A young woman strums a tune for her new lover, illuminated by soft sunlight that filters through the ruins of a music shop. Across town, a paramilitary commander tortures a member of a barbaric cult. Swarming all around the decaying city meanwhile are thousands of “infected” — zombified hosts for a parasitic fungus.
Welcome back to bleak yet often beautiful post-apocalyptic world of The Last of Us. One of the standout TV shows of recent years, it returns for a tour-de-force second season that continues to defy expectations with its deft blending of visceral horror and heart-rending drama. As with the first season, the seven new chapters are adapted from the eponymous video game series and revolve around the relationship between an infection-immune teen named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her surrogate father figure, sad-eyed smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal).
The story picks up five years after the first-season finale, in which Joel went on a bloody rampage to save Ellie from a fatal procedure to extract a cure from her DNA — potentially dooming mankind in the process. We meet them again in a fortress commune in Jackson, Wyoming, where their relationship has become as frosty as the climate. Now 19 and a member of the town’s patrol team, Ellie hunts down infected and steers clear of an overbearing Joel, whose efforts to protect her only drive her further away.
The turmoil is soon compounded by a threat from the outside world as a cadre of vigilantes head for Jackson in search of Joel. Leading them is Abby (an unnerving Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of a surgeon Joel executed during his rescue mission years earlier. Tough, truculent and traumatised, she resembles Ellie’s mirror image.
Ellie also finds herself becoming increasingly like her adoptive father as her sense of duty to her loved ones reveals her own capacity for ruthlessness. But there is also warmth in her tentative romance with fellow patrolwoman Dina (Isabela Merced), who steals away with Ellie on a treacherous mission to Seattle.
If that all sounds a bit vague, it’s to avoid diminishing the impact of the bold, bruising turns the series takes. It’s no spoiler, however, to say that for all the nightmarish scenes involving disease-ravaged zombies, The Last of Us is also a story about the harm and hurt people inflict on each other. Scenes set in hastily abandoned cityscapes littered with corpses might be dystopian fiction, but they are also serve as a warning of how suddenly civilisation can fall apart.
Every detail in this expansive, vividly realised world seems to have been thoroughly considered by showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, every technical aspect fine tuned. And yet the pacing is taut, the tension unyielding; the performances brim with life and emotional authenticity. A flashback chapter charting the erosion of Ellie and Joel’s relationship is perhaps the pinnacle of Ramsey and Pascal’s extraordinary work so far.
That this subtle, sombre character-focused episode comes just a few after one of the most intense, brutal hours of TV this year is testament to the show’s terrific range as it fuses the intimate and the epic, the human and the monstrous.
★★★★★
On Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK from April 14 at 9pm, and on HBO and Max in the US from April 13
