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By SuperyachtNews 29 Jan 2016

Price reduction on 56m Perini Navi at Arcon Yachts

Arcon yachts has reduced the price of perini navi’s ketch sailing yacht burrasca by $500,000. she is currently based in monaco and has a new asking price of €16.5 million….

Arcon Yachts has reduced the price of Perini Navi’s ketch sailing yacht Burrasca   by $500,000. She is currently based in Monaco and has a new asking price of €16.5 million.

56m Burrasca was built at the Italian shipyard’s facility in Viareggio in 2003. She is one of the first Perini Navi builds to feature the design work of Ron Holland, who since 2003, has gone on to design the interior of two other notable 56m Perini Navi builds, Bayesian and Selene , and the exterior for a further 12 Perini Navi builds ranging from 43.5m to 63.4m.

At 497 gross tons, Burrasca is one of the more voluminous sailing yachts in the fleet. Only 2.3 per cent of the sailing yacht fleet exceeds the 500GT mark. Her capacious interior permits her to sleep 12 guests over a five en-suite stateroom layout; only 2.2 per cent of the sailing yacht fleet can accommodate 12 or more guests on board.

S/Y Burrasca

Burrasca is also a more than capable motorsailer; she is fitted with twin inboard Deutz TBD616 V12 engines, with 1,240 hours on the clock since their 6,000-hour overhaul in 2014. She has a fuel capacity of 55,000 litres, allowing a 17 knot maximum speed and a boundless 6,000 nautical mile range at 10 knots under motor. 

Burrasca’s  10-year ABS classification survey was completed in the summer of 2014. Additionally, she underwent extensive servicing and upgrading of all on board systems.

There is a very limited selection of sailing yachts on the market at this size, henceforth their sales are few and far between. Twizzle was sold earlier this month for what was expected to be in the region of the €39.75 million final asking price. However, last year only one sailing yacht above 50m was sold - 51.7m Red Dragon . No second-hand Perini Navi build of this size has been sold since 56m Salute in December 2014.

All images of Burrasca courtesy of Arcon Yachts

Year of build: 2003 / 2014

CA: Arcon Yachts

Asking price: €16,500,000

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Perini Navi

Arcon Yachts

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1,000 rounds of ammunition and fireworks were onboard yacht that burned in Marina del Rey: Owner

MARINA DEL REY, Calif. (KABC) -- The owner of a luxury yacht that erupted in flames and sank in Marina del Rey said 1,000 rounds of "unspent ammunition and fireworks" were onboard the vessel, according to fire officials.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department provided an update on the incident in a social media post Thursday morning.

The fire was reported shortly after 8:30 p.m. Wednesday at 211 Basin A, where flames engulfed the multi-level, 100-foot boat, the agency said.

Residents in the area said they heard multiple explosions resonating throughout the harbor as yacht was consumed by flames. Fire officials said two people were able to get off the boat uninjured.

Fire crews poured water onto the burning vessel, which later sank into the harbor.

An environmental hazard team was expected to arrive in Marina del Rey Thursday to assist with the cleanup of the burned vessel.

A United States Coast Guard Incident Management Team from Sector Los Angeles-Long Beach is monitoring the cleanup efforts, according to the Coast Guard, which said that the yacht "caught fire and discharged red-dye diesel."

"The fire did not appear to damage any other vessels in the harbor," the USCG said in a statement Thursday. "The Coast Guard is working with Patriot Environmental Services and Clean Harbors organizations to contain and recover the discharge from the yacht."

The yacht's fuel capacity was reported to be 6,000 gallons, according to the Coast Guard. Crews from California Department of Fish and Wildlife's Office of Spill Prevention and Response and the L.A. County Sheriff's Department are also assisting in the efforts.

The Oiled Wildlife Care Network was also notified and was on standby for wildlife response. "No observations of oiled wildlife have been reported at this time," the Coast Guard said Thursday morning. "For your safety and the safety of the animals, do not attempt to capture oiled animals." Witnesses were urged to report oiled wildlife to (877) 823-6926.

