THE LAST OF US, the new zombie-ish video game spinoff series from HBO (and game creator Neil Druckmann and CHERNOBYL creator Craig Mazin), debuted last week, to great acclaim (and apparently great audience numbers).
And early on in the pilot Mazin & Druckmann made a really nice choice that I think is worth highlighting.
The series begins basically on Day Zero of a fungus-based plague transmitted through bites that drives victims insane. And we're with Sarah and her dad Joel and her uncle Tommy as they try to navigate what very quickly escalates from just another day to a total horrow show in their small Texas town.
And—and this is a VERY VERY BIG SPOILER, so if you haven't watched the show or played the game and ever plan to, DO NOT READ THIS YET.
In fact I'm so invested in not ruining this for you I'm actually going to add some space here so there's hopefully no chance your eye will have accidentally seen what I'm about to write. Let's take it from star Pedro Pascal's other show, THE MANDALORIAN (which weirdly has some very strong similarities with this show).
Seriously, if you're not through the pilot yet, DO NOT SCROLL PAST GROGU.
Okay, I warned you...
Seriously now, I warned you...
SO, at the end of that Day One sequence, which Joel and Tommy spend fighting like Hell so as to get Sarah away from the sudden mobs of insanity, a cop stumbles upon Joel with Sarah. And, afraid that they might be infected, despite all of Joel's begging, he shoots them, killing Sarah.
I KNOW, right? It's quite a moment.
Then the show jumps ahead 20 years, like a lot of post-apocalyptic world stories do. They've given us the backstory we need on our main character, now let's get into the main story proper.
It's here that they make a really small but really meaningful choice: they make the change in the world super super personal to Joel. That is to say, when we cut to today, they don't just show us how everything is overgrown, cars and highways are a mess, Boston is walled off—sort of your typical stuff.
They give a girl who wanders to the wall from the outside and collapses. And she gets brought in and scanned for infection by a police officer, in a brilliantly written and performed scene. (That character, whose name is "Kind FEDRA Officer," is played by Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah.) It seems like everything's fine; that's what the cop tells her.
Then we cut to Joel, in his new life basically burning bodies—and one of the people he's working with sees what's in the back of one of the trucks and can't handle it and asks him to do it. And he looks and we see that it's the masked body of the girl, who has been killed because she was in fact infected.
And without any reaction, Joel picks the girl's body and throws it in the fire.
You could have had Joel burning bodies without the story of the girl and we'd have had a sense of how much the world has changed and he has. But you add that girl and it's SO MUCH more personal. 20 years in he's so fucking shut down he doesn't even see the parallel to his own life.
And having someone else see the body first and be unable to do it underlines that all the more.
And then, to really cap it all off, they just move on. Which once again makes it super clear how this world is and how Joel is in it.
For me, the takeaway is, If I'm doing a first act/pilot time jump (and it doesn't matter if this is scifi, romcom or drama), how do I make my details of the "new universe" not only specific to it, but personal to the character?
