The Last of Us (TV Program)

In its stunning first-season finale, “The Last of Us” became a video game — and, in the process, morally potent TV.If you watch HBO’s “The Last of Us” there’s a good chance you know it’s based on a video game, even if you’ve never held a controller in your life. (I’ve never played the game, though before I reviewed the series I watched a 10-hour play-through video on YouTube, which I can safely say was a first in my career as a TV critic.)You didn’t really need to know the series’s origins to enjoy the zombie-apocalypse drama, though, and for most of the first season, it was easy to forget them. But in the season finale’s bloody and morally harrowing climax, “The Last of Us” fully embraced its video-game roots — and by doing so, became powerful TV.The setup: After a perilous cross-country journey, Joel (Pedro Pascal) has finally delivered Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to a medical center run by a resistance group called the Fireflies. Ellie, a scrappy teen immune to the zombie fungus, may be humanity’s only hope. But Joel learns at the last moment that the operation to extract a possible cure from her will kill her.As you’d expect, he springs into action. When he overpowers his guards in a stairwell, the narrative shifts into game mode. He collects the dead soldiers’ weapons in the same way a game character resupplies inventory. As he blasts his way through the hospital, the over-the-shoulder shots mimic the point-of-view vantage of gameplay; the clank of shell casings recall the sound design of modern games. You half expect to see a health and ammo meter somewhere in the corner of the screen.We have seen Joel pull off some spectacular fights, and the history of TV and cinema tells us to expect a battle royal here. This is not that. It’s a slaughter. The ambient noise fades behind a mournful score as Joel mows down the overmatched guards, as if he’s playing on easy mode. He shoots armed opponents and unarmed ones, grimly and mechanically.Finally, he makes it to the operating room, where Ellie has just gone under anesthesia. Point-blank, he executes the surgeon — who, however unethically, is trying to salvage an effort to save the human race — then orders the terrified nurses to unhook Ellie.He saves her. He wins. Isn’t this what you wanted?When “The Last of Us” was first announced, it may have seemed like a mismatch for HBO, that citadel of mature TV drama — at least if your image of video game adaptations was formed by “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” But a video game, even or especially a shoot-em-up, can actually have a lot in common with the antihero drama format.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Many great HBO dramas, going back to “The Sopranos,” have worked by making you share the perspective of imperfect protagonists. You may find Tony Soprano repellent, but you’re along for the ride. You spend time with him, you share in his conflicts, you laugh at his jokes. The act of following someone in a narrative makes you complicit — you want Tony’s story to keep going — which challenges you to question what you want and why you want it.Nothing makes you inhabit the experience of the protagonist quite like a video game. There is a challenge, enemies, a goal. You control the point-of-view character, and you want to win. So you are on the side of Mario, not Donkey Kong; the lone gunslinger, not the cannon fodder in the hallways.There is a history of games, including “The Last of Us,” that use this dynamic to make players confront complicity much as cable dramas do with viewers. The 2012 game Spec Ops: The Line puts the player in the position of a special-forces soldier who commits atrocities in the name of completing the mission. (“You are still a good person,” a loading screen taunts the player.)The “Last of Us” finale puts the controller, figuratively, in the viewer’s hand. You share Joel’s perspective. You have the gun. You have come to know Ellie, to laugh and grieve with her, to love her. You want her to live, and you have the charge of protecting her. So everyone standing in the way needs to die. Humanity will need to find some other way to save itself.Joel (Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) have overcome many threats together but their mission was intended to be for the benefit of humanity as a whole.Liane Hentscher/HBOWhat complicates the scene is that no one is entirely the good guy here. The Fireflies didn’t give Ellie the chance to choose her fate. But the scene also doesn’t offer the easy comfort of framing Joel as the underdog beating the bad guys. There are only people making lousy choices, trying to survive.In a conventional zombie story or game, what Joel does would be the right thing, the only option. Zombie narratives like “The Walking Dead” tend toward a simple moral framework: The world has gone to hell, the survivors have reverted to beasts, and all you can do is look out for you and yours. Pursuing noble obligations to a larger