City News Service contributed to this report.

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• MARINA DEL REY
• BOATING SAFETY
• FIREFIGHTERS

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Marina del Rey’s harbor produced an unexpected light show Wednesday evening as a luxury yacht loaded with ammunition and fireworks burned for more than two hours before flames were extinguished, authorities said.

Flames leaped 20 to 30 feet from the 100-foot vessel, dubbed the Admiral, while live ammunition rounds could be heard firing from the boat, according to videos from the scene .

Thursday morning, the charred yacht was lying on its side, and the water around it was tinted red from the diesel fuel dumped from the vessel. A Coast Guard spokesperson said an estimated 4,000 gallons of diesel was dumped into the water. The total is not official as monitoring continues.

Los Angeles County Fire Department officials said two passengers aboard the boat exited safely. No information was available about the cause of the blaze.

An L.A. County Fire spokesperson said one individual suffered minor injuries, was treated at the scene and was released.

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Firefighters responded to a call around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and eventually knocked out the flames at 10:33 p.m. The boat was declared fully submerged at 11:33 p.m.

The yacht’s owner, who was not identified, told fire officials that the vessel was carrying 1,000 rounds of ammunition and fireworks.

U.S. Coast Guard personnel confirmed they were on the scene evaluating cleanup options.

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the last of us video essay

Behind the Scenes: How they Filmed ‘The Last of Us’

A deeper dive on the HBO show that’s spore than meets the eye.

Published September 1, 2023 Features , Movies By Meg Shields Disclaimer When you purchase through affiliate links on our site, we may earn a commission.

Welcome to  The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that looks at how The Last of Us show did the video game justice.

Cast your mind back to — oh, I don’t know — the late 1990s. Everyone and their auntie was clowning on the  Mortal Kombat  movies. 1993’s Super Mario Bros. was simply Too Much for its audience ( a reclamation effort is underway, don’t worry ). People were genuinely forwarding the thesis that video games were not and never would be art .

We don’t live in a more enlightened age in the 2020s. But we do know better. Of course, video games are art. And adapting video games into cinema and television isn’t an impossible feat. It’s just really, really hard. It requires good people at the helm who understand what made the video game great in the first place. It requires innovative thinking about the limitations and strengths of film and television, and how they can be bent to capture the spirit of their source material.

HBO’s The Last of Us  is getting a lot of due praise for being one of the rare video game adaptations to knock it out of the park. The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where a fungal infection has decimated much of humanity. Survivors attempt to make a home for themselves in this new, overgrown world — avoiding infected and non-infected humans alike.

The following video essay focuses on the series’ cinematography, and how its visual choices used the confines of streaming (where folks can be watching on a projector or on their phones) to tell a story that gelled with the source material. It helps, of course, that the original game already had a cinematic feel to it. No shade intended, but adapting  The Last of Us  (with its cut-scenes and naturalistic lighting) is an easier transition than, say, oh I don’t know … LucasArts’  Loom ? Either way: it’s a heroic chapter in the long-term rehabilitation of video game adaptations. And here’s a look at part of how they pulled that off:

The following contains visual spoilers and has some NSFW content. Beware!

Watch “The Last of Us Behind the Scenes — Did They Do the Game Justice?”

Who made this?

This video essay on how HBO’s  The Last of Us  approached the cinematography of a video game adaptation was created by StudioBinder . This production management software creator also happens to produce wildly informative video essays. They tend to focus on the mechanics of filmmaking itself, from staging to pitches and directorial techniques. You can check out their YouTube account  here .

More videos like this

• Here’s Entertain the Elk with a look at what makes the grim prologue of The Last of Us – Season 1 so effective
• And here’s Like Stories of Old with a look at why modern apocalypse fiction feels different these days.
• For more of StudioBinder’s work, here’s their video essay that explores the ingredients that go into  an iconic cinematic close-up .
• Here’s more of StudioBinder’s work: a video essay on how filmmakers light scenes with low light .
• Finally, here’s a video essay about how three directors,  Quentin Tarantino ,  David Fincher , and  Christopher Nolan ,  direct interrogation scenes .

