More ground rules and body horror
I have to be brutally honest: I found episode 1 of The Last of Us a bit dull. I attributed that to it being a pilot telling a story I already basically knew, but in a five star rating system, I’d probably give it a three. Good news, though: episode 2 is way better! We open in Jakarta on September 24, 2003. A woman, Ibu Ratna, professor of mycology at the University of Indonesia, is detained by a serious-looking military authority and brought to what looks to be a hospital. There, Ratna inspects a corpse, which has a nasty bite on its leg and a mouth full of still-moving mycelium.
Measured against the intro to the first episode — the talk show bit — I thought this was much stronger. The first intro had the unenviable job of having to explain the idea of an apocalyptic fungal infection to an audience that may have been primed for just another zombie TV show. Here, we know what’s going on, and the opening sequence coasts on that, delivering dread and melancholy all the way through. When the professor realises the scope of the problem — at that point, only about 15 infected people unaccounted for — she tells the military man: “Bomb. Start bombing. Bomb this city and everyone in it.” Clear-eyed about the problem, Ratna asks to go home and spend her remaining time with her family.
We cut to Ellie, who wakes up to find Joel and Tess standing guard over her. They interrogate her and learn that her destination is a Firefly military base, where her miraculous survival might help manufacture a cure. Joel says he’s heard it all before, and wants no part of it. There’s some lovely staging in this scene. Ellie sits under a beam of light, tufts of grass and flowers sprouting around her. Joel, on the other hand, is in the dark. And Tess, as the scene progresses, steps from out of the dark with Joel, ending up right between the two. The whole time, Joel’s hands shake. Tess’s faith, meanwhile — in everything she thought she knew about the infection — is shaken too. Tess finds the middle ground, and the adventure continues. Ellie may not be who the Fireflies think she is, but delivering her will still net the adults what they need: a car battery.
Outside, the group comes upon a crater. “Is this where they bombed?” asks Ellie. It is, Tess says. Most big cities, we learn, were hit like this. But it’s not apparent that it worked in all those other places, or what “worked” means, for that matter. A bit later, when Ellie references zombies that use echolocation, Tess and Joel exchange worried looks. Back to back, we get two one-on-one conversations between Ellie and either Tess or Joel. Tess comments that Ellie is a weird kid, but she’s obviously warming to her. They talk about how Ellie got bit in the first place (she gives one of those answers that feels like it’s omitting something), and you can sense there’s a flicker of recognition when Ellie talks about breaking into an off-limits area in the quarantine zone. That’s Tess and Joel’s bread and butter; they’re smugglers, after all.