Joel is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, and is Sarah’s father and Tommy’s brother. He works too much, but is very attached to his affections. When a mysterious disease turns infected people into vicious attackers, Joel does what he can to get his family to safety, but ends up losing his daughter. Years later, in a quarantine area near Boston, he works in illegal trafficking with a woman, Tess, known in the darkest days, when she had recently lost Sarah and the disease had thrown the world into chaos. From the rebels to the military regime that dominates the quarantine zones, he is tasked with bringing a girl, Ellie, to a meeting point in the West, in the middle of what remains of Boston, where the infected are always lurking.
Based on the award-winning video game of the same name, The Last of Us is one of the most anticipated series of recent years and definitely lives up to expectations.
Scripted by Chernobyl author Craig Mazin together with the art director of the game itself, Neil Druckman, The Last of Us is a fairly faithful retelling of the original story, but with a slightly different perspective and some variations. As the authors have repeatedly stated, the violence has been reduced: when it comes it’s terrible, but it’s not as omnipresent as in the video game – also because it would have ended up anesthetizing the audience and even resembling the implacable Black Summer. Tense as it is often, The Last of Us is above all elegiac, shot through with melancholy for a world that has ceased to exist, as well as the typically post-apocalyptic theme of how humanity can regress after the collapse of civilization.
The journey that Joel and Ellie face, from Boston to Salt Lake City, crosses a good slice of America and passes through several key encounters, which show various reactions to the horror. The disease is not a trivial infection, but a contamination by cordyceps fungi, capable of controlling their hosts and with the sole aim of spreading and expanding their colonies. A sort of zombie apocalypse, where there is no cure because it’s not bacteria. However, Ellie, already in the first episode, proves to be immune to the infection: even if she is bitten she does not become infected.
The reason will be explained later in a flashback, but it doesn’t matter: she doesn’t remember it and for Joel the girl ends up being a sort of new daughter. The Last of Us is therefore both Ellie’s training path and the rediscovery of Joel’s paternity. The two are often alone on the road and, surrounded by an extremely hostile world, they can only count on each other. In fact, the game overturned the perspective in some important segments and the player no longer controlled Joel but Ellie, who is everything but a trivial damsel in distress – and the same change of protagonist also takes place in the series in several points.