First things first: as I mentioned in my Season One review, I’m not a gamer, I’ve never played The Last of Us or even watched a how-to video for it. So I’m going to discuss this episode, and all subsequent ones, based solely on how it works as a TV show.
Judging on that basis, the super-big “When You’re Lost in the Darkness” comes off pretty well. All of the season’s episodes cover familiar ground in one way or another, but the premiere perhaps treads the most familiar of that ground. As I believe Leo Tolstoy said, all zombie apocalypses are alike, but every post-apocalypse is unhappy in its own way. The episode eventually gets to the specifics of this one and, more importantly, establishes Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsay), and Tess (Anna Torv) as interesting characters before the three set off on their dangerous mission. But before that, we have to watch civilization fall the way it does in so many dystopian shows and movies.
Which is not to say that the material is bad; just more generic than what’s to come, especially in the later episodes. And even those sequences are well-executed, even if some of them, like Joel, Sarah, and Tommy’s harrowing attempt to get out of town before the mushrooms catch them, feel too much like a game where you’re not allowed to play
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I’m told that driving is actually a cutscene in the game, and maybe it feels different there, coming between different levels; here I felt like I had to have a controller in my hand the whole time.
But the most compelling parts of the episode come before and after the nightmare that engulfs the world over a weekend in late September 2003. Although Joel will become our central character, he is a supporting player in much of the 2003 scenes that focus much more on his daughter Sarah, played by Nico Parker. In these scenes, Sarah looks like a typical teenager – at times lost in her own head, at others outgoing, friendly and generous to others, including her father and their neighbors. Parker (daughter of Westworld alum Thandiwe Newton) is excellent, holding the screen and establishing Sarah as someone we could believably root for throughout the series.
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This, of course, should not be. Instead, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman use these scenes to establish the emotional stakes for Joel and make us deeply feel at least some of the pain he feels when Sarah is shot by a panicked soldier on the night the world is destroyed . The person Joel has become when the story jumps forward to 2023 is defined almost entirely by this tragic moment. He’s emotionally closed off and effectively brutal, and when his new subordinate Ellie is threatened by a soldier at the end of the episode, he has PTSD in a flashback to Sarah’s death and goes absolutely savage in the way he beats this guy.
Before we get to that violent escape from Boston, we first need to establish the state of America 20 years after the zombie uprising. It’s a grim, often unpleasant reality: a collection of fascist city-states ruled by FEDRA, the armed enforcers of what’s left of government. Those lucky enough to reach one of FEDRA’s enclaves have homes, food, and safety, but not much else. There are mass hangings, and anyone infected with the fungus that destroyed civilization—like, say, the poor little boy who wanders into the Boston Fort right after the time jump—is quickly killed, his body burned to avoid further spread of the disease. It’s no shocker to learn that there is a resistance group, the Fireflies, who oppose FEDRA’s unyielding rule.
However, Joel doesn’t care about that, or seemingly anything else. He has a secret route in and out of the city so he can bring in drugs and other supplies from outside to make his life a little more bearable. And he has a girlfriend in the person of Tess, who is bad in her own way. (We’re introduced to her surrounded by armed men after a beating, but it’s clear that she’s in command of the room the entire time, and would probably have found a way out of her predicament even if a conveniently timed Firefly bomb hadn’t been given to her escape route.) He exists rather than lives, haunted by the loss of his daughter even more than the loss of everything else he knew, with few goals beyond surviving the next day.
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Then the target arrives in the form of Ellie, a girl close in age to Sarah who needs a way out of town. Like Tess, we meet her while she’s someone else’s prisoner—in this case, Firefly leader Marlene (Merle Dandridge). Ellie doesn’t have as much command of the situation as Tess, but we also quickly see that she’s not afraid of being chained to the wall by gunmen who won’t explain why they want her. And when Marlene puts her in the custody of Joel and Tess, Ellie immediately starts teasing her taciturn new male guardian with her curiosity about the apartment and his life. It’s an instantly lovable entrance for Bella Ramsay and a great contrast between Ellie’s outgoing personality and Pedro Pascal’s deeply muted Joel.
Ellie (Bella Ramsay) and Tess (Anna Torv) in The Last of Us series premiere. HBO
The Boston scenes are notable for their lack of zombies, although we do get the sickening images of a dead body engulfed by a wall of mushrooms when Joel and the others traverse an underground tunnel late at night. And we find out that Marlene needs Ellie to get to her other fireflies in the west because Ellie is somehow immune to the infection. The focus on humans and the possibility of a cure is a sign of how thoroughly FEDRA has destroyed the immediate threat, but also a marker of how The Last of Us — like The Walking Dead and other examples of the genre — can treat the undead as unfortunate and dangerous. fact of life, and other people as real monsters.
All in all, a promising start, though I’ll admit I got to the end of it wondering why this was the thing so many of my gamer friends were excited about. But “When You’re Lost in the Darkness” effectively sets up the world and our main characters, making all the good things to come possible.
Some other thoughts:
* Television needs intervention to prevent future title sequences like this or the one used by The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from the opening credits of Game of Thrones. People don’t like that sequence because it’s two minutes of CGI forming different shapes; they like it because it’s two minutes of CGI telling a sort of story by establishing the geography of the series as a whole and of individual episodes, changing periodically to introduce new points on the map or prepare us to return to little-visited places like The Pike. While the idea of the spores rising into something resembling a city—i.e. a metaphor for how the world as we know it has been swallowed up by mushrooms – is clever, in the end it’s still just a bunch of shapes and not interesting enough to understand for as long as it does. I already wished the screeners had a button to skip the intro until the second episode.
* John Hanna does a good job in the opening scene in 1968, playing a scientist who warns of just this kind of disaster aided by climate change. His monologue could easily play as bald exposition — a way to contextualize what’s going on as we witness events from Joel and Sarah’s POV — but Hanna absolutely sells the innate fear of this thing.
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* Pedro Pascal has many gifts as an actor, many of which are on display in this episode. Regional accents—or at least this regional accent—might not be one of them. The good news, depending on your point of view, is that Joe’s Texas accent pops up from time to time in this episode and throughout the season and pretty much disappears after a while.* Finally, it’s always nice to see the former alum of Friday Night Lights’ Brad Leland in a story set in Texas, even if things end much worse for his character here than they did for Buddy Garrity on FNL.
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