Good old postapocalyptic fiction. At least in its company, we can take some small comfort knowing that however bad things might appear out there, we can always imagine worse things in here. Take for instance The Last of Us, HBO’s latest appointment television series and probably the first massively successful adaptation of a video game. It’s a pretty damn grim—but also pretty damn fine—piece of postapocalyptic storytelling.
Set in an alternate version of 2023, The Last of Us takes a bleak view of a post-pandemic world. Twenty years after a mutant fungus got into the world’s food supply and triggered a global collapse, those in the US who escaped infection reside for the most part in dingy, walled-off quarantine zones, kept in check by the watchful, piggish gaze of local authoritarian governments. Meanwhile, beyond the walls, the infected lurk—zombies in all but name. The story follows deuteragonists Joel (Pedro Pascal), a grizzled, sick-of-this-shit smuggler in the Boston QZ, and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the foul-mouthed fourteen-year-old Joel has been hired to protect. Amazingly, Ellie appears to be immune to the lethal fungus. By delivering her to a lab on the other side of the country, the hope—dim but not unthinkable—is that researchers might develop a cure from her blood. So begins a cross-country trek.
A little more than halfway through its first season as of this writing, the series has proven a worthy and, by most measures, a faithful adaptation of its 2013 source material, which is often cited as an exemplar of what video games as a medium can do. Certainly the show recognizes what makes the video game tick. Blending the conventions of the zombie and road-trip genres and topping the whole thing off with a bare dusting of buddy-comedy, The Last of Us moves adroitly among monsters, characters, and spectacles. The zombies, with their fungal fruits and grinding splintered teeth, are horrifying. Pascal and Ramsey make for an entertaining duo. And the westward journey, quintessentially American despite the capsized nation, is punctuated by some genuinely stunning optics: the scattered wreckage of crashed airplanes, lushly overgrown cities, skyscrapers slumping one into the other. “You can’t deny that view,” Ellie says to Joel, as the two survey the Boston skyline.
Coincidently, this line of dialogue also features in one of several scenes that had me wildly reenacting that DiCaprio meme from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin—directors of The Last of Us game and HBO’s Chernobyl (2019), respectively—like to leave Easter eggs for fans of the game, and they especially seem to like Easter eggs that are shot-for-shot recreations of the game’s cinematic sequences. For those in the know, the result is delightful, if also a wee bit jarring in its naked attempt to pander. Watching iconic shots of, say, Ellie balance-beaming her way above a city street or Ellie flipping through a gay porno magazine in the backseat of a pickup leaves one—or leaves me, anyway—with the vaguely chagrined pleasure of having been singled out for fan service.
More effective and more interesting, by contrast, are the show’s departures from its source material. Its handling of violence for example is a good deal more compelling than in the game. The game and its 2020 sequel encourage players to turn a critical eye toward the violence—often spectacularly grisly—that they enact on screen. At the same time, the critique gets couched in a combat system that is both impossible to opt out of and deeply satisfying. The show doesn’t have this problem. Unburdened by the need to keep players’ thumbs active, it can navigate this ethically fraught terrain much more nimbly, portraying violence as at once inelegant, messy, excessive, traumatizing, and—because it’s a postapocalyptic TV show—inevitable.
A similar departure occurs in the show’s depictions of relationships and community. Here the obvious example is the show’s third episode, a 75-minute tearjerker starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett. In it, Offerman and Bartlett elaborate—with astounding grace and tenderness—a gay romance only ever implied by the game. Yet this romance is really just one part of the show’s larger efforts at imagining the possibilities, but more often the impossibilities, of community in the ruins. What do we owe people, the show asks, and what do they owe us? Where do I start, and where do others begin? The game, which is anchored firmly in Joel’s perspective, limits these questions almost exclusively to his and Ellie’s not-quite-father-not-quite-daughter dyad. The show, its cameras considerably less encumbered by a single point of view, does not. In fact, arguably the show’s most provocative answers to these questions unfold in two of the unlikeliest contexts. The first is among the zombies themselves, imagined in the show as a hive mind, consuming and consumed—the individual turned literally self-less, vanished into the whole.
The second answer, no less despairing but much more human, arrives with the opening of the latest episode. There, The Last of Us imagines the triumphant aftermath of a successful revolution against a murderous QZ government. Yet as images begin to unfurl of revolutionaries executing captives, lynching government agents, and dragging dead bodies through the streets, the message is not one of a liberated polity, a people made more free. The message instead is The Who’s, a bitter affirmation of a status quo imagined as inescapable: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
In fairness, such pessimism is basically SOP for postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that all but assumes the meanness and selfishness of human beings when you get right down to it. We are the monsters. We are the walking dead. It’s a good story. And for some it’s maybe even reassuring. But is it true? Now there’s a question. Amid what lately has felt like a deluge of apocalyptic reports from out there—reports of massive earthquakes, exploding trainwrecks, toxic plumes—it seems a question worth sitting with.

Ben DeVries (’15) graduated with degrees in literature and writing. He and his wife Jes, a fellow Calvin grad, live in Champaign, Illinois, where Ben is looking to add some letters behind his name. On the academic off-seasons, he reads fantasy and works as a glorified “go-fer” at the Champaign Park District. He’s been known to make a mean deep-dish pizza.