Druckmann is adapting his own work for the screen (he is the writer of the game). More or less, the storyline is exactly as it is in the game with a few changes, but nothing too major. Perhaps that is why the show is able to capture the plot, the mood and the bleak world of the game so well, succeeding where most of the other video game adaptations fail. The minute you hear the somber and hauntingly beautiful guitar plucking in the title track complementing the eerie visuals of the fungi; the Cordyceps has already sunk its tendrils into you.  

Often while watching TLOU, you tend to forget you’re watching the show and not a video of the gameplay or a cutscene from the game. From a visual viewpoint, the show is a scene-by-scene recreation of the locations in the game. Right from the Boston QZ to the infested outdoors, the hike back to settlement in Jackson, Wyoming. It’s faithful to the cutscenes – the camera angles, the lighting, the blades of grass swaying in the wind, the soft snowfall. Oh, and the infected of course –  the clickers, the cadavers and especially the big bloater. They make your skin crawl and fingers itch for an antifungal spray.

Both Pedro Pascal (who plays Joel Miller) and Bella Ramsey (Ellie) have done a phenomenal job of portraying the characters. Especially in Episode six, ‘Kin,’ where Joel confides in his brother that he may be losing his edge and worries he may not be able to take Ellie all the way to the Fireflies. We see the chipped mask of the hardened survivor fall to reveal a more vulnerable victim of the world around them.

The Last of Us is to video games what Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is to books. They’re a lot similar in many ways. Both are about fathers (in Joel’s case, a role he takes on as much as he is pushed into) taking their wards across the post-apocalyptic United States, protecting them from anything that seeks to harm them by any means necessary. Both of them paint a grim picture of what humanity becomes, especially in the case of TLOU, sometimes the infected aren’t as dangerous as their living counterparts.

Two roads now diverge in the wood.

Is HBO’s The Last of Us one of the best video game adaptations of all time?

Or

Did HBO’s The Last of Us do as good a job as the game in telling the tale of Joel and Ellie?

The former is hard to answer because most often superlatives are subjective. As for the latter, the answer is easier.

Standalone as a TV series HBO’s TLOU is a good show, but link it to the game and you can’t help but think it falls short.  

But where? It isn’t the cast, or the music…nor is it the visuals…

The answer to this is simple.

It’s because the story of The Last of Us is still best experienced as a game.

When TLOU released, it was considered one of the best games of all time because it broke down the invisible wall between the cinematic and gameplay. The bond Joel develops with Ellie, how they grow on each other (quite like the fungus responsible for plunging the world to chaos) is not just restricted to the cutscenes, but rather sprinkled like spores everywhere. It is in Ellie’s questions and Joel’s quiet explanations as they journey through their bleak, bleak world. It is in the comfortable silences and the tense thick quiet that can be cut with Ellie’s knife, listening for whatever is out there lurking behind a dark corner.

Joel in the show is a much more muted version of Joel in the game. Joel is, at the end of the day, only human with human faults, strengths and weaknesses. He’s hard of hearing in his right ear thanks to a gunshot and his knees ache. A stark but realistic contrast to his video game counterpart, who can parkour through ruined buildings and fight off hordes of the ‘Infected’ and humans like a one-man army. He still is a one-man army, but the show does tone it down a notch.

For the majority of the game, you control Joel. You gather the materials, you protect Ellie, you load the gun and you pull the trigger. You risk it all in this cross-country adventure to protect your precious cargo, humanity’s hope and the most likely cure to this apocalypse – a 14-year-old girl called Ellie. You need to get her to where she needs to go, by any means necessary and neither Joel nor you have no problems getting your hands dirty.

In the show, however, you are detached, it is not you controlling Joel, you just watch everything playing out in front of you. Somehow in being detached from Joel, the effect is that the viciousness with which Joel dispatches his enemies is all the more magnified.

I watched the series with a friend who was deeply disturbed by the torture in episode eight,‘When We Are in Need.’ Now, I had played the game, so when Joel takes a metal pipe to a man’s skull, it wasn’t surprising. Just another day in the apocalypse where you need to tie up loose ends lest they come back, quite literally, from the dead. My friend, who had not played the game, was struck by the savage display, remarking on the fact that Joel didn’t need to be unnecessarily cruel. He felt that there was no need to behave so barbarically. I, on the other hand, felt that in a world where humanity and kindness are nothing but a pipe dream, it is always better to take that pipe and beat a cannibal savage until he doesn’t get back up again. A dog-eat-dog world where hesitation costs you your life. Those men were out to kill Joel and Ellie as cruel and as mercilessly, probably more, if Joel didn’t fight back, they might have been the ones with the split-open skulls.

