The Last of Us: Is Episode 3 starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett really one of TV’s finest hours of drama?

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us, episode three. Jonny Mahon-Heap is a Culture reporter for Stuff.

OPINION: In the early days of the pandemic, it was the wide, empty spaces that were the eeriest.

Shuttered airports, an empty Piccadilly Circus, tumbleweeds rolling through shopping malls – the world was a waiting room – and we found ourselves suspended in mid-air between two ways of life.

In The Last of Us, HBO’s new apocalyptic drama (which airs here on Neon and Sky TV’s SoHo) starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay as a surrogate father-daughter duo making their way through an American wasteland in an alternate 2023, the show’s vast budget allows us to imagine that alternate world – one where a disease won – and a pandemic overwhelmed civilisation.

From the showrunner of HBO’s lauded Chernobyl miniseries, and co-written by creator of the original video game, The Last of Us has been called the best video game adaptation ever made – with The Guardian even going so far as saying that this week’s third episode might be the finest “you will see this year”.

So, were they right?

READ MORE:
* The Last of Us zombie apocalypse will not stop me from taking my mushroom supplements
* The Last of Us: Is this the best-ever TV series based on a video game?
* Netflix’s That ’90s Show, Neon’s The Last of Us, Disney+’s Alaska Daily among January’s must-see TV

Thus far, The Last of Us has felt like a good story, well-told – a familiar dystopia that presents an even more terrifyingly familiar portrait of a world descending into chaos, distinguished by the stellar work of leads Pascal and Ramsay.

The zombie creatures – fungus-faced monsters straight out of your worst nightmares – plague 2023’s scorched planet; but, as is the case in any good dystopian fiction, it’s the humans who are scarier still, as a fascist government reigns while power structures (and hopes for a cure) crumble.

But the third episode of the prestige drama swivels the spotlight onto two new characters, played by Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman and The White Lotus’ Murray Bartlett, who play a pair thrown together in the early aftermath of the zombie apocalypse.

In so doing, The Last of Us creates a hauntingly beautiful love story – expect its two performers to show up big time next awards season, because they’re going to break your heart.

Offerman plays Bill, a survivalist whose end of days are spent raiding abandoned Home Depots, joyriding in the empty streets and tending to his chickens and burgeoning vegetable patch.

Bill fortifies his property with his I Am Legend-esque security systems; think tripwires that trigger shotguns, electrified fences and motion-resistant flamethrowers. Into one of his traps falls Frank (Barlett), a softly-spoken, lone traveller whose band of refugees have all fallen to the infected.

Wary and weary, Bill invites Frank inside – allowing him to stay for the night. But the pair find themselves falling for one another, and are soon cresting into a romantic relationship, as the world crests more deeply into disaster.

The episode is exceptional in its economy of storytelling. As a portrait of love in the time of cordecyps, it presents the hope that – even in this maudlin, maddening world – love is the only thing to live for. (Plus, between Offerman, Bartlett and Pascal, the show is an early contender for the most hirsute and hot cast on television).

The story – a kind of zombified Before Sunrise – is a doozy; it skips neatly across time, covering 20 years of the apocalypse – and a lifetime of tender moments between the couple. “I wasn’t scared until I met you,” Bill says at one point, as he (and the audience) understand the beauty and the terror of no longer being alone.

The heart of the episode lies in the little details, in its idea that love can make the world shrink to a pinprick. You feel you already know this couple intimately, or maybe you are that couple. Even at the end of the world, with humanity on the out, there’s good humour in showing how Bill and Frank still cajole and console over the same things as any couple – that dinner party post-mortem, the dispute over paint colours, or a beaming grin across the table as you clink wine glasses.

So far, The Last of Us has been at its best when it abandons the big ideas to focus on individual moments of beauty and terror – as a bottle episode, it’s an aching take on who we might have become, where we might have ended up, what we could have done to each other in the worst of circumstances.

The world is overrun with the infected, by governments without a pulse, by a military that governs with despotic force – but out there in the wreckage, there are people building their lives back, fighting for each other.

It’s also the most woozily romantic hour of television I can remember – a punch-drunk vision of love while the world is burning.

There’s a moment that will catch you in the throat – a scene in a strawberry patch that is so simply, subtly played that it carries you through the heartbreak.

At the end of world, it’s the undead who rule, but those with beating hearts are the ones who truly live.

Episode 3 of The Last of Us is now available to stream on Neon and will debut on SoHo at 8.30pm tonight (Monday, January 30).