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It was probably at some point during the truck ride in episode one that you really felt it: that oh boy, we’re really watching The Last of Us now kind of a feeling. When Joel, Tommy and Sarah flee their home, we watch from Sarah’s viewpoint in the back seat as their suburb of Austin falls apart around them.
Beat for beat, it was exactly as it was when you first played it on your PlayStation a decade ago. It was almost eerie to watch it again on TV. There’s the flaming house, the crashed car, the desperate family Joel tells Tommy to leave along the side of the road when they scream for help.
And it went on throughout the opening episode. There were tweaks to the set-up and to Joel, but Pedro Pascal’s growl was exactly the right shade of pissed off. You just about managed to stop yourself murmuring, “That was in the game,” every time something from the game popped up – a line, a camera angle, a little detail – though only just.
But despite the fact that Craig Mazin and the team bent over backwards to reassure fans of the game that their beloved story will be honoured on TV, there’s a really vast gulf between the two tellings. It’s not in the casting or the scripting or the general vibe. It’s in the climates the two The Last of Us properties arrived in.
When the game was released in June 2013, the US had seen Barack Obama sworn in for his second term. In the UK, the Tories had just published a draft bill to look at holding a referendum on leaving the EU. David Moyes had just been measured for his Manchester United blazer after being hand-picked to lead them to glory by Sir Alex Ferguson. The nation grooved to the funky, funky sounds of Bonnie Tyler’s Eurovision entry ‘Believe in Me’ as it stormed to 19th place.
Basically, it was a very different world. Worries about governments taking advantage of disasters to do away with civil liberties were the stuff of bug-eyed Alex Jones monologues and a tiny, wacky fringe.
Now the TV series arrives nigh on three years since – and you might remember this – a weird virus thing kicked off in China, and then landed in Italy, and then went absolutely everywhere.
The idea of a government taking extreme measures to protect its citizens from a respiratory disease carried by aerosols is not the same now. In 2013, it was a pretty off-the-shelf way of creating a dystopia scenario everyone could agree was really dystopian. No civil rights, not much in the way of democracy, violence in the streets and stacks of corpses being hoyed into fiery pits: yep, pretty bleak.
The same story is now far more overtly political. Obviously, the Fedra police state of The Last of Us is way more brutal than anything that happened over any of the lockdowns. Not one of Chris Whitty’s press conferences included a graph of the week’s summary executions.
However, there remains the feeling on the conspiratorial right and left that the actions of Whitty or Anthony Fauci and those of your common or garden totalitarian One World Government are at the very least two ends of the same slippery slope. That brilliant cold open where John Hannah’s professor talks about “billions of puppets with poison minds” hit different when I remembered walking through Sefton Park in Liverpool, and hearing something very similar from the anti-vax cranks by the fountain.
It’s not like this stuff is just happening on the fringes either. Yes, in the UK a few particularly lost souls – some attention seeking, some genuinely bewildered, some wilfully obtuse as a brand because they can’t get minor roles in ITV4 police procedurals anymore – have started suggesting that the presence of defibrillators for public use is proof that the Covid vaccines are poison.
But look at the Telegraph’s opinion pages and you’ll see a loathing of lockdowns and an apparently unironic use of the phrase ‘deep state’ is pretty standard. A few weeks ago, Tory backbencher Andrew Bridgen lost the whip after comparing the vaccine rollout to the Holocaust and baselessly accused the British Heart Foundation of covering up evidence that mRNA vaccines were harmful.
And that, really, is the hurdle that The Last of Us will have to clear as the series goes on. The extra skin-crawling potency of its story, the reason that it’s been made right now, is also the thing that plays most uncomfortably for anyone who’s freaked out by the conspiracy theorists.
Usually the route that post-apocalypse fiction takes is to have its subversives take the fight to the man, and it feels great. Now we’re in a weird situation where the analogues of those subversives are Piers Corbyn and the Magna Carta fundamentalists who kept their gyms open.
Something, you suspect, has to give. The Last of Us started with an homage to its roots, but there’s a chance here for this particular strain of cordyceps to grow apart.
