Loss and Escape from Boston

Based on one of the most successful and critically-acclaimed video games of all time, “Last” isn’t a true zombie saga in the Romero vein, but rather more of a viral outbreak zombie saga like “28 Days Later.”

A fairly faithful adaptation of the video game, our intention in following this series is to explore it from the vantage point of someone who’s not played the game. It’s not about how much it deviates from the source material, but how well it holds its own.

We’ve heard enough of people arguing that Bella Ramsey doesn’t look like the Ellie in the video game because it just doesn’t matter. That’s one property and this is another. “The Walking Dead” deviated in lots of ways from Robert Kirkman’s comic book series and in some cases it was better.

In that spirt, we cast off the shadow of the video game — because we can still enjoy it for what it is all by itself — and enter the world of “The Last of Us” as if it was a wholly original project, because in many ways it will prove to be just that. It’s a different medium entirely, so it has no choice.

From here on, there will be spoilers from the super-sized series premiere, so if you’re still reading and you haven’t watched the show yet — honestly, that’s on you at this point. Consider yourself warned.

A lot of groundwork has to be laid to get a series off the ground, and especially one that has a more complex high concept like a fungal outbreak. We appreciated the awkward footage from a 1968 television show laying out how this would work before jumping into the story proper.

In that short intro, we were also slapped around with the idea that fungi can’t exist in host bodies above 94 degrees. But if the temperature of the Earth were to rise just a few degrees, the fungi might just have to adapt and then humanity could be at risk of becoming carriers.

It’s subtle as far as a climate change narrative goes, but it does creep into your head and nest there (like a fungus) when you consider the temperature of the world is creeping every so slightly higher.

From there, we jumped to 2003 and were introduced to our main lead, and his primary and secondary motivations for everything he does. Pedro Pascal, who’s become famous for rarely taking his helmet off while babysitting a “Baby Yoda,” took time from his “Star Wars” gig to breathe life into a single father who’s both overwhelmed and deeply devoted to his daughter.

Unlike most zombie apocalypse series, we appreciated that this one slowed down and took a little time to really dig into what happens right before all hell breaks loose. Nico Parker was fantastic as Joel’s oft-terrified — but dangerously curious — daughter Sarah.

Rather than focus on Joel’s double shift at work, we instead followed Sarah to school and later to a place where she could repair a watch for her dad as it’s his birthday. Alas, he’d come to remember that day for far worse reasons.

The slow burn of things being a little off, an outsized military presence, emergency vehicles flying by, was managed perfectly as Sarah made her way home.

A silly scene early on saw her going to visit the neighbor, an elderly woman who is catatonic in a wheelchair. It was through this woman, in the background behind Sarah, that we got our first hint that something was wrong.

The tight focus on all of this through young Sarah’s perspective was beautiful in keeping us largely unaware of the particulars, but sensing a growing wrongness right along with her. It’s also remarkable and terrifying just how quickly it all goes to hell.

That night, Joel gets a call from his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), who’s been locked up for stopping a customer from attacking a waitress. He leaves a sleeping Sarah at home. When she’s awakened later, it’s pretty much all over.

In the suburbs, it’s not clear just how wrong things are right away, but when the neighbor’s dog comes over in a terror and refuses to be brought back home by Sarah, it is through her eyes (and that insatiable curiosity) we get our first glimpse of what’s going on.

Inside the neighbor’s house, she finds the woman’s son-in-law dying and the woman on top of her daughter, doing … something to her neck. In a Romero zombie world, she’d be chewing into it, but when she looks up, we can see fungal growths coming from her mouth. Planting seeds, perhaps.

Then, we get one of the more terrifying things to consider in any zombie apocalypse … the fast zombie! The woman is surprisingly fast, though reckless in her movements. It’s a pattern we’ll see repeated to great effect later, but worth emphasizing how challenging that had to be to pull off this visual of wildly out of control fast movement. It’s always toward the subject, but unbelievably clumsy and chaotic at the same time.

Thankfully, Joel and Tommy arrive on the scene just in time to dispatch the woman, much to the horror of Sarah who has no idea what’s going on. The fact Joel just nailed her with a wrench indicates how much more he and his brother have already seen.

From here, we got an incredibly claustrophobic and effective sequence from mostly within the truck as they leave their neighborhood (as neighbors start to attack neighbors) and try to escape Austin, Texas. Alas, the military has responded quickly.

Taking away the big picture and limiting our view largely to what can be seen through the windows of the truck, we see how quickly a world can fall apart as people are running and screaming, infected are attacking and those in cars are lost for what to do.

Then, out of nowhere, an airplane crashes into the road behind their truck, just as they’re being overwhelmed by the volume of people on the street. The adrenaline rush of this whole sequence is just incredible, culminating in that dramatic encounter with an infected chasing Joel and Sarah through a restaurant.

Further indication of how far things have gone, when a soldier finds him carrying his daughter, the soldier’s orders come in to just go ahead and kill them anyway, even as Joel is insisting they’re not infected. It’s a totalitarian approach, apparently ready to go scorched earth on at least one American city, that doesn’t lift.

When the soldier fires, Joel jumps into a ditch with Sarah and nearly gets shot to death anyway before Tommy shows up and saves him. Tragically, though, Sarah has been shot in the gut and as Joel tries to figure out how to pick her up, she dies in his arms.

And all of that was just the prologue, setting up the actual story. We leaned into it a bit because it was so effective in establishing the mood of the saga, and the very real dangers and horrors of this world — notably with the human element the most dangerous for Joel.

Two decades later (i.e., today), the world is in a shambles and Joel is now living in Boston under a strict and totalitarian military regime. They’re as much prisoners as they are citizens, with some getting hanged publicly for violating such rules as trying to leave the Quarantine Zone without authorization.

