Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey fight fungus the hard way in HBO’s new series.
He stars as Joel, a violent smuggler chaperoning sassy Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a ruined America.
Their undead odyssey is overly familiar and can play like a video game with just the talking parts.
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in ‘The Last of Us’.Liane Hentscher/HBO
Pascal brings a lightness to gory trauma, aging himself with unkempt gray fuzz, mumbling anah-reckonTexas twang.
He looks like he would be really bummed about killing you.
In 2003, Joel’s a regular-guy contractor and a single dad.
A fungal infection rapidly spreads through humanity, turning victims into mad chomping killers.
These cordyceps creatures are essentially, though not technically, zombies.
Civilization collapses, so J.K. Rowling never finishesHarry Potterbut also never tweets.
Beyond the walls linger monsters who used to be people and people who are the real monsters.
Young Ellie is a typical doomsday adolescent masking loss behind perpetual middle-finger snarl.
She’s also a genetic miracle.
A cordyceps bite usually turns a person into an invulnerable beast defeated only by brain trauma: Zombie stuff.
Somehow, Ellie survived an attack.
Her DNA could save the world, if Firefly scientists out West can analyze her immune system.
It’s a whole continent of danger from here to there, plus a personality problem.
Joel don’t talk much.
Ellie won’t stop bantering.
Can a gruff badass get along with a precocious kid?
The answer is obvious, which represents a bigger problem.
What’s different with this Armageddon?
Star power, an HBO sheen, a music budget.
There are big-deal guest leads.
The action is fine, functional.
One episode completely shifts the game’s canon, but some scenes get recreated shot-for-shot.
That may work best for newbies, or fans who prefer adaptations barely adapted.
It contributes to the feeling of watching someone else’s replay.
There’s aWalking Deadproblem, too.
Without spoiling anything specific,Last of Usdoesn’t reinvent any wheels there.
Joel and Ellie go various places populated by a charismatic leader and barely named followers.
The fun with any formula is the variables.
The game stood out for sheer gorgeousness.
Co-directors Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann built Eden in ruins, flooding empty downtowns with reforested green.
Druckmann executive-produces the TV series withCraig Mazin, a former spoof artist who nailed somber historical terror with 2019’sChernobyl.
The game made merry with the “clickers,” blind echo-locators who react to noise.
Alas, those concepts fade to undead mush.
The character-first focus is admirable, and there are moments of sweetness with the main duo.
But their dynamic feels obvious; does Joelneedan origin-sized hole in his heart?
Check me out,man!"
and “Dude, you got to go up in the sky!”
She gets trickier material in a late flashback, andLast of Uscomes to life in breakaways like that.
Nothing else in the nine-part debut season pops like that.
It’s never clear why the game’s 2013 outbreak has been transposed to 2003.
Cultural references feel frozen from earlier: A-Ha, Linda Ronstadt,Mortal Kombat II, cassette tapes.
