1. Different enough from the walking dead to stir major interest while carrying the torch

The Walking Dead became the face of all post- apocalyptic zombie fantasy for a decade, giving us everything we needed. When it was created, I remember how it was absolutely transformative, everybody tuning into watch. It paved the way for bringing all comic books and video games about zombies to life.  

While there has been movies about zombies( that Brad Pitt one- world war Z is the first one that comes to mind) and some comedy Zombie movies like Sean of the Walking dead and Zombie land; no other program really took zombies as seriously as the Walking dead did and no one even really tried to take it away from them. 

To recap, In The Walking Dead, the zombies were the first part of the disease but the second part was really about the after effects, as crisis tends to expose the darkest parts of our humanity which left unchecked make us sub human.  We saw people take advantage of others fear to gain power and others use the apocalypse to carry out their amoral agendas and twisted fantasies. In the later seasons, it asks how would humans rebuild from not just a zombie apocalypse but really any event that put the goodness of humanity in question. How would we convince others and mostly ourselves that we were still human? . This second phase, is really where the Walking Dead has taken place in the last couple of years, whereas before it was really at the tail end of a legit apocalypse.  Eventually, the Walking Dead was so much at the this second phase, to the extent where it really was not about the zombies at all, which would be cool for a while but would eventually serve as its central downfall.  Thus, The Walking Dead really capitalized on the whole “ it’s not what the zombies will do to you but the people will do” trope and as the seasons went on it became more about the danger of living in a world that lacks social order and the checks and balances that come with it.

Now, while the Last of Us certainly takes advantage of that same trope where in the first episode Marlene says “ there are things more dangerous than just the infected out there”.  The Last of Us almost uses the inherent knowledge that people have from shows like the walking dead in their favour. After we all witnessed fucking cannibals, enslavers, villains and motorcycle gangs in the walking dead, the Last of Us knows that it’s a given, and even through Ellie makes fun of some of those tropes. It takes the torch from the Walking Dead by focusing on the central aspects of a post apocalyptic world that the Walking Dead never attended to. Not necessarily to their own fault, but the walking dead did not have the flexibility that time jumps give you, which allows the Last of Us to maintain that video game story mode type of feel, where the audience puts the puzzle pieces together for themselves. But going back to the cure. There was moment in the walking dead where we all felt like it could very well happen(at the end of season one) but to no avail. The Last of Us, is focused on a genuine promise of a cure, which allows it to play out as a condensed miniseries where the stakes are extremely high. Therefore every death, setback and sacrifice is more important than the next one in a thrilling mission to do what the Walking Dead really could never do- provide hope for audiences! It allows there to be that central element of hope that a lot of post apocalyptic things miss out on. There has to be hope binding all the darker elements together or else there really is no darkness and thus no beauty. The walking dead lost this hope towards the end of its series, where things just got so out of hand that nihilism and cruelty seemed to takeover the show. The Last of us however, happily caries the torch to end what was supposed to be the end a long time ago for the Walking dead.

2. Connecting with a modern generation and audience

My favourite thing about the Last of Us is this idea of a whole new generation that is only brought up in a world of greed, hate, self destruction and mistrust. They have never known a world that has any social order which really makes the character Ellie have a powerful role within the show. She becomes a microcosm for what they are fighting for, the beauty of naivety and the innocence of the youth. Her youth is desperately needed in a world that seems to be filed with adults bitter about what lost, but she seems to not know what has been lost. It asks the audience to draw parallels to this in our own lives. When our parents have to tell us about something from the past(as Pedro pascal does with her in the car) or how in the digital age we are getting father removed from what happened to our ancestors. Ellie is all of this hope, curiosity and innocence wrapped in one character while drawing meaningful connections to how stories are passed from generation to generation( as Pablo pascal says, people like to tell stories). But something about her toughness really hiding the broken parts of her makes the audience connect with the story as they understand the experiences of both an adult and child. The walking dead had this to an extent, but none that never knew the real world, which is thought provoking and emotionally unsettling. 

3. PEDRO PASCAL!!!

Pedro Pascal has to be one of the reasons that this all fits together so seamlessly. The way that he kind of plays a Rick Grimes post- Lori dying(if you’re familiar with the walking dead) but a more predictable and methodical version of him is absolutely jaw-dropping. This is someone, who has truly absorbed and learned that 1. He can’t trust anyone, 2. There is no saving everyone, but however  3. You got to save the good one’s while you can, as his friends help him kind of rediscover. While Ellie does help him find that light again and give him the hope, Pascal does an amazing job of playing someone that is really quite familiar with the advent of hope and doesn’t really give a shit because he had already lost everything in his daughter. He doesn’t need to say much to say a lot. He merely looks and you know that he is a broken man but that in some ways he uses that as his biggest strength towards survival. Similar to Ellie, he is a microcosm of how the writers are displaying this divide between the people that have never known a life outside of this and those that understand. He becomes the representation of everything people have lost but also the will to keep fighting. What I like most, is that Joel was already maybe a little bit this guy before everything. But like how Bill is very trusting before and after the fact and Nick Offer man is both mistrusting before and after really represents how an apocalypse waters down our personalities to just mean survival when really deep down people become extensions of who they really were.