Yes, they’re protected within the walls of the city, but they’re also trapped there.

Our first introduction to the QZ established by the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) is through a young boy who arrives at the entrance. He’s brought inside where he’s subjected to a quick-scan test and we see some of the rules of this outbreak.

George A. Romero had his zombie rules, and this world has its own. In particular, “time to full infection” can vary dramatically depending on where you’re infected. It ranges from 5 minutes to 24 hours, with shorter rates the closer to the head it is.

While a doctor of some sort tells the child that they’re going to give some medicine, the truth quickly becomes evident. We get our first glimpse of Joel on a body burning detail.

When a woman balks at tossing the next body, Joel proves able to do it — and it’s the body of the child who we watched walk in. The child was infected and there is clearly still no cure.

Now in his mid-50s, this Joel looks more weather-worn, and yet he carries himself like a far more dangerous and ruthless man. Along the way, we find out that he and Tommy are still together, though Tommy has gone missing for the past three weeks way out in Wyoming.

That’s right, they’re setting up a road trip movie, with Tommy as just one of the motivating factors.

We’re also introduced to Anna Torv’s badass character Tess. We first see her getting interrogated, but at first glimpse it looked like she was the one interrogating the other guy. It’s a testament to her confidence (or recklessness) that she was in command of that moment even after having been beaten by two goons, still standing by.

There’s also the fact the guy who had his fellas rough her up was more than a bit of an idiot, but it doesn’t take away from the obvious strength of character she has. That’s going to come in handy along the way.

We were introduced to several characters throughout this first chapter, but ultimately only a few of them are going to matter consistently throughout this season. Joel and Tess are two of them. The third is locked up somewhere else.

With an oppressive military regime in power, of course there’s going to be resistance. That came in the form of the Fireflies, though it’s also made clear the leader of this particular faction is taking orders from somewhere else.

That suggests that the FIreflies is bigger than one city, and we at least heard rumor that FEDRA has a bigger facility in Atlanta. Is it true? How well connected are they to the Boston location? It could be that there is a network of connected cities or regions under FEDRA control. Is it national? East Coast? Firefly was working to try and take down at least this FEDRA, with very little luck, in Boston, but it appears there’s a larger operation at work, as well. Where there’s big power, there’s big resistance.

And then something new dropped into their lap.

Enter Ellie, another young girl not unlike Joel’s Sarah from two decades prior. Well actually, Sarah appeared to be a very sweet girl, a little precocious and way too curious. Ellie is also curious, but she’s also a foul-mouthed hellion who’s got a massive chip on her shoulder.

We quickly find out there’s something special about her, with the Boston Fireflies planning to abandon the city entirely to take her west. That all goes to hell, though, which is when Joel and Tess and Ellie first share a scene together.

As Joel and Tess are tracking the guy who interrogated Tess to try and get their battery back so they can steal a truck and go find Tommy in Wyoming, they wind up in the Fireflies headquarters, such as it is. It’s a bloodbath, with only two Fireflies and Ellie left.

Marlene and Kim we’d met previously, but now both have been shot and are in no shape to fulfill their mission. But guess who’s in fine shape to complete the mission? You guessed it.

In this regard it’s impossible to completely forget that this is based on a video game, because here’s the main quest for the characters. At the same time, it’s also a pretty common trope to have to transport an innocent child across a ravaged landscape for some reason.

In this case, the reason itself is a cliché, as well. But it still doesn’t take away from the care and attention given in this first hour to set the stage for truly anything down the road.

Before Joel and Tess found Ellie and the Fireflies, they got a glimpse of someone dead from the fungal infection, and they’d basically exploded into a floral decoration all over the wall. We’ve seen the very beginning of infection in the prologue, and this aftermath but all of the in-between remains a huge mystery.

Echoing a theme of most zombie shows, humans were actually the biggest danger in this opening episode. It was a human soldier who killed Sarah in the prologue. During their attempted escape, history repeats itself, as the threesome again find themselves looking down a military barrel.

The fact this soldier was the one on the take with Joel didn’t help the get a clean escape, though. It did, however, serve as a way for Joel and Tess to find out just why Ellie mattered so much. She’d been told earlier in the hour by the Fireflies leader, but the audience didn’t get that morsel just yet.

Going “by the book,” the soldier was checking all three of them for infection, but when he got to Ellie, she stabbed him in the thigh to try and stop him. It only escalated the situation, and at the pivotal moment with the soldier’s panic rising, Joel flashed back to when Sarah was killed and attacked, punching the soldier … to death!

We then got our answer, as his machine indicated red, meaning Ellie was infected! But, as she pleaded for her life from a panicked Tess, she’d been infected three weeks prior. No one lasts that long without turning, and she hasn’t turned.

That’s right, it’s the immune kid transport trope, and that’s the whole narrative of this series. Firefly is waiting for her out west to presumably try and synthesize a cure from however she’s immune.

Honestly, it’s better now that Joel and Tess know because that’d get them more invested in ensuring her safety across the country. It also happens to coincide with their own mission to Wyoming to save Tommy.

At the same time, Joel appears to be experiencing some transference already, associating Ellie with Sarah in attacking that soldier. That could well make him even more protective of her.

What’s exciting about this episode is that we got two fully satisfying vignettes of a post-apocalyptic world. The effects were fantastic, the monsters are genuinely terrifying and the human danger is very much in place.

It’s also exciting to imagine exploring the wilds after 20 years of this fungal infection hitting humans. Are animals infected? Are there other fungi out there? The limitless possibilities after establishing the rules of this world make “The Last of Us” an exciting adventure both to see if they can save humanity, and to see what they might discover along the way like a post-apocalyptic Lewis and Clark expedition.

The journey begins in earnest next week as “The Last of Us” continues Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.