Tagged with: The Last of Us The Queue

Meg Shields

The Last of Us: Gender in a Post-Apocalyptic World

by Benedetta Fabris

April 4, 2023

House of Dragon , The White Lotus , and, now, The Last of Us… HBO is on a roll lately, churning out success after success. Based on the 2013 video game produced by Naughty Dog for Sony PlayStation, The Last of Us takes place during a zombie apocalypse. But it’s not really about the zombies—it’s about humanity. And though this is the premise of many apocalyptic narratives (think of The Walking Dead ), The Last of Us is one of the few instances when it turns out to be true.

Twenty years after a fungal infection has turned most of the population into zombies, Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler, is assigned a special task: transporting fourteen-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to the anti-government group Fireflies. Why? Ellie might be the key to developing a cure for the infection, as she appears to be immune to the Cordyceps fungus. As he reluctantly accompanies her on this journey, fighting off zombies (or “infected”, as they call them) and humans alike, Joel goes from viewing Ellie as mere cargo to caring for her as he did for the daughter he lost.

How does The Last of Us portray male and female gender roles? 

Now, my feminist zillennal brain might be reading too much into it, but I find that the interesting question addressed by The Last of Us and other post-apocalyptic narratives is the following: if gender is a social construct (as argued not only by feminist theory but by the World Health Organization ) what happens when society as we know it collapses?

The short answer is things get a lot worse. Masculinity seems to thrive in a post-apocalyptic world that calls for violence, strength, and rationality–all values that are gendered as male, as opposed to nurturance, tenderness, and emotionality, which are signifiers of femininity. Joel embodies all the characteristics of the stereotypical male action hero: hardened by his tragic past, he is emotionally detached, brave, and physically strong. He keeps his word, and resorts to ruthless violence to survive and reach his goals. He takes on protecting Ellie to keep his promise to his friend and smuggling partner Tess (Anna Torv), but he stubbornly refuses to care for her and makes himself emotionally vulnerable.

As for the female characters, both Tess and Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), the leader of the Kansas City rebels, are strong and successful in a traditionally masculine way. The only way they can make it in the post-apocalyptic world of The Last of Us is by aligning their values and their behaviors with hegemonic masculinity—as expressions of femininity would make them weak. Yet, despite their efforts, both Tess and Kathleen are ultimately unsuccessful: they end up being brutally killed (and violated, in Tess’s case, through a “clicker kiss” ).

So, post-apocalyptic society sounds just like our society, on steroids. Our world, or today’s Western, privileged world, deems femininity as weak and inferior, while masculine qualities are not merely exalted, but necessary in order to survive. Even with zombies roaming the streets, the patriarchy still stands.

However, as the show progresses, we see Joel’s character undergo a transformation. As he bonds with Ellie, he displays compassion and empathy. He is given a second chance at being a father figure, and to tap into that tender, caring nature he had buried down deep after the death of his daughter. It is perhaps his weakness, but it is also what gives him purpose.

Frank and Bill's love story in The Last of Us defies expectations 

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), who broke the internet with their sweet, heartbreaking love story. While in the game we only briefly meet Bill after Frank’s death and the nature of their relationship is only implied, the show dedicates a whole self-contained episode to the couple. Titled “Long Long Time”, fans and critics alike highly praised episode three, with Victoria Ritvo calling it “a masterpiece in its own right” .

