The Last Of Us Season 1: Setting the bar high for future adaptations

On Sunday night, HBO’s smash hit The Last Of Us came to an end after a record-breaking 9-week run. Since its first episode, which aired on Sunday, January 13, Neil Druckmann’s adaptation of the video game of the same name has been making all the headlines, amassing millions of viewers around the world and proving that adapting video games to the small screen while remaining faithful to the source material is 100% possible.

For years, video games have been successful and powerful storytelling mediums, however, their live-action adaptations have not. More often than not, these ambitious attempts to bring these stories to life have been lacking in what made the original story so special to fans. The Last Of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, seems to be one of the few exceptions to the rule, setting the bar very high for what we should expect from future video game adaptations.

Regardless of what you think of The Last Of Us and its story, what the creators behind the show accomplished in this first season is truly something to behold. Without losing the artistic vision that made the video game so popular, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann took the well-known and beloved story and transposed it into another language, expanding its multiple plots and characters, and enriching the universe with such love and care that this, perhaps, became the key to its success – its big, big heart.

But allow us to elaborate further on that.

The Last Of Us, the humanization of Joel and Ellie’s story

Even before the first episode of The Last Of Us aired, a lot of people were wondering whether or not the TV show would live up to the hype. On paper, Joel (Pablo Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) main arc is a tried and true story, a generic post-pandemic apocalyptic tale that we’ve seen countless times in the past. But what makes this TV show unique and a standout among others in its genre is that the story isn’t just about the journey and struggle of these characters to survive a pandemic caused by a fungal infection while forming a strong bond between them, but at its very core it’s more about their human nature.

In both the first season of the TV show and the first part of the video game, Joel and Ellie’s main goal is to try to survive in a ravaged world filled with zombie-like creatures known as the infected – humans that have contracted an infection caused by the Cordyceps fungus – while trying to reach the base of a rebel militia known as the Fireflies, where a cure for the disease could potentially be made.

We mainly see all this through Joel’s eyes, a man who loses his only daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) during the first outbreak and as a result becomes a rude, closed-off, grumpy smuggler just trying to get by and find his missing brother, whom he hasn’t heard from in a long time. But there’s more to him than what he lets on to the world, and it’s as the story starts to progress that he slowly begins to realize that, although he has closed himself off from any human emotion, he’s found in Ellie someone worth fighting for again.

Ellie, on the other hand, knows that she’s special. She’s immune to Cordyceps and is aware that her blood could hold the key to a cure, but she’s also just a teenager trying to survive. She has no one, so having Joel as her guide and father figure changes her completely. Like many children born after the pandemic began, she’s innocent in the sense that she hasn’t experienced many of the things we take for granted (her first time getting in a car remains one of our favorite moments from the show). 

So while she may not think twice about killing an infected to save her life, she’s still just a child in many other aspects of her life, and facing the harsh reality of the world around her forces her to grow faster than she should.

And that’s what makes Joel and Ellie’s journey together so special. Because it’s not just about them fighting and/or avoiding the infected to fulfill their mission and reach their every-changing destination. It’s about their human experiences both as individuals and as an eventual father-daughter duo. It’s about how they deal with isolation, camaraderie, growth, loss, fraternity, and the moral complexity of surviving in one of the world’s most dire situations.

We know it’s cruel, it’s unfair, but it’s also beautiful because it shows us the very essence of humanity. Joel and Ellie’s bond grows and improves as the episodes go by, going from a tense and distant relationship of two strangers bound together by fate, to a caring and loving family relationship. They find in each other a reason to keep fighting even when everything around them is collapsing.

We see them go to extreme lengths to keep each other alive, and so when the season finale raises the question of whether individual happiness is worth more than the collective good, you realize that no matter what you thought at the beginning of the show, there’s no correct answer to that question. When we find a speck of light in a completely dark world where joy is nothing more than a luxury, do we want to let it go or hold on to it? As we said, there’s no correct answer.

Representation in apocalyptic times

In terms of representation, The Last Of Us truly exceeded all of our expectations. The creators of the show had previously stated that the queer aspects of the original story would be part of the adaptation, but truth be told, we never expected them to be so front and center. We talked a bit about it when we released our mid-season queer check-in a few weeks ago, but a lot has happened since then, so we want to dig a little deeper into that.