community only gets you killed.As my colleague Michelle Goldberg has written, “The Last of Us” has sometimes embraced this essentially conservative outlook, celebrating the wisdom of building fences and hoarding guns. But not wholly. Yes, there are raiders and cannibals out there, but Joel and Ellie also stay over in Jackson, Wyo., now a thriving communist society that does not, contra what “The Walking Dead” has led us to expect, hide a terrible secret.More important, as the finale makes painfully clear, the series rejects the easy moral escape clause of “It’s us against the world.” As much as Joel and Ellie may be a self-sufficient unit, they are still part of the world. Their choices have ramifications beyond themselves. And here, “protecting your own” may mean millions more dead, somewhere offscreen. The consequences of your beating the final level are not, whatever you might say, above your pay grade.Which is why, as disturbing as Joel’s shooting spree is, it is not the most chilling thing he does in the episode. The finale, like the video game, saves this for the end.We rejoin Joel driving away from the Firefly compound with Ellie. When she wakes up, he lies to her about what happened. “Turns out there are a whole lot more like you,” he says. But the Firefly doctors couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the immunity effect. “They’ve actually stopped looking for a cure.”The Fireflies were going to take Ellie’s life. Joel takes her hope.When I reviewed “The Last of Us” before the season started, I could talk about his act only in general terms. The series is “an extended horror story of single parenting,” I wrote. “Joel’s struggle is a heightened version of the everyday experience of how being responsible for a vulnerable life makes you vulnerable yourself, how it can make you do unforgivable things for them — or to them — in the name of protection.”Joel, as we now know, watched his daughter die at the beginning of the outbreak. It is not lost on anyone that he sees Ellie as a surrogate child. And to this point, under the worst conditions, he has done what a parent should: He has protected her and given her the wherewithal to face the dangers of the larger world and to accept her responsibility to it.But he fails Ellie in the way that many parents fail their children: out of love and fear. Maybe he doesn’t want her to feel guilty. Maybe he doesn’t want her to hate him. Maybe he suspects that, if she had the choice, she would have agreed to save the world instead of herself. She gave us good reason to believe that earlier, when Joel offered to turn around and leave with her. “After all we’ve been through, everything I’ve done,” she said. “It can’t be for nothing.”Joel’s tender betrayal of Ellie is unbearable partly because of the narrative structure “The Last of Us” borrowed from the video game. Ellie is, in game terms, a “playable character.” In the game, you play as Ellie while Joel is laid up with his wound. In the series, you join her point of view in the last two episodes before the finale, watching her fall in love in a flashback and then defend her own life while saving Joel’s.We have already been told that Joel has done horrible things to survive the apocalypse. But the unforgivable thing he does here is to make Ellie into a non-player character again, denying her the agency to be the protagonist of her own life.The second season will likely explore the fallout from Joel’s actions.Liane Hentscher/HBOIs it permanent? Maybe not. Just before the credits, Ellie questions Joel: “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true.” He sticks to his story. She says, “OK,” but there’s a disquiet in her eyes. Is she accepting that she is no longer humanity’s hope for a cure? Or that she gave Joel a chance to tell the truth and can no longer trust him?This may be the question that hangs over the next season. With this gut-punch of a finale, “The Last of Us” has made its stakes about something bigger than simply keeping Ellie alive. All of us, it says, have the right to play our own game. More

This week’s episode offered a different perspective on who the good guys and bad guys of the story are. But only briefly.Season 1, Episode 8: ‘When We Are in Need’You know that old saying about how history is written by the victors? Something similar could be said about fiction. The heroes of any story are the people the author wants us to follow; and the villains are anyone standing in their way. But another storyteller with another focus might have flipped that perspective on the same story.Two episodes ago in “The Last of Us,” Joel and Ellie were startled by what they assumed was a roving band of raiders on the fictional University of Eastern Colorado campus. One of these men ran at them while they were trying to mount their house and gallop away. Joel wrestled with him and broke the man’s neck, after taking a puncture wound in the gut.This is a clear-cut case of right and wrong, right? Some rogue tried to kill the good guys and suffered the