When we first meet Bill, he’s a survivalist who waits for the military to evacuate his town before turning it into a self-sufficient fortress, surrounded by electric fences and booby traps. Like Joel, everything about him screams “macho action hero who needs no one”. Enter Frank, a passerby who falls into one of his traps. Bill reluctantly lets Frank into his home and into his heart and discovers that it’s possible to live, not merely survive, even when the world is crashing and burning. Together, they transform Bill’s solitary fortress into a safe haven, where they can cook, sing, paint, water plants, grow strawberries, love, and die on their own terms. "I'm old, I'm satisfied, and you were my purpose,” Bill tells Frank, revealing he’s not willing to go on living without him.

In a world where stereotypically masculine qualities seem necessary to survive, Bill and Frank shattered gender stereotypes and were the happiest of them all. And if that doesn’t say something about our own society…

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Video Games — The Last of Us: Power of Narrative Through Exploration

The Last of Us: Power of Narrative Through Exploration

• Categories: Sony Video Games

About this sample

Words: 606 |

Published: Aug 4, 2023

Words: 606 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, narrative in the last of us, key mechanics in the last of us, works cited.

• Naughty Dog. The Last of Us. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013.

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Road-Tripping Through a Post-Apocalyptic America in “The Last of Us”

In the post-apocalyptic diseasescape of the new dramatic thriller “The Last of Us,” on HBO, survivors are offered the choice between a regimented existence in scattered quarantine zones under a repressive police state and near-certain death beyond their borders. Inside the government’s densely patrolled walls, it’s believed that only the nihilistic sort—slavers, marauders, terrorists—would risk infection by the creatures that wiped out civilization two decades ago: mutated parasitic fungi called cordyceps, which hijack their human hosts and turn them into zombies. The infected, who slowly hybridize with the parasites to become more impervious, may well be ineradicable as a species. When the mutation is first discovered, in Jakarta, a petrified mycologist advises, “Bomb this city and everyone in it.”

Cities were shelled in an effort to stamp out the cordyceps, and small towns were replaced by mass graves. A fascination with panicked brutality links “The Last of Us,” co-created by Craig Mazin, to his previous series, “ Chernobyl .” On the autumn night in 2003 that the cordyceps arrive in Austin, a construction worker named Joel (Pedro Pascal) attempts to flee in a truck with his teen-age daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), and his younger brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna). He denies help to a young family stranded on the side of a road and is soon repaid exponentially for his hard-heartedness when a soldier is instructed via walkie-talkie, with no explanation, to execute Sarah. In the present day, Joel, now a skilled smuggler, plans to break out of a Massachusetts quarantine zone with his partner, Tess (a soulful Anna Torv), and head to Wyoming in search of Tommy. The pair are reluctantly convinced by the new order’s resistance movement—whose leader Tess scornfully calls “the Che Guevara of Boston”—to transport a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsay), to a scientific base out West. Immune to the cordyceps, she may hold the key to a vaccine. (If such a breakthrough comes to pass, one can imagine a second season of the show that contends with the characters’ bafflement at the widespread mistrust of a lifesaving jab.)

Genre-savvy and satisfyingly tense, “The Last of Us” is adapted with affectionate but not deferential fidelity from the 2013 video game of the same name. Neil Druckmann, who wrote and co-directed the award-winning third-person shooter, created the TV series with Mazin. I have never played The Last of Us, and, for viewers justifiably leery of video-game adaptations, one of the highest compliments I can pay the show is that I wouldn’t have guessed that Joel and Ellie’s mordant, spiritedly macabre adventures first began in pixelated form. (Provocatively, a late sequence structured like a conventional shooter game makes us reconsider the morality of the gunman.) Audiences unfamiliar with the source material are more likely to be reminded of other popular series. “Game of Thrones” is an obvious influence, not just in the casting of the two leads, who played fan favorites on the medieval-fantasy juggernaut, but in its character-driven stakes and seductive evocations of brute force as a sometimes necessary evil. “ Station Eleven ,” the defiantly optimistic portrait of a Shakespearean theatre troupe wayfaring through a post-pandemic Midwest, is another precursor, in images if not in tone; the Ozymandian sights of nature’s reclamations in “The Last of Us”—ducks and frogs swimming blithely in a flooded hotel lobby, or a herd of roaming giraffes seemingly escaped from a zoo—conjure that same beauty of perseverance amid desolation.

