General news
The Last of Us premiere knew exactly what to change from that tragic prologue
Last of Us
To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories
To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories
When I first played The Last of Us on release back in 2013, following the unending torrent of acclaim comparing it to the cinematic greats, I went in blind. I knew it was a zombie-adjacent post-apocalyptic epic, totally my shit at 16, but what I didn’t quite expect was a rich, deeply humanistic drama about grief, our species’ capacity for love, and our barrelling descent in the face of its loss. What happens when the thing you love the most — in the case of Joel, played in the series by Pedro Pascal, his daughter — is snatched away from you by the cosmos, by circumstance, by something so insane as an overnight pandemic that renders its victims blood-thirsty, parasitic puppets?
That’s the setup in the prologue to the video game, which puts you at the wheel of Sarah, Joel’s aforementioned daughter, portrayed in the adaptation by Nico Parker. Similarly, in the series, we begin from her perspective: it’s Joel’s birthday, he’s working late again, and so we spend the day with her instead, going to school and running errands as it becomes increasingly clear that something is deeply off. But that doesn’t matter for now — it’s Joel’s birthday, and she’s got him a present, his favourite watch that, busy so he is, he’s neglected to fix. He comes home, they watch a movie together, she falls asleep on his shoulder; it’s the daddy-daughter relationship of a guy who simply does his best and a kid who, wise beyond her years, appreciates it nevertheless.
Then the world is torn asunder, gradually and suddenly, by… drugs? Mass hysteria? A biological terrorist attack? Whatever the case, things move fast: Joel, Sarah and her Uncle Tommy (Gabriel Luna) escape the suburbs on the road after a close call with a maniacal neighbour, having already taken a chunk out of her own elderly son. Planes fall from the sky. A family friend’s farmstead burns in the night. The newsman is silent; phone reception is dead. A nearby town descends into chaos, panicked bodies flooding the streets. Their car wrecked in a crash, Joel carries Sarah to a military blockade. Then… it happens.
The brilliance of the prologue in the game is that it dunks you in icy water from the off. The whole sequence, from when Sarah awakens to her dad being missing to her all too avoidable death, lasts around fifteen minutes, depending on how much you dawdle in the gameplay bits. In the series, we get a little more context: the show opener, a Walter Cronkite style interview on ABC in the ‘60s, delivers a wad of exposition on the existential threat of pathogens like Cordyceps, parasitic terrors thankfully contained to the animal kingdom which invade their victims’ nervous systems, flooding their brains with hallucinogens and piloting their bodies. They can’t survive in human body temperatures, but what if global warming forced them to evolve?
That we’re afforded more time with Sarah and Joel before her death only worsens the emotional rug pull. Parker is brilliant, too: she imbues Sarah with the sure-mindedness of someone double her age, in friction with her innate, big-eyed innocence. Crucial to the game as it unfolds, and indeed the series, are the parallels between Joel’s biological daughter and Ellie, who becomes a subconscious surrogate. It’s a similar juxtaposition of traits that makes Ellie such a compelling character: born into an age of terrible cataclysm, of inhuman ruthlessness, Ellie would surely love to just be a kid, but that’s impossible in the world of The Last of Us, where one lives under the constant threat of bullets and bites. Spending more time with Sarah, it’s clearer to see why Joel, in the throes of grief even tweo decades later, so soon embraces this uncanny stand-in.
This first episode sets the tone for the rest of the series, which takes an astute approach to adaptation: rather than stripping the source material back, it expands. So when Sarah dies, fleshed out so she is, it really, really fucking hurts — even if you’re expecting it.
The Last of Us airs on Sky Atlantic every Monday at 2 a.m.
Source Credit: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-last-of-us-tv-show-premiere
