The monsters and the milieu
The destroyed Boston that the three emerged into also is determinedly faithful to the video game, with an identical colour palette and oddly pretty destruction brought about by the baroque fungus, humanity’s bombs and nature reclaiming the earth. The second episode, directed by Druckmann, was keen to recall some of the game’s favourite shots; Ellie and Joel admiring the rooftop view, for instance.
The familiarity extended to the ‘clickers’, deeply infected individuals with their heads encased in fungus. The first encounter in the Bostonian Museum was almost a carbon copy of the game, as Joel, Tess and Ellie sneak silently in the dark as the horrifying screeches (again, identical) of the blind clickers rang around the halls. Seasoned game players may have been disappointed that Joel didn’t get the job done by clobbering them all with bricks, but you can allow a bit of dramatic license to up the heartrate for the passive viewer.
Most of the major plot points of the first game are being matched beat-for-beat so far, but there has been some colouring outside of the lines. The climactic encounter of the second episode was a key moment in the game, but the detail of it was notably different, shifted away from human foes to focus more on the horror of the infected. A decision that made sense in the context of the episode.
The differences
For someone who has played through The Last of Us many times, the differences and additions are the most interesting part of watching through Mazin and HBO’s adaptation. A full 1:1 recreation would be useless, as you would have to spend a lot of time watching Joel moving planks around and crab-walking through ruined offices hoovering up every roll of sticky tape and pair of scissors in sight. Or having his neck chewed off by a mushroom zombie several times in a row but getting to try again.
Those gaps have been filled by some smartly judged TV detours, ones that are vastly different to anything in the game but only serve to enrich its tale rather than overwrite it. The ‘double prologue’ of the first episode was particularly chilling, with John Hannah’s 1960s scientist explaining in terrifying detail the potential for a fungal pandemic that takes over humanity’s brains and crushes society as we know it. This wasn’t featured in the game, and certainly had the pragmatic dread of Mazin’s Chernobyl series. Yes, it’s zombies, no matter how you dress it up; but seeing it laid out in such scientific terms was a splendid way of immediately putting viewers on notice.
Repeating the trick in episode two, as an Indonesian scientist is whisked away to explore the first appearance of the irreversible virus, was another terrific addition. For all of the effective horror born from the Last of Us video game, these quieter scientific detours, driven by our own recent pandemic crisis and the ‘what if?’ nature of the disturbingly real cordyceps, are perhaps the most terrifying.
The slowburn 2003 sequence that sees the infection spread was a considerable extension of the game’s heart-wrenching prologue. Spending more time with Joel’s daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) as the first hints of cordyceps apocalypse whirl around her was terrifically executed. And the blurred image of an elderly lady becoming one of the fungi’s first victims as Sarah idly flicks through a DVD collection is not one that will leave me any time soon.