proper consequences.This week though, we get a different angle on what happened. In a small, struggling community of survivors in Colorado’s former Silver Lake resort, the residents are mourning the loss of Alec, the man Joel killed. They considered him to be a hunter, who was out looking for food for his starving people when he was viciously murdered. When they find out Joel and Ellie are hiding out in a house just a few miles away, the group turns to their leader, David (Scott Shepherd), for justice — which, from their perspective, is wholly justified.This episode — this season’s next to last — is at once the show’s simplest to date and also the one that digs deepest into the larger themes. On one level, the story this week is one of pure suspense, set in just a few locations, and with not a lot of action in comparison to what we have seen before. It’s about a recuperating Joel and a terrified Ellie trying to fend off the Silver Lakers, whose intentions remain suspicious no matter how gracious David appears to be. (Give a lot of credit to Shepherd’s perfectly pitched performance, which makes David seem at once kindly and creepy.)Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Ellie first meets David out in the woods with his right-hand man, James (Troy Baker), where they are all chasing the same deer — which Ellie ends up killing. She gets the drop on the men and makes a deal at gunpoint. They can share the meat if James brings her some penicillin to treat Joel’s gut wound, which is red and swollen with infection. And while Ellie waits, David talks.The story he tells about where he came from seems credible. David is a religious man now, but he used to be a nonbeliever, before the plague. He and his flock left the Pittsburgh Quarantine Zone when the Fireflies toppled FEDRA in 2017; and they gradually made their way west, losing some people to raiders but gaining others.David firmly believes everything happens for a reason, as he has expressed on a banner hung in the Silver Lake steakhouse where his group gathers: “When we are in need, He shall provide.” He thinks God delivered Ellie to their settlement to be a potential leader and provider. (Ellie: “You inviting me to your hunger club? Thanks.”)But while David insists that what Ellie calls “some weird cult thing” is actually “pretty standard Bible stuff,” there are indications that something is amiss. For starters, David seems strangely hesitant when Alec’s daughter asks when they are going to bury her father. Even stranger: Though their pantry had only about a week’s supply of meat before the excursion to the Eastern Colorado campus, everyone at dinner gets a bowl of “venison” in tomato sauce. (Some of the savvier Silver Lakers seem hesitant to eat it, though they eventually do tuck in.)Then there is the question of whether David honestly wants Ellie to be part of his team. (“I’m a shepherd surrounded by sheep and all I want is an equal,” he says to her at one point.) James certainly seems eager to kill Ellie outright whenever David is not around. “If we bring her back she’s just another mouth to feed,” he grumbles. When David warns that if they leave her on her own she will likely die, James suggests, “Maybe that’s God’s will.”This debate over who gets saved and who gets culled — or eaten — raises some uncomfortable questions, making this episode especially provocative.Consider Joel again. All season long, we have heard about the terrible things he has done to survive, though we have seen only brief flashes of what he is willing to do when necessary. This week, though, we see him at his most merciless. When the Silver Lakers are closing in on the house where Joel is convalescing, Ellie leaves him with a knife and jumps on the horse to try and misdirect the hunters. She ultimately is captured; but it does not matter. Even a weakened Joel is strong enough to choke one man, tie up two others, torture his prisoners to get information on Ellie’s whereabouts and then viciously kill them. He behaves like the enemy they believe him to be.In the end, this episode comes down on Joel and Ellie’s side — and not just because they are the show’s main characters. David’s turn to cannibalism crosses too many lines. Once you start seeing everyone as either friend or food, you have lost the moral high ground.Even worse, it is strongly implied that David is just a sicko, through and through — and that he has been since before the end times. After his people cage Ellie, David’s low-key, rational-sounding conversations turn into fervid rants. He talks about how human beings are animals. He says Ellie has “a violent heart,” adding, “and I should know.” He praises cordyceps because “it secures its future with violence, if it must.” When Ellie escapes by breaking his finger, burns down the steakhouse (banner and all), and stabs him in the gut, David appears to be excited by her aggression. Later, as David pins her to the ground, his voice turns dark. “I thought you already knew,” he says. “The fighting is the part I like the