‘The Last of Us’ Series Premiere Recap: Fungus Among Us

‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 1: ‘When You’re Lost in the Darkness’

Every great post-apocalyptic saga should begin with a killer “here’s where everything went wrong” sequence.

Think of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” with its single zombie lumbering through a graveyard, chasing after a young woman and her obnoxious brother. (“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. We understand right from the start what these people have been through because we go through it right along with them, minute by agonizing minute, as they panic and flee from the bloodthirsty ghouls and the mounting mayhem.

It’s too soon to say whether HBO’s big-budget adaptation of the video game “The Last of Us” will become a classic like Romero’s “Dead” movies. 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.

The first half-hour of the show’s 80-minute premiere is set mostly in Austin, Texas, in 2003, where a construction worker named Joel (Pedro Pascal); his teenage daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker); and his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna) endure a harrowing 24 hours. It begins with them minding their own business on Joel’s 36th birthday. It ends with them trying to escape a city that has been devastated by rampaging monsters, trigger-happy soldiers and exploding vehicles.

Mazin (who also directed the episode) and Druckmann spend a lot more time than one might expect with these three characters in Austin, given that their story’s primary action is set 20 years later and hundreds of miles away — and especially given that Sarah does not survive the day. Most of the Texas scenes are from Sarah’s point of view, too, although there are sly hints throughout that something bigger is happening. In one scene we hear radio reports about “disturbances in Jakarta.” In another, the next door neighbors’ grandmother twitches in the background, her mouth gaping unnervingly wide.

The Austin sequence matters, though, and not only because it grabs the viewer with some thrillingly chaotic spectacle. By the time we leave 2003 — with Sarah laying dead from a soldier’s bullet and Joel emotionally wrecked — we have learned some plot-relevant details. We know that humans all over the world are becoming infected with something that turns them into ferociously violent savages. 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.

A short scene before the opening credits is just as important. 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. This, put concisely, is what the characters in “The Last of Us” are going to be dealing with: “Billions of puppets with poisoned minds.”

But as Romero showed over and over again with his zombie pictures, it isn’t always the infected alone who turn monstrous. The second half of this first episode takes us to the overgrown ruins of Boston in 2023, where in a “quarantine zone” Joel is taking odd jobs — some legal, some not. He does general cleanup work for the same kind of gun-toting authoritarians who killed his kid. (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”). They are trying to scrape together enough money to buy a battery and a truck so they can reunite with the still-alive and possibly endangered Tommy in the wilds of America, where the danger of the fungus creatures is rivaled by the viciousness of roving noninfected gangs. Nowhere, it seems, is safe.

If the last half of the pilot is less exciting than the first, it also has to do the hard work of setting up the rest of the series. Beyond establishing the miserable conditions of 2023, Mazin and Druckmann must introduce the show’s other leading character: Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a feisty 14-year-old who is the only known person to survive an infection — and, hence, could be the key to saving humanity. When Joel and Tess’s truck battery plan goes awry, they take an assignment from the anti-FEDRA resistance fighter Marlene (Merle Dandridge) to shepherd Ellie to one of the safe houses of her organization, the Fireflies. So the real story begins.

Still, even when they’re just moving pieces into place, the creators keep adding fascinating little wrinkles that make their world and its inhabitants more multidimensional. The best touch is also the quirkiest. It seems Joel has stayed in contact with the outside world — including with Tommy — by way of encoded radio messages. 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.

Unfortunately, Joel and Tess have already left the apartment when the radio crackles to life and starts blaring Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again.” That’s a song from the 1980s, which is a sign that there is trouble all around. Our heroes will have to find out for themselves what bad business awaits out there. And Joel will have to see if he can live up to the song’s lyrics — or if, for the second time in his life, he will fail to save a young girl.

Side Quests

• By the way, “Never Let Me Down Again” never reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop charts, but we can let that slide, because it’s a great song. 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.

• Mazin and Druckmann do a good job of setting the stage and telling their story through visual cues and subtle dialogue rather than blunt exposition. The most devastating example is in the first Boston scene, when an injured boy stumbles into town and is immediately checked over by the authorities. We can see in the background that the boy’s fungus test is glowing red, but he is told nothing of it, promised he’ll receive a good meal and a pile of toys once they give him some medicine — “just a little needle.” Later, we see the kid’s body in a pile of corpses Joel is burning. We can fill in the rest ourselves.

• Full disclosure: I have never played “The Last of Us,” and I am not really a gamer (though I have spent a lot of time watching my gamer wife and gamer kids play the likes of “Breath of the Wild” and “Xenoblade Chronicles”). 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.

• Make sure to read the extensive coverage of “The Last of Us” that the Times has run this week, including Brian Tallerico’s primer on the show and the game, Conor Dougherty’s behind-the-scenes look at the making of the series, Douglas Greenwood’s interview with Ramsey and James Poniewozik’s review.