![]() The Last of Us Part 2 players will also get a chuckle out of a scene where Sarah and Joel sit down to watch Curtis and Viper 2, a movie absent from the first game but namechecked as Joel’s favorite in the second. We spend ample time with Sarah, allowing Joel’s future interactions with Ellie to contrast more sharply, and we also get to know the neighbors who first introduce us to the game’s pandemic and see a bit of pre-pandemic life. The Last of Us boasts one of the best openings in video games, and the TV show expands it by detailing what happens in the day preceding that night-time opening. Nobody would have to do much thinking to draw a connection between characters masking up to prevent infection and our own reality, but don’t we want to have to do at least a little bit of thinking? The Intro and the Boston Quarantine Zone (Episode 1) ![]() Nobody would believe the physics-defying spores that don’t expand beyond set borders on TV (isn’t it weird how opening a door or even a protruding hole in a wall or ceiling never led to expansion?) anyway, but, as noted above, The Last of Us is not concerned with our current pandemic, but with the next one. Masks would make for an easy parallel to our own pandemic, but this change is for the better. ![]() This one has been making the rounds online ahead of the show's debut: There are no spores in HBO’s The Last of Us. Bush positioning recent American governance as a natural precursor to a world of summary executions, saturation bombing, quarantine zones, and black market ration card trading. Our present is no longer the onset of the pandemic but its endemic stage, and the totalitarian FEDRA is now openly discussed as fascist, with visual references to Operation Desert Storm and then-president George W. In the show, the pandemic breaks out in 2003, with most of the show taking place in 2023. The video game opens in 2013, the same year it was released, but takes place mostly in 2033. In that event, he concludes, “we lose.”Įarth loses a bit faster on TV. Of course, he notes, a cordyceps fungus that can take over the body of an insect can’t survive at the temperature of a human body, but if the earth were to “get a few degrees warmer,” its survival might dictate that it evolve to do so. ![]() With clear echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the first of them warns of increased air travel enabling a mutated supervirus to spread easily, and if the contradiction of the other expert dismissing just viral illness to warn instead about fungi seems like cheap irony, it turns around. The show opens in 1968, with two infectious disease experts discussing with a TV journalist the possibility of global pandemics. The nature of the infection itself has been reworked to have overt contemporary analogues. There are also too many examples of condensing and abridging gameplay segments to list all such instances (the much calmer escape and a sacrifice in Episode 2 will give an idea of what to expect), but here are some of the larger changes viewers can expect to see-and we will keep this list updated as the show continues through its first season. Where the game was locked into Joel’s point-of-view for all but a brief segment-meaning we see what he sees-the show takes a more omniscient one, showing us what other characters are up to and treating us to numerous flashbacks throughout its nine episodes. Rather than constantly prolonging the next story beat with excitement, TV tends to focus on context and backstory, and there’s plenty of backstory to go around with The Last of Us. Don’t expect this 9-hour series to find Joel and Ellie wheeling carts around to hop fences or fighting off Clickers every time they need to get from one place to another-Joel kills exactly one baddie with his giant arms, and it’s not an infected one. While HBO’s The Last of Us is true to the game, those who have played it can look forward to differences, if not surprises. We can almost imagine an HBO-style tagline: “It’s not Detective Pikachu. It’s exactly the sort of premise (serious, with contemporary overtones) and thematic material (both formats take on grief, hope, and parenthood) that you would expect more from cable TV than a Sonic game. The game, whose acclaim rests primarily with its narrative, was written and directed by Neil Druckmann (who, along with Chernobyl 's Craig Mazin, serves as showrunner for the adaptation) and follows a smuggler named Joel (Troy Baker in the game, Pedro Pascal in the show) as he ventures across the country with a teen girl (Ashley Johnson/Bella Ramsey) who might be the key to a cure to a fungal pandemic that has turned the world into an apocalyptic wasteland.
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