Mazin and Druckmann eventually carve out their own niche between the relative sunniness of “Station Eleven” and the self-conscious grimness and shock-for-shock’s-sake violence of, say, “ The Walking Dead .” The show’s rough-hewn center is the surrogate father-daughter bond between Joel and Ellie, but the series works best as an anthropological travelogue of post-catastrophe subcultures, teasing out the disparate ways that survivors rebuild mini-societies and create new alignments of power.

Between the monomaniacal militias and the self-cannibalizing cults, a deserted preschool classroom, constructed underground, stands as a brightly muraled testament to the blind hope that many parents still nursed for their children, while a heavily guarded commune risks the messy ideals of equality and coöperation even in the face of existential peril. These long detours are often accompanied by rather moving vignettes centered on minor characters. An early highlight is Bill (Nick Offerman), a smugly paranoid, hyper-competent prepper who relishes the mostly unpestered solitude of near-extinction, until the arrival of a hungry trespasser (Murray Bartlett) forces him to grapple with the loneliness he’s tried to deny. Scott Shepherd is as terrifying as any of the spore-heads in his role as a soft-voiced pastor who preys on his followers’ need for solace and guidance. A peevish husband and wife in their silver years, isolated in a snowy hinterland, illustrate the inevitability that, in the end, nothing endures but cockroaches and bickering old couples.

The sole disappointment among these secondary figures is played by Melanie Lynskey, who turns in perhaps the first bad performance of her career as Kathleen, a rebel leader fixated on revenge. An underwritten character created for the series, Kathleen serves as a cautionary tale for Joel—grief transformed them both into stronger, sharper, and, in many ways, baser versions of themselves. With Ellie, Joel is offered a path toward redemption, as well as a chance to become more than the sum of his gruff heroics. He’s still the dutiful dad who sacrificed neighbors and strangers alike to protect his daughter. The series, like the game, asks when that patriarchal protectiveness—the subject not only of this story but of so many cinematic masculine fantasies—verges on something darker.

But “The Last of Us” does lightness just as well, and it is that willingness to embrace the full humanity of its characters, including their ardor for material comforts, that gives the series its earthy relatability, despite Joel’s laughable spryness as a fiftysomething roughneck and Ellie’s gothic childhood as an orphan in a post-apocalyptic military school. When Joel and Ellie pack provisions from a rare well-stocked home, she makes sure to prioritize toilet paper—a big improvement from the pages of old magazines. There’s a refreshing honesty to the show’s approach to menstrual needs, too, not least in the “Fuck yeah!” that Ellie exclaims, stumbling upon an ancient box of Tampax in an abandoned store. The show’s occasionally clunky dialogue hampers the formation of an organic through line for Joel and Ellie’s relationship, but the scenes of mutual teasing, or of Joel’s recollections of what the world was like before, feel as crucial as the ones in which they save each other’s life for the umpteenth time. Passing the shattered remains of a downed plane, Ellie marvels at the thought of human flight, an experience that Joel tells her felt far from miraculous. Later, seizing the opportunity to shape her ideas of the past, he reassures her about his own former line of work: “Everybody loved contractors.” Acting opposite an understated Pascal, the button-eyed Ramsay shines as the shrewd but sheltered Ellie, a snarky, friendless teen desperate to find a worthy target of her loving mockery.

The expansive imaginings of survivalist adaptations are matched by the production’s eerie visual allure, not least in the marine pulchritude of the cordyceps’ character design. Multicolored fungi bloom across the faces of the infected, leaving intact the mouths and teeth with which they attack, as they join a teeming, growing army that appears to know no natural death, and only lies dormant, waiting. For all the narrative’s graceful swerves and clever surprises, its greatest reveal may be that the characters find reasons to go on despite the immense evolutionary advantages of their predators and the realization of our most savage instincts. ♦

An earlier version of this article misattributed the description of a resistance leader as “the Che Guevara of Boston.”

