The Last of Us it’s the new one TV series HBO license plate created by Craig Mazin, award-winning showrunner of Chernobyl which brings Naughty Dog’s fascinating and revolutionary video game of the same name to the small screen, which originally arrived for PlayStation 3 in 2013. The show, which sees Neil Druckmann himself among the executive producers and screenwriters, creator of the original work, has already conquered the public and critics, registering excellent ratings.
Although only the first three episodes have been aired so far, the emotional and qualitative impact that the project has communicated is impressive, denoting not only an accurate fidelity to the source material, but also perfectly coherent and in line original ideas with what is narrated in the video game. Probably, to understand the strength of The Last of Usyou simply have to start from the beginning, from the pilot and analyze its content in relation to current eventshowever, doing some very revealing spoilers on the plot of the work.
The drama of the pandemic
Already in the video game, right from the start, it is clear that we are in a dramatic pandemic context, in an America where a mutation of a fungus, Cordyceps, has gotten out of hand, spreading a very dangerous infection for which the only two options they are death or transformation into a human-mushroom hybrid that is not at all pretty to look at. Having experienced the effects of the coronavirus on our skin in the last 3 years (both directly and indirectly) seeing a series that begins with a similar incipit creates a strong connection with the viewer. Furthermore, to further strengthen this union between fiction and reality, within the television work there is a completely new prologue that better immerses the public in the atmosphere and mood of The Last of Us, inextricably binding to the many news bulletins as well as talk shows where, recently, we have heard virologists and experts on the subject speak. A correlation which, however, is an integral part of the game itself in the first place and therefore does not have the purpose of riding the wave of contemporaneity.
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Zombies that never go out of style
L’Epidemic also arising from Cordyceps, is connected to another detail that should not be underestimated or the presence of infected. Although the various stalkers, runners, clickers and bloaters are not real undead, the zombie apocalypse theme is around the corner and is perfectly in line with what we have seen in recent years of television and cinema. From the diffusion of this horror subgenre thanks to the legendary George A. Romero (who codified this genre with Night of the Living Dead of 1968), we have witnessed thousands of different apocalypses with as many cannibals, resurrected and awakened corpses without ever getting bored, demonstrating that we are dealing with a timeless topos. In The Last of Us however, this detail is not predominant within the story and there are many other decidedly more important themes that emerge, but in any case this helps the series in terms of commercial positioning, bringing hot content that is always watched with interest.
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A father and a daughter
The story of The Last of Us revolves around the relationship between a father and daughter. Not surprisingly, the special love that binds, in the narrative premise, Joel (Peter Pascal) to his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker), breaks down abruptly, transforming a rude but loving father into a man apparently without feelings, secretly looking for a void to fill. Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a 14-year-old orphan who grew up in a world where Cordyceps had already taken hold, thus being born into a brutal and degrading context. In meeting Joel, the girl finds a father figure that she has never had in her life and at the same time her gruff companion rediscovers the value of the family and the affection of a daughter. A recurring narrative theme that works not only because it represents a journey of growth and evolution for both characters, but also because, with the clash of two such different figures, you can range a lot in terms of characterization. On the one hand, the profound value of oppositions and contrasts can be exploited, to then create harmony once their bond becomes solid.
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A land in ruins
It could actually go unnoticed given the infinite amount of suggestions, themes and details of The Last of Us, but America represented in the series is a place in ruins, with nature increasingly regaining control of the territory. The setting of the HBO show, similar to what is depicted in the video game, is very suggestive, with totally destroyed buildings, other prisoners of vines, with the vegetation becoming more and more thick and invasive. A perspective that, beyond the triggering cause of the Apocalypse, is quite plausible even in our world. If we then take into account that, compared to 2013, the media are now making the population increasingly aware of the damage caused by pollution and global warming, it is clear that the background has a decidedly stronger hold on the public. As in the case of the pandemic connection, however, we are not dealing with a disturbing element that prevents vision, but exactly, on the contrary, with one that keeps viewers firmly in place due to its marked realism.
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A world of survivors
In the series, as obviously in the video game, the survivors are analyzed in an anthropological, sociological and psychological way, the unfortunates who, saved from the Cordyceps, fight for their lives in a degrading and brutal society, where the laws have been abandoned in favor of a dictatorship military, perpetually fought by a group of terrorists, the Lights, who seek lost freedom. With this human regression there is an opportunity to investigate the soul of each character, primary and supporting character, not only to understand his story, but also to understand the motivations that drive him to make certain choices. As in the state of nature theorized by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, “one man wolf” that is to say “man is a wolf to man”, in a fight against everyone where the important thing is simply to remain standing, to the detriment of the lives of others. A somewhat extreme and pessimistic exasperation of today’s world, where competition rather than collaboration is rewarded in every area and where one must always be better than others, at any cost.
