Is This The Last of Us? Speculative fiction and reality intersect

As the post-apocalyptic HBO series begins season two, it hits a bit too close to home.

This is the apocalypse. Right now. We’re in it. I know it doesn’t look apocalyptic, not aesthetically, anyway. People are not zombifying. The ground is not opening up and swallowing cities whole. There’s no violent innerspace, no hollow earth populated by a pissed-off Godzilla, Kong, and/or a tribe of Matt Gaetz-fathered monkey-men. But make no mistake, the apocalypse has begun. Everything that follows is, by definition, post-apocalyptic, and now we’re all finally characters in the media we consume.

In artistic imaginations, the apocalypse arrives unexpectedly—one minute, we are at a Rockwellian family BBQ, and then suddenly, the meteor takes out Los Angeles. In reality, in the present, we are learning that LA will slowly erode into the Pacific or simply burn down because climate change is a woke DEI hoax. Part of the unintentional propaganda of post-apocalyptic fiction is that it has us prepping for zombies or aliens or violent lightning strikes (Geostorm!) or thermonuclear war when, in reality, the apocalypse has been ushered in by Executive Orders, congressional budget resolutions, DOGEbros, corruption, avarice, an anesthetized electorate, expanding power within the oligarchy, and complacent/complicit journalism. The monsters are dressed in suits and require no masks. They golf and own superyachts. They’re on the PTA.

In pre-apocalyptic times (before January 20th, 2025? Maybe 2016? Or when Obama dropped the mic?), post-apocalyptic narratives were presented as speculative, dark, and dreary fictions of tomorrow populated by rogues, zombies, aliens, and disaffection. Raw denim, western pearl snaps, and waxed canvas jackets still existed if only communities could survive the night. I remember the first few seasons of The Walking Dead and thinking, “Could I survive the zombie apocalypse?” and now I look back at season 37 of its 11th spin-off and think: That shit looks easy compared to 2025. Try fighting a ketamined-up Elon Musk flanked by Joe Rogan’s r-slur-dropping Dudebro Army brought to you by Blue Chew.

The latest in our cultural fascination with post-apocalyptic narratives (and our compulsion to ignore its current manifestation) returned Sunday for its second season. The Last of Us, from Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann, based on Druckmann and Bruce Straley’s seminal video game franchise and starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, continues our obsession with telling stories of a dark near future. While most of those eschew sunny elements for tales of woe and destruction, perhaps none have antagonists as scary as The Last of Us. Yet, TLOU is character-driven. The ghouls (human, alien, monster, Will Forte) take a back seat to the communities trying to outlast evil.

In fact, TLOU is not so much a warning of the apocalypse but rather a snapshot of how we (in the now) can endure it and survive the red-tied monsters. Hannah Arendt said, “death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism,” which seems to be a tumble we took about six weeks ago. As a parable for modern times, TLOU argues that the zombies (yes, I know, not traditional zombies, but some kind of portobello gone mad) are analogous to those currently in power: our elected officials, our oligarchs, our dogebros. The survivors (read: us) are left to make what they can of the world, building small communities, developing grassroots initiatives, and going to Bernie/AOC rock rallies.

I never played TLOU on PlayStation. My video gaming ended when 8-bit doubled, and gamepads became more complicated than my 1986 Honda Civic Wagovan. I have no relationship with gaming post-Super Mario 2, and even then, I was not a competent gamer. But I do appreciate the narrative structures and artistry of the media and wish I had the ability to do anything other than watch my nephew play Red Dead Redemption 2. As a result of my ignorance, I have no idea what’s coming in TLOU season two other than there are only seven episodes, it will follow the events of the video game’s sequel, and the trolls are mad that (season two addition) Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby isn’t the Abby they didn’t get in the game. Fortunately, most of them are distracted by tariffs on the Switch 2.

Have you ever noticed how cinematic post-apocalypse America seems to be centered in parts of the country no one cares about until mid-terms or ski season? Jericho (late, great, gone-too-soon Skeet Ulrich CBS drama) put the center of post-nuclear war America in Cheyenne. Silo (probably) is set in Georgia. Station Eleven is set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The OG TWD took place in Georgia and South Carolina. Yellowstone is in Montana, and if you don’t think Yellowstone and its universe are post-apocalyptic, consider this map of settler incursion.

