HBO knows how to make culturally impactful, appointment viewing television. From The Sopranos, to Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones, HBO has a long history in crafting binge worthy, headline grabbing, everybody has to watch this TV. To do so in the saturated market of the streaming age is an even bigger feat which they already achieved this year with the superb third season of The White Lotus. Well, you’ll be glued to the screens for the next seven weeks because HBO and the team behind The Last of Us have done it once again. Brilliantly paced, beautifully crafted, with heart pounding action to boot, The Last of Us is must watch TV with one of the best television episodes in recent memory. Utterly superb. 

 

Five years have passed since apocalypse survivors Joel and Ellie traversed a ravaged USA from Boston to Salt Lake City seeking to take Ellie, immune from infection, to the revolutionary militia group The Fireflies. Escaping the brutal aftermath of that encounter to a settlement of survivors in Jackson, Wyoming, Joel and Ellie must face and wrestle their demons with the very real threat of adversaries lurking ready to strike. 

 

The second series of a highly successful television show can sometimes be tricky to land narratively and in scale. But here showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have more than stuck the landing, they have raised the bar. 

 

Narratively The Last of Us season two is perfectly balanced giving space for character development and exploration while punctuating that with explosive action, usually at the gnarled hands of the infected. Some scenes will have you holding your breath, peeking between your fingers as it unfurls in front of you. There are a couple of episodes here that are so grand in their scale and execution that they will rival those Game of Thrones episodes that could easily have been from a Hollywood blockbuster. Peak television. 

 

It would be easy for the show to descend into a sense of utter hopelessness, such are the odds. But Mazin and Druckmann manage to infuse proceedings with hope, heart and a dash of humour that gives humanity back to the characters. All of life is here; community, death, despair, and hope. And it’s kinda of why, on many levels, why The Last of Us is so compelling. It strips everything away to expose humanity at its worse but also at its very best. 

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Brilliantly paced, beautifully crafted, with heart pounding action to boot, The Last of Us is must watch TV with one of the best television episodes in recent memory. Utterly superb.