Besides giving us one of the best episodes of television we’ve watched in a long time (Episode 3, ‘Long, Long Time’) and making us cry our eyes out with the tender love story of Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), The Last Of Us also gave us a peek into Ellie’s backstory, thereby establishing her sexuality earlier than we had expected – aka the already confirmed season 2. 

Throughout the 9 episodes of this first season, we see hints about Ellie’s sexuality being thrown around here and there, like when Tess (Anna Torv) asks Ellie if she has a boyfriend and the girl awkwardly says ‘no boyfriend’; or when Ellie doesn’t even flinch when she finds Bill’s adult magazines in his car and instead of reacting like any teenage would, she laughs and wonders how a man can walk with ‘that thing’ among his legs.

But it isn’t until episode 7 ‘Left Behind’ that we get to see in full display who she is and what made her the person she is in the present. 

As with Bill and Frank’s story in episode 3, it is through a series of flashbacks that we get to see Ellie and Riley’s (Storm Reid) own story. Set weeks before Joel and Ellie meet, we learn that Ellie and Riley are best friends and roommates at a FEDRA facility that serves as both a school and an orphanage (FEDRA is the Federal Disaster Response Agency, which runs quarantine zones with the remnants of the US military). 

One night, as Ellie is getting ready for bed, Riley comes back after having disappeared for weeks. As it turns out, Riley has joined the Fireflies now but came back to spend one last day with her best friend before moving to Atlanta, so we see the girls embark on one last adventure together: a date at the mall.

Somewhat mirroring Bill and Frank’s journey, we see Ellie and Riley come to terms with their sexuality and share with each other the strong feelings they have developed for one another. We get to see them enjoying their time together playing Mortal Kombat on the arcane, dancing to ’80s music while wearing silly Halloween masks, drinking smuggled alcohol Riley somehow acquired, and even sharing their very first kiss. But this is a post-pandemic apocalyptic world where the good times are never destined to last for long, so just when all seems well, an infected crashes their date and all hell breaks loose.

We’re not going to lie, the whole thing hurt like hell. But what happens with the infected helps reinforce the fact that even though these girls were born into a world where Cordyceps already existed, they’re still not prepared for what’s out there in the real world. They fight, and they even kill the thing, but unfortunately, in the midst of the chaos, they are both bitten and that little incident seems to seal their fate: they’re both going to die.

However, we know that Ellie survives (this is actually when she finds out she’s immune), and while we don’t see it graphically, in the season finale we do learn that it was Ellie who had to kill Riley so the Cordyceps wouldn’t take over her. This revelation is very painful, but it also gives us a deeper understanding of the person Ellie is, what drives her motivations in the present, and what will cause her to change in the future – for better or worse.

It was hard to find the time to include love stories in a TV show where survival is the dominant factor, and even harder for these to represent the LGBTQ community. But The Last Of Us said ‘hold my gun’ and managed to weave two wonderful LGBTQ stories into the main plot, teaching us that love – the kind that changes your life and gives you a purpose – can be found even in an apocalyptic world.

HBO’s The Last Of Us is a wonderfully faithful adaptation of a beloved story. A true showcase for both Pascal and Ramsey to demonstrate their great abilities as performers (we expect Emmy nods for these two). It treats us with stories that are equal parts heartwarming as they’re heartbreaking, which helps make it not just another action-packed, graphically impressive post-pandemic apocalyptic show, but something much more complex than that.

As we’ve already said, it takes everything that made the source material so special and bolsters it with powerful character-driven episodes that help us realize that when all is said and done, there are actually more terrifying things than the infected wiping out the world.

As if we were playing the video game, in The Last Of Us, we don’t just passively watch the narrative unfold, but we’re active participants in it all. And while it hurts like hell and we’re still recovering from all we lost this season, now that we’ve watched all nine episodes, we can say with complete certainty that it wasn’t for nothing.

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The first season of The Last Of Us is available to stream exclusively on HBO Max. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all queer stuff!

Featured Image: Image courtesy of HBO. Photograph by Liane Hentscher.