Imitations of Life

On the ‘best’ / ‘worst’ episode of The Last of Us

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

The TV show The Last of Us has been a commercial and critical hit, but its episode by episode review scores tell a different story: maybe even the dreaded story of the critic/audience review gap. Based on the video-game of the same name, and co-created by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin (I wish some relation) the show is a post-apocalypse story, the apocalypse zombies, the zombies fungal. Its inaugural season recalls (intentionally?) the film Children of Men: a grizzled cynic, in this case Pedro Pascal as Joel, is sent on a mission by a female terrorist cell leader to ferry a girl to a secret team of scientists. But the girl, in this case Bella Ramsey as Ellie, isn’t carrying the first pregnancy in years but the first immunity to zombieness.

In those same years unfolds the story of episode 3, ‘Long, Long Time.’ In it Nick Offerman plays Bill, a vindicated survivalist and logical extension of Offerman’s anti-government character Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. One day, into Bill’s amply supplied solitude stumbles Frank, played by Murray Bartlett of White Lotus fame — that is, stumbles and falls into one of Bill’s mantraps. Frank persuades Bill to spare him then to let him into his compound for a meal…