most.” (Yikes!)The episode concludes with one horror after another. Joel arrives in Silver Lake, where he is appalled to find his horse dead in a cold storage facility where three headless human corpses have been cleaned, dressed, and hung on hooks. Back in the burning steakhouse, David seems to be on the verge of sexually assaulting her before she gets her hands on a meat cleaver. She practically turns feral as she hacks him to death.Yet even during such a grim and bloody day, there are glimmers of hope. The original sin of “The Last of Us” — in Joel’s eyes, anyway — is that he failed to save his daughter when the plague started raging. On this day, Ellie has already saved herself by the time he arrives; but at least he gets to give her the reassuring hug he never gave Sarah. This, in itself, is a kind of heroism. As a traumatized Ellie sobs, Joel holds onto her, tightly. “It’s OK, baby girl,” he says. “I got you.”Side QuestsThe actor who plays James in this episode played Joel in the video game. Although Baker did not act opposite Bella Ramsey in the original “The Last of Us,” it still must have been strange for him to play a character so hostile to Ellie’s existence.I appreciated the realism of seeing Ellie bring the penicillin back to the unconscious Joel and having no idea how to give it to him. (Just injecting it straight into the wound seemed to work OK.)On the one hand, a world overrun by mushroom monsters seems pretty bad. On the other hand, the survivors get to live out their lives in swanky resorts. Maybe worth it? More

This week, an extended flashback fills in significant aspects of Ellie’s life in the Boston Quarantine Zone.Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Left Behind’Although Ellie talks almost nonstop, during her long trip across the country with Joel she has said very little about herself.Going by the few details she has let slip — and what he have seen ourselves — we know she grew up in the Boston Quarantine Zone with no parents. She does not have a boyfriend. She did have a friend who knew how to perform an infamous finishing move in the video game “Mortal Kombat II.” She loves the comic book series “Savage Starlight.” She thinks whiskey is “gross.” She is wild about Will Livingston’s “No Pun Intended” joke books. She experienced shooting and violence firsthand back in Boston. And she got her nonfatal cordyceps infection while exploring a sealed-off shopping mall.About 95 percent of this week’s episode consists of an extended flashback to Ellie’s life in the QZ, while in the present day she scrambles to keep the wounded Joel alive. Most of what we see in the flashback confirms what we already knew. But some details are a bit different — and those details matter.For example: Ellie wasn’t just being educated by FEDRA; she was being indoctrinated. Singled out from her class as a future leader, she was being trained physically and mentally to protect the QZ and hunt Fireflies. Her stubbornness though was causing trouble. She was bucking authority, sneaking out at night, and fighting with the other girls — spurred on in part by her rebellious roommate Riley (Storm Reid).When the flashback starts, Riley has been AWOL for three weeks; but while Ellie is asleep in their barracks after lights-out, Riley sneaks back in and explains her where she has been. She joined the Fireflies, after meeting Marlene and commiserating about how much they both hate FEDRA fascism. Ellie is skeptical, but still agrees to join her best friend for a wild after-hours excursion — which turns out to be a trip to the mall. For those of us watching at home, the alarms bells are already ringing.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.It takes a while before any trouble starts; and in the hour or two before then, these two girls have the greatest night of their lives. The building has working electricity, so Riley lights the whole place up, and as the young ladies head down what Ellie calls the “electric stairs,” Riley announces her intention to show her “the four wonders of the mall.” Hearing this, Ellie beams and says, “You planned stuff?”Ellie’s excitement is the first clear sign that she is hoping this outing could — if played right — turn romantic. Anyone who has ever had an intense hang session with a pal they secretly have a crush on will recognize this vibe. When Riley makes fun of the mall’s un-looted Victoria’s Secret store and jokes about what Ellie would look like in lingerie, Ellie blushes and then surreptitiously checks her hair in the window’s reflection. Later, Riley takes Ellie’s hand to lead her to a working carousel, which plays what sounds like an instrumental version of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” Is this flirting?We experience all these moments from Ellie’s perspective, sharing her hesitancy to make the next move. Sometimes their faces get close, and Ellie clearly wants to lean in further for a kiss. But what if she is misreading the signs? The romantic tension is more stressful than a clicker