We reached an impasse.

In the final episode, Joel accomplishes his task of getting Ellie to the Fireflies to work on the cure. Unfortunately, on the way to curing the world, the life of a 14-year-old girl needs to be lost. Joel discovers that the doctors have prepped Ellie for a surgery that will cost her life. There are no workarounds there are no options – other than murder, of course.

Joel is a man who lost his 14-year-old daughter Sara the night the world turned upside down; she was shot dead quite unfairly by a soldier. Joel is a man who escorted Ellie across the country fighting tooth and nail to keep her safe, keep her alive. Joel is a man who is about to be robbed of a daughter, unfairly, again.

Somewhere along the way from Boston to Salt Lake City, Ellie stopped being cargo. In the game, it is frustrating, when you die a brutal death, you see Ellie follow you to the game over screen, facing a similar demise. It fuels your drive to fight your way through to the end, when you reload your save file. Joel (you) has worked so hard in getting her here, nearly dying in the process. Joel and Ellie talk along the way (for that is all they can do) about what they’re going to do after. Joel is a man who allows himself to hope for the first time in a long, long while.

So when he hears that Ellie is going to die, when she hasn’t even been given a choice in the matter, his next plan of action is to go on a murderous rampage to rescue her. It’s a bloodbath and Joel is successful.

He lies to Ellie when she comes to in the car that they couldn’t find the cure, the Fireflies were attacked and they’ve escaped by the skin of their teeth.

Here comes the moral dilemma – a child’s life for humanity to have a second chance.

You’ve seen this post-apocalyptic world filled with all sorts of people – cruel, kind and everything in between. Mostly barbaric, though. Is it worth saving?

It is not up to the player to make that decision. You play as Joel, but you aren’t Joel.

Joel’s decision is to save Ellie. She’s what is important to him. She is his second chance.

Whether or not what Joel did was the right thing is another matter entirely. But what the game does that the series doesn’t, is to show just how precious Ellie is to Joel. What is it exactly that makes him choose a single life over the rest of the world? The buildup to that culminating decision that Joel makes is where the show falls short of the game.

Especially so because the entirety of their relationship in the second game (and the upcoming second season) is based on that one decision.

Watching the show, you aren’t as attached to Ellie as you are in the game, where you constantly look over your shoulder to make sure she’s still there. But it is hard to form an attachment to a character in just nine episodes, technically seven. The show does change the pace of things considerably from the game (and has content added in, which the game doesn’t).

I say seven episodes because out of the nine, episode three –‘Long, Long Time’– was about two side characters whom we never see again and episode seven, ‘Left Behind’ (which has the same name and story as the game’s DLC), sets the stage for Ellie’s past and the story of how she got infected. Both are good episodes in their own right, but it does shift the focus of the story from Joel and Ellie and what they go through. The minute the focus shifts, the gravitas is lost. There is of course no point adapting the game word for word, frame by frame; you need to make changes to suit the medium. But along the way, a bit of the ethos of the story is undeniably lost – the game did it better.

That said, the show isn’t disappointing; on the contrary, it’s solid. It is a story of endurance, of survival, of struggle in a world ravaged by nature and man. A story of ordinary people clinging on however they can. I’m sure that I would have enjoyed it a lot more had I not played the game.

Of the plot points introduced in the show and the little easter eggs hidden – as well as Clickers in abandoned QZs – both Joel and Ellie from the game are in the show. Troy Baker (Joel in the games) plays James, a member of the settlement which Ellie stumbles upon in episode eight. Ashley Johnson (Ellie in the games) portrays Anna, Ellie’s mother in the series, who gets infected as she gives birth to her daughter. Her story makes it clear how Ellie is immune to the infection.

An interesting change to the show from the games was how the infection spreads. In the games, the infection spreads through spores and the characters wear gas masks to circumvent this. In the show, the infection spreads through unified tendrils forming an interconnected network like mycelium. While visually it does translate a lot better to the screen it didn’t really make sense in Tess’s (Anna Trov) death. Yes, she’s infected. Yes, she’s dying. Yes, there’s no way to prevent her tragic end. But wouldn’t it be significantly less nasty to just burn the building down to the ground instead of placidly waiting for a clicker to connect to your mouth via mouth tendrils in a sort of ‘kiss of death’?

All that aside, HBO’s The Last of Us does provide a faithful take to the game and is definitely worth a watch. That is if you can make it past the creepy grandma who waits for you in episode one! 

Fungi have never been more of a threat than they are in this show, so be nice to that mushroom you see in the wild, or on your plate.