The Last of Us
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
HBO’s prestige treatment of Naughty Dog’s masterpiece: Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler twenty years past the cordyceps apocalypse, escorts Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenage girl immune to the fungal infection, across a ruined America, and the show understands the game’s core: the plot is the road; the story is what the road does to two people learning to love again.
The adaptation choices are superb: the Bill and-Frank episode (Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett’s hour, one of the best episodes of television this decade, full stop) expands the game’s most affecting subplot into a complete love story; the finale’s Joel’s choice, the lie that defines him, lands with the game’s full weight. Season 2 (adapting Part II, the most controversial sequel in gaming) divides exactly as the source did, with Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby arriving under the weight of a discourse storm the show handles with dignity.
Verdict: Watch it. The best video game adaptation ever aired, until the argument starts about which one is.