attack.Throughout this episode, there is some foreshadowing of the looming tragedy. Before they enter the mall, Ellie and Riley come across a QZ resident who has killed himself with pills and booze. After they liberate his alcohol (which Ellie pretends to enjoy), the corpse falls through the floor. Later, while they are enjoying the marvels of a video arcade — playing “Mortal Kombat II,” naturally — the camera moves away to show a wall-clinging monster, awakened by the noise. It is a nerve-racking mood-shift, worthy of a great horror movie.Ellie and Riley have some cranky moments together, arguing about whether the Fireflies are a force for good. Ellie fancies herself a freethinking anti-authoritarian, but she has spent much of her adolescence being inundated with anti-Firefly propaganda. When Riley grumbles about how the QZ can keep the lights on but can’t feed their own people, Ellie counters that the Fireflies didn’t help matters when they blew up a storage depot. The friends later briefly split up after Ellie realizes that Riley didn’t just stumble across this mall but has in fact been posted there by the Fireflies, who have her building explosives for them. (Ellie is not persuaded when Riley insists she would never let them use those bombs on her.)Ellie comes back though, because Riley is about to be reassigned to Atlanta, and Ellie doesn’t want their last memory of each other to be her storming away in anger. They reunite in the Halloween store — the final planned “wonder,” after the carousel, a photo booth and the arcade — where Riley talks about how the Fireflies have replaced the family she lost.“I matter to them,” she says.“You mattered to me first,” Ellie says.Then they put on monster masks, dance around to Etta James’s cover of “I Got You Babe,” and finally kiss. Ellis panics and apologizes; but Riley says, “For what?” The huge smile that spreads across Ellie’s face — followed by her asking, “What do we do now?” — is one of the sweetest and most relatable moments yet in this series.The magic can’t last. While Ellie and Riley are still giddy over their first kiss, that wall-clinging savage from earlier barges in. The girls kill him off, but not before he wounds them both. Ellie, we know, will survive. Riley, presumably, does not. (Her death is not shown, but it is possible that when Ellie hinted to Joel back in Kansas City that she had killed before, she meant Riley.)Earlier in the episode, a FEDRA officer mapped out Ellie’s future, pointing to two possible choices. She could keep goofing around and then spend the rest of her life as a miserable QZ worker-bee; or she could follow the rules and one day become a boss. Toward the end of the episode, Riley offers a different binary. They go ahead and kill themselves; or they could savor every last remaining second of their humanity. Riley knows what the right option is: They stay alive until the decision is out of their hands: “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up.”Back in the present — in the basement of a snow-covered suburban home — Joel says the opposite. She wants Ellie to leave him, to let him die. Instead, she tears the house apart until she finds a needle and thread to stitch Joel up. He holds her hand tenderly, before she threads the needle and gets to work.Two more minutes down.Side QuestsThis episode is based on a downloadable expansion to the “The Last of Us” video game, released about a year after the original’s 2013 debut.The scene where Riley lights up the mall is absolutely beautiful, rich with the soft, colorful glow of retail outlet signs. (Also oddly touching is the electronic clatter of an old arcade, echoing through the empty walkways. Who would have guess that a “Mortal Kombat II” punching sound could be poignant?)The funniest visual gag in the episode: The sign on the multiplex box office reading “Back in 5 min.”The Ellie/Riley debates about FEDRA are fascinating, because during Ellie and Joel’s journey, both sides have at different times been proven right. Law and order has indeed broken down in some “liberated” QZs. But some of those communities fell apart in the first place because FEDRA’s rule was unbearable.Nearly everything in Ellie and Riley’s room either comes up again in this episode or is a part of Ellie’s lore. We see a “Savage Starlight” comic, an Etta James tape, a “Mortal Kombat II” poster, and, of course, the first volume of “No Pun Intended.”“How does the computer get drunk?” “It takes screen shots.” Another Will Livingston classic! (Ellie and Riley, born too late for that kind of tech, don’t get it.) More