Season two of The Last of Us opens in Jackson, Wyoming, after a brief prologue introducing Dever’s Abby, whose character’s quest for vengeance upon Joel (Pascal), who took the morality question in “Omelas” to heart, saving Ellie (Ramsey) in the season one finale, feels very TWD. Life in the post-mushroom-zombie reality of the union’s least populous state is fairly normal and not unlike actual America in 2025: New Year’s Eve is a stupid holiday, teenagers are insolent, lovable pissants, there’s not enough housing, the sewage systems are outdated and infected with cordyceps, old white dudes are homophobes, Catherine O’Hara is a genius, men are resistant to therapy, and there’s no shortage of guns and ammunition. What I find most interesting about TLOU is the collective attempt to live within a fascist autocracy where a seemingly undefeatable coalition of monsters is unquestionably in charge.

The past decade has made it difficult not to consider the inevitable apocalypse but the world we’ll have to live in afterward. Even the most optimistic of us must reasonably believe that we have crossed some threshold from which we cannot return. Whatever happens after these four years, the world will never be the same, and if you follow my position that we are living post-apocalypse, then how do we survive the Now? The world is on fire, but we still go to work, pay our taxes, gather with friends, and watch appointment prestige television on HBO. All the most powerful people, organizations, and institutions are cowering before the will of a far-right movement. Whereas in the five-year time jump in TLOU, bloaters—the most evolved monsters—present a new, more nuanced threat to their world; in our hellscape, The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 have taken the four years of the Biden reprieve to refine their attack on democracy. There’s no one left but us—we the people, the plebians, those with courage but no power, which is essentially the hallmark of the protagonist communities in The Last of Us.

Joel and the Jackson townsfolk are the last of us—no superheroes, just laborers and artists trying to get from one day to the next, paycheck to paycheck, or scavenged good to scavenged good. Ellie, with her immunity to the infected, is the embodiment of hope: young, flawed, brave, eager, and complex. But thanks in part to Joel’s decision, hope, with all its virtue, isn’t enough.

I don’t know where TLOU is going, and there’s great joy in that in an age of narrative predictability, unlike in the real world where the daily chaos and surprise is a fucking anxiety-inducing nightmare that has me closing my eyes as I open the NYTimes app. I just want to do my Wordle, and I’m afraid the morning headline will be “Trump Bans Literacy” or “President Vance Sworn In.” The world of The Last of Us is slightly more dangerous than ours because—you know—zombies. But as I tend to my days in a world where empathy has become an enemy, what I have appreciated about the series is that it is interested in the human aspect of the apocalypse. Hell, the mere fact it has an interest in humanity itself is respite. The Avengers aren’t trying to save the world, and Rick Grimes’ isn’t endlessly fighting zombies, finding a home, discovering an enemy, defeating the enemy—rinse off blood and goo and repeat. The show’s preeminent episode is one that relegates its leads to tertiary characters. Season one’s “Long, Long Time” features Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as unlikely lovers who endure the hardship of their relationship in an apocalyptic reality, as opposed to enduring the apocalypse while happening to be in a relationship. There are fewer gory fight scenes in TLOU than in most media of its ilk, which may anger the gamers but translates to a better piece of art, makes a better argument, and gives realistic hope as opposed to fantastical hope. It’s also a tribute to Mazin and Drukmann’s showrunning allowing a series the space for a self-contained episode, a rarity in today’s media landscape.

Two thousand and twenty-five shows us we are all far more likely to pass away from a disease we cured in the 1800s reintroduced by RFK Jr., as an extension of authoritarianism than a ravenous hoard of half-dead baddies, but the measure of our lives will be how we endure that oppression—with courage? with reason? starting a podcast? Most of these narratives focus on solutions, whereas TLOU focuses on survival, knowing a solution is beyond the capacity of the community at its core. Joel chooses love over a cure, saving Ellie (again: Omelas) despite knowing that she and her immunity—even in death—may save them all. Joel, like us, is incapable of consideration beyond his present, beyond those he cares about. In many ways, that’s how most of us need to fight a Wednesday doomscroll.

I don’t know if we’re past a cure, past reconciliation. What will save us, TLOU argues, isn’t just love or hope but rather consolidating power within a locality. The bloaters are everywhere and aren’t going away, but there’s nothing they despise more than our existence. Which in some ways makes merely living, loving, and caring a victory in and of itself.

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