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The Last of Us – Game of the Generation [A critical essay]

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• Entertainment
• HBO’s <i>The Last of Us</i> Adaptation Is Astonishingly Well Made—But Something’s Missing

HBO’s The Last of Us Adaptation Is Astonishingly Well Made—But Something’s Missing

I n a vignette that opens the second episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic epic The Last of Us , a professor of mycology is eating lunch in a Jakarta restaurant when two military types whisk her away mid-bite. Transported to a government lab, she inspects the corpse of a factory worker whose body is now host to a writhing, bloodthirsty fungus. When she learns that the source of the human bite that caused the dead woman’s infection remains unknown, the scientist starts to shake; the teacup in her hand rattles against its saucer. One officer begs her to help them make a medicine or a vaccine. But she knows that a cure would be impossible. Saving humanity, says the genteel academic, will require mass murder: “Bomb this city and everyone in it.”

It’s one of many chilling moments in a series, premiering Jan. 15, whose predominant moods are tense, mournful, and unnerving. And while almost all of the action in The Last of Us takes place halfway around the world from Indonesia, in the United States, the professor’s lethal prescription sets the tone for a story whose characters are constantly forced to choose between protecting themselves and their loved ones, and making existential sacrifices for the good of a plague-ravaged society. Based on the acclaimed video game franchise and created by the game’s mastermind, Neil Druckmann, and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin, the show is by turns gorgeous and harrowing, brutal and warm. From the performances to the storytelling to the aesthetic elements, it’s an exquisitely made adaptation. But it also asks viewers to absorb a whole lot of human misery without saying much that we haven’t already heard in similar shows.

The plot is a pastiche of familiar post-apocalyptic survival narratives, though not one that too closely resembles any particular predecessor. In the show’s alternate-reality 2003, climate change catalyzes a mutation in the terrifying Cordyceps fungus that allows it to take over the human body, essentially transforming its victims into deadly zombies. Within a week of its discovery in Indonesia, the brain-colonizing affliction spreads around the globe, causing chaos, violence, the collapse of society, and the demise of the vast majority of the human race. You know the drill: one minute the frequency of ambulance sirens is a cause for mild concern; the next, people are fighting mushroom monsters who used to be their next-door neighbors.

Although we meet one of two protagonists, a contractor and single father named Joel ( Pedro Pascal ), just before the plague decimates his home state of Texas, most of the show takes place two decades later. Joel has made his way to Boston, where he and his partner Tess (Anna Torv) work as smugglers—a dangerous job in a ruined, walled-off city controlled by a fascist government, FEDRA, that condemns even the pettiest of criminals to public execution. Apolitical survivors by nature, the couple is gearing up for a risky trek to Wyoming, in search of Joel’s idealistic brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), when they become entangled in the machinations of a righteous, militant rebel faction, the Fireflies. The group’s leader, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), cuts a deal with them to escort a young woman who could hold the key to humanity’s future.

Fourteen-year-old Ellie ( Game of Thrones breakout Bella Ramsey ) is a headstrong, independent orphan with a remarkable secret: she is, as far as anyone can tell, the only person who’s been bitten by a zombie without being infected. If she can make it to a laboratory out west, where Firefly scientists are conducting crucial research, she might be able to help develop the cure that seemed impossible 20 years earlier. But the journey won’t be easy; networks of corpse-powered fungi still lie in wait for fresh blood, and the humans who’ve lived through the past few decades are a pretty cutthroat bunch. Further complicating things is Ellie’s delicate relationship with Joel, who’s grown hardened and gruff since losing a daughter her age in 2003.

