The Last Of Us

Fungi To Be With

The Last Of Us
Canada/USA 2023
9 episodes Jan - March 2023

A quick, shout out of a review for The Last Of Us, a TV show based on a successful Playstation game of the same title. It’s not one I’ve played as I kinda stopped playing video games around the same time I started writing this blog (too much of a time suck). So I don’t know how faithful it is to the original storyline but I do know this new one includes a fungal infection that is the exact same one, as observed in ants, as was used in the original novel and movie of The Girl With All The Gifts (reviewed here and here). And it takes place in a similarly bleak, post-apocalytpic wasteland where small clumps of humans divided into various factions struggle to survive in the world which all went to hell 20 years prior.

Interestingly, the post apocalyptic work is set contemporary to when we’re watching as an audience so, yeah, the fungal-zombie apocalypse started twenty years prior to this. We see the first night where civilisation collapses in the very first episode and, I’d have to say the series starts off strongly at the very least. We meet main man Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, as he loses his daughter to violence that first night and this starts him off on the path to becoming an embittered smuggler in the post-apocalyptic world. Then, as part of a trade, he agrees to escort a tough, 14 year old girl across the country to find a resistance group hospital (like I said, despite everyone trying to survive, there are warring factions in the dregs of humanity left after the events in the first episode) to use her blood as a cure for mankind. Ellie, played absolutely brilliantly by Bella Ramsey, is immune to the fungal infection. That is to say, she is infected but shows no signs at all of infection... as she isn’t a lethal zombie-like creature trying to infect you within 12 hours of being infected herself. You’ll find out just why she’s immune in the pre-credits sequence of the last episode in season one.

Pascal is also very good with this and he plays a really cold and ruthless character who, suprise surprise, softens to Ellie and bonds with her before the end of season one. Bonding exercises include surviving the infected, surviving the ruthless leader of a rebel faction who is after them (played by the great Melanie Lynskey from Yellowjackets, reviewed here and here), various raider groups, ill health (when Ellie has to stitch up a bad knife wound on the barely conscious Joel and trade for penicillin, barely escaping from the ‘Christian Cannibals’ she makes the trade with) and various other gnarly events.

And, it’s okay I guess. It’s not hugely brilliant and I’m not too sure why it’s caught the popular imagination so much but, although it’s fairly clichéd and very predictable. it’s well made, well acted and is nice to look at. Some of my favourite moments are ‘nature against the wreckage of humanity’ shots... such as a frog jumping on the keys of a piano in a half destroyed hotel or a bunch of giraffes between wrecked tower blocks. So there are some poetic moments and it’s things like this that kept me watching.

Another positive is that there are few episodes which aren’t self contained. I think there were two where things were left on cliff hangers to resolve in the next one but it’s more like a 1970s TV show in terms of just having a central mission with a new adventure each week. Most of the episodes crosscut between a character in the early days of the fungi-zombie pandemic and the present day which, is an okay way to do it but it gets a bit overworked by the end of the show... although there’s a lovely episode which tells Ellie’s back story and shows just what... or rather who... she lost to the virus herself.

And that’s me done on this one. The Last Of Us is a well put together show and has a lot of entertainment value and some good acting from the leads. The mushroom people (as I like to call them) are not particularly credible, it seemed to me, so I did find it hard to get too worried about them, once I’d finally seen one. All in all, it’s a better show than most of the ones that, say, Disney are putting out these days (yeah, I’m talking about their Star Wars and Marvel shows) and I’d certainly watch a second series... which I’m assuming will be based on the sequel game. Not the best of modern TV shows but certainly not the worst either.