This week, Joel and Ellie encounter a safer and more social way of life, but it’s not clear whether they want any part of it.Season 1, Episode 6: ‘Kin’In the old western movies, the aging cowboys and gunslingers would sometimes talk about giving up the vagabond life and buying a ranch, where they could settle down — bothering no one and going unbothered. In this week’s “The Last of Us,” Joel and Ellie spend a fair amount of the episode riding horses, shooting guns and facing down posses, just like those western heroes. They also find the time to talk about what their lives might be like after the Fireflies whip up a cure for the cordyceps infection. And sure enough, the first thing Joel imagines for himself is living in an old farmhouse and raising sheep — who, he says pointedly to Ellie, are “quiet and do what they’re told.”As we move into the second half of this season and get closer to the point where Joel is supposed to turn Ellie over to the Fireflies and possible save humanity, it’s only natural for these two to start thinking about what comes next. And it makes sense for Joel — who has seen enough of this fallen world — to want to escape from everything and everybody.But Ellie’s experiences have been more limited. She never experienced life before cordyceps. She seems less sure of what a “normal” life should be like. She knows the Boston Quarantine Zone — functional but depressing. She got a brief glimpse at Bill and Frank’s survivalist oasis but never really saw it in action. She has seen the horrors of “Killer City.” So what does she want for herself? She used to dream of being Sally Ride. Will that ever be an option again in her lifetime?At the start of this episode, Joel and Ellie invade the remote cabin of an old Indigenous couple, Marlon (Graham Greene) and Florence (Elaine Miles), who are skeptical about their prospects in Wyoming. (When Joel asks for the best way to head west, Marlon says, “Go east.”) But then our heroes make it all the way to Jackson, where they encounter a whole other way of living: calmer, safer and more social.And neither Joel or Ellie are sure they want any part of it.To be fair, by the time they get to Jackson, they are feeling pretty stressed. Marlon and Florence warned them that Wyoming would be a deathtrap, with every major city swarming with infected and the wilderness strewn with corpses. Even the Jackson emissaries they meet out on the road initially surround them on horseback and let a snarling dog sniff them to see if they are sick. (Joel looks terrified as the hound approaches Ellie, unsure if she will pass the test.)Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Then they get taken behind Jackson’s enormous wooden gates, and inside they find a kind of utopia. The residents have power, thanks to a nearby hydroelectric dam. They have a sewage system. They grow vegetables and raise livestock. They have nice houses, Christmas trees and movie nights. (During Joel and Ellie’s stay, the community center is showing the 1977 Neil Simon comedy “The Goodbye Girl.” Hey, in the end times, a movie is a movie.)Jackson also has Joel’s brother, Tommy, who left the Fireflies and settled down with his new wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). As soon as Maria sees Ellie — all scruffy and scrappy — her maternal instinct kicks in. She gives Ellie a few things she’s sure the girl needs: an “eggplant”-colored winter coat, a menstrual cup and a haircut. (Maria: “Who’s been cutting your hair?” Ellie: “World class salons.”)She also offers Ellie advice, born of her years as the Assistant District Attorney in Omaha. “Be careful who you put your faith in,” she says. Maria thinks she knows the kind of person Joel is, based on what Tommy has told her about their time on the road. Ellie’s reply? “Maybe I’m smarter than Tommy.”As for Tommy — described derisively by Joel two episodes ago as “a joiner” — he looks both happy and wary to see his brother. He is not too keen on the way Joel seems to roll his eyes at Jackson’s communistic “share and share alike” approach to survival. (When Joel suggests that this kind of living isn’t their way, Tommy replies, “There were other ways, we just weren’t any good at them.”) But when Joel explains who Ellie really is and what his mission is — and adds that he feels like he has lost his edge and his reaction time as he has gotten older — Tommy agrees to take over the job of escorting Ellie to the Firefly compound at the University of Eastern Colorado.Hearing this plan, Ellie panics. She may not know exactly what kind of life she wants to lead after the world gets fixed, but she knows she is not ready to live it without Joel. So Joel relents. They say their goodbyes to Tommy and head down to Colorado together, feeling more bonded than ever. Because Maria told Ellie a little about Sarah, Joel starts letting down his guard. He talks about the old world, and his old job. (“Everybody loved contractors,” he insists.) When Ellie asks whether America used to be like the way things are in Jackson, he admits the real world was much more competitive.Gabriel Luna and Pascal in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOBut it seems Joel was right to doubt himself. The UEC campus turns out to be Firefly-free, with indications that the group has fled to Salt Lake City. Before Joel and Ellie can regroup, they see raiders roaming by and have to hurry back onto their horse — though not before Joel, while fighting off one of the interlopers, gets stabbed by a broken baseball bat. He has been dealing with some kind of chest pains all episode. That, combined with the wound in his gut, fells him on the outskirts of town.Back in the first episode, as Joel and Ellie left Boston, the radio in his apartment played Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” sounding a warning he did not hear: Do not fail another teenage girl. As he slumps off his horse, the song returns, in a slowed-down, ethereal cover version. It’s like a voice from beyond, mocking Joel with lyrics that now sound like lies: “He knows where he’s taking me / Taking me where I want to be.”Side QuestsIt’s too bad that Joel and Ellie didn’t get to spend more time with grumpy old Marlon and Florence, because those two were a hoot. Greene (“Dances with Wolves”) and Miles (“Northern Exposure”) are veterans of the big and small screen, and their characters’ deadpan digs at each other are wonderfully wry. When a gun-wielding Joel asks Marlon to show him where they are on his map and growls, “Your answer better be the same as your wife’s,” Marlon asks Florence, “Did you tell him the truth?” When she says yes in a hesitant monotone, an uncertain Marlon then asks, “Are you telling me the truth?”Ellie’s brain has been so warped by her book of puns that when she looks upon the splendor of an active hydroelectric plant, she says to Joel, “Dam!” (Joel: “You’re no Will Livingston.” Ellie: “Who is?”) And Joel’s brain has been so warped by her daily barrage of questions that after mentioning what a dam does he quickly adds, “Don’t ask me how it works.”Joel and Tommy have their first long conversation at an actual bar, drinking what looks like pretty good whiskey. This got me thinking: How many unspoiled food and beverage products from before the apocalypse would still be unconsumed 20 years later? I suspect there was probably enough bottled alcohol left in the world to supply survivors for centuries — but only if they could safely get to it.This episode opens with a flashback to Henry’s suicide, which again includes the sound of Ellie’s haunting reaction: a startled combination of a gasp and a pained moan. That’s one end of Bella Ramsey’s remarkable acting range. The other end is seen and heard in Ellie’s unceasing line of goofy banter, as when she teases Joel’s poetic description of proper rifle-handling by asking, “You gonna shoot this thing or get it pregnant?” More

Joel and Ellie have been dealing more with humanity recently, but this week the undead reclaimed center stage.Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Endure and Survive’Oh yeah, that’s right … “The Last of Us” is a zombie show.For the past two episodes Joel and Ellie have been dealing with mere humanity, seeing the best and worst possible paths for their kind from Bill and Frank’s romantic optimism to Kathleen’s “kill ‘em all” bitterness.But in this week’s episode, which premiered Friday night on HBO Max — it will also air on HBO on Sunday night, opposite the Super Bowl — the undead reclaimed center stage. After Kathleen’s army rolls up on Joel, Ellie and their new allies Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), the ground suddenly opens up and a rampaging horde of the infected swarms out, slaughtering scores of rifle-toting goons. It’s an abrupt reminder of a world-ending threat that has never stopped lurking for the past 20 years. Lately, the survivors of the cordyceps plague have been pointing their guns in the wrong direction.George Romero’s told this same kind of cautionary tale in 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” and then again in the sequels. Romero’s human characters set up barricades against the teeming masses of mindless monsters; but then over and over they would get distracted by their own bickering, let their guards down and then either get shot by outsiders or eaten by ghouls. The TV series “The Walking Dead” ran for 11 seasons with a similar idea. Though the fortresses on that show kept getting bigger — and the people inside them better organized — year after year, some catastrophic disaster would befall the living and the undead would capitalize.What distinguishes “The Last of Us” from its predecessors is that the series isn’t about the downfall of human society per se. That’s just an imposing, ominous backdrop to what so far has been a more intimate story. The action this week in Kansas City could have filled an entire Romero film or two or three “Walking Dead” seasons. But here these troubles are just something else our heroes have to move past, while hoping to suffer as few lingering injuries as possible.All of this though does not keep the episode’s director, Jeremy Webb, and the screenwriter Craig Mazin, one of the series’s creators, from leaning into the mayhem in Kansas City. The result was some of the most straight-up thrilling sequences in this show since Episode 2.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.The episode begins with a flashback to about 10 days ago, when Kathleen’s resistance movement finally overcame the FEDRA troops and dragged their corpses through the street in riotous celebration. On that night, she begins her tireless search for Henry, a former FEDRA informant who she blames for the death of her sainted brother, Michael. She starts by rounding up all the collaborators she can find and saying — or more accurately lying — that if they cooperate they will get the chance to be tried in her court. (“You’re all guilty, so that’s how that’ll go.”) That is how she learns that Henry and his 8-year-old brother Sam are under the protection of Dr. Edelstein — the man Kathleen will later interrogate and then shoot, as we saw in last week’s episode.But don’t feel too bad for FEDRA, or for their network of Quarantine Zone snitches. As Henry later explains to Joel, the authorities were so abusive to the city’s residents — “Raped and tortured and murdered people for 20 years,” he says — that the town became known far and wide as “Killer City.”Henry and Sam are, as suspected, the people who sneaked up on Joel and Ellie in their high-rise office building hideaway at the end of last week’s episode. While leaving Edelstein’s secret bunker, Henry saw Joel and Ellie escape an ambush. Sensing these newcomers could aid their own escape, Henry and Sam followed them in order to propose a plan. The four of them are to travel together through the city’s maintenance tunnels — which Henry insists are free of the infected, thanks to a secret FEDRA project that even Kathleen does not know about — and then sneak out through a residential neighborhood near an embankment, next to the bridge out of town.Keivonn Woodard in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOOn the way though, Henry chooses to come clean to Joel, to let him know that Kathleen has reason to be furious. Henry did point FEDRA to Michael, because he needed medication for Sam, who in addition to being deaf, once had leukemia. (“I don’t work with rats,” Joel reflexively says at one point. “Today you do,” Henry replies.)So that’s what leads to our escapees facing dozens of militia rifles. They get through the tunnels OK, but then a sniper pins them down after they surface and by the time Joel disarms the gunman, Kathleen’s soldiers have bulldozed their way in. Henry offers to sacrifice himself to allow Sam and Ellie to escape, but Kathleen isn’t moved by any sob story about a sick brother. “Kids die, Henry,” she says. As she pulls out her gun, she adds, “It ends the way it ends.”Cue the monsters. Before Kathleen can shoot, one of her huge armored vehicles falls through a weak spot in the earth, loosing masses of the extra-ferocious underground creatures that Henry calls “clickers” — including one Big Boss mega-zombie who looks absolutely horrifying and also kind of awesome. (The video game includes a whole hierarchy of the infected.) Thanks to Joel covering his allies from the sniper’s nest as they scramble toward the embankment, all four of them are able to get away in the melee. But they are not unscathed: Sam gets infected. Though Ellie tries to save him by smearing some of her blood into his wound, he goes feral anyway, and Henry has to shoot him. With no one to stay alive for, he then shoots himself.That’s a truly heartbreaking ending, because these brothers would have made great traveling companions. Ellie and Sam had become fast friends, bonding over her collection of puns and a comic book series they both love. (Quoting the comic, Ellie says, “To the edge of the universe, endure and survive!”) Right before the end, they share what frightens them both, with Ellie admitting, “I’m scared of ending up alone.” Then Sam — poor, doomed Sam — asks the question that everyone should have probably been asking while they were trying to kill each other.“If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?”Side QuestsKathleen doesn’t stick around long enough to become the formidable tragic villain she seemed meant to be; but Mazin does give Melanie Lynskey two terrific scenes that add dimension to the character. The first is the collaborator roundup on the night FEDRA fell, where she berates the assembly for selling out their neighbors for “apples” and then demands they tell her what they know. (“You’re informers! Inform!”) In the second, she walks around an old bedroom and talks about growing up with her beloved brother, a good man who wanted her to forgive Henry. The point of these two scenes is to show that Kathleen had defensible reasons to destroy FEDRA and everyone who helped them — but she knows she took things further than Michael would have.Sam and Henry hide out for 10 days in Edelstein’s hidden loft, with a small supply of canned food and a big bag of crayons. Later, they take Joel and Ellie to the remnants of an underground settlement, which has books and games. As always, the great dream in nearly all post-apocalyptic stories — and heck, maybe in life itself — is to find a secure space with some food and something to do, and then to stay put for as long as possible. More