As they travel west together, following a trajectory that supposedly hews quite closely to that of the game, Druckmann and Mazin carve out space to tell the stories of the people our heroes encounter. There’s an idyllic gated commune and a Christian cult on the verge of starvation. The closer these digressions get to individual characters, the less generic they feel. In Kansas City, a grieving community leader ( Melanie Lynskey ) launches a scorched-earth quest to destroy a man (Lamar Johnson) who betrayed her in an effort to save his own leukemia-stricken kid brother (Keivonn Woodard). A bittersweet vignette that comprises most of the season’s best episode casts Nick Offerman as a misanthropic survivalist who builds a relatively luxurious fortress around himself and then accidentally booby-traps the perfect person (Murray Bartlett) to share it with him.

Smartly cast and evocatively written, these side stories effectively evoke an emotional response. (Criers, be warned.) Even the surrogate parent-child bond that inevitably develops between Joel and Ellie transcends cliché thanks to the performances. Liberated from his Mandalorian mask, Pascal tempers Joel’s stoicism with glimpses of tenderness; you can see his protective-dad muscle memory kicking in despite his insistence that he sees Ellie as mere cargo. Alternately plucky, goofy, heartbreakingly naive and, necessarily, mature beyond her years, Ramsey’s sensitive portrayal of her orphaned character might be the show’s greatest asset.

Equally impressive is the visual world Druckmann and Mazin import from the game. Created in consultation with concept artists at the Last of Us ’ developer, Naughty Dog—and financed with a massive budget that reportedly topped $100 million for the eight-episode debut season—the series’ backdrops vary widely but share a distinctive patina of post-apocalyptic decay. Each infected body has its own freakish, human-mushroom hybrid features, and the patterns that the fungus makes as it creeps across walls and floors and furniture are at once beguiling and nauseating. Now that so much of what we see on the big and small screens has a vaguely unreal aspect imparted by the overuse of computerized effects, it’s a particular pleasure to see a video-game adaptation that’s genuinely cinematic, immersing us in the majesty of snow-covered mountains at one moment and the grimy details of an abandoned shopping mall the next.

The Last of Us is so skillfully, meticulously, and lovingly constructed—to call it TV’s best video-game adaptation would be to damn it with faint praise—that it was tempting to ignore the question that nagged at me throughout each episode: What’s the point? It’s not that the characters’ motivations are muddled, or that the central dilemma of self vs. society isn’t explored in enough depth. But that moral conflict, which resonated with so many fans of the game, isn’t exactly novel in this medium. There have been so many post-apocalyptic dramas in recent years: The Walking Dead franchise, Sweet Tooth , The Rain , Snowpiercer , The 100 , Y: The Last Man . Just about all of them touch on similar themes. The very best examples, like HBO’s own The Leftovers and HBO Max’s Station Eleven , don’t just ask whether the ends of one person’s survival justify the means; they conjure unique visions of spirituality, art, and love influenced by the ordeal of living through the end of the world. Each can be wrenching at times, but both leave viewers with profound ideas about what it means to be a person in precarious times.

I don’t know that The Last of Us has comparable insight to offer. Having never played the game, I can only imagine that the meaning-shaped hole in its otherwise robust story is something players fill with their own simulated but still, in a sense, firsthand experiences of embodying Joel and Ellie. A game that interrogates your ethics is a game that teaches you about yourself. In the form of beautifully rendered, often devastating TV, the effect is less illuminating and more masochistic. What’s the point of putting yourself through so much vicarious suffering, at a time when everyday life offers plenty of the real thing, if you’re not going to come out the other side any wiser?

Correction, Jan. 11

The original version of this story misstated the relationship between characters played by Lamar Johnson and Keivonn Woodard. Woodard plays Johnson’s younger brother, not his son.

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The Last of Us Is Lost in the Darkness of the American Myth

In The Last of Us , “endure and survive” is a linguistic North Star for Ellie. Educated in a school run by FEDRA, the last tightly clenched fist of American government rule, and forced to remain in the confines of the Boston QZ, where public hangings are common, Ellie has internalized, even romanticized, the phrase from the Savage Starlight comics. If Ellie can handle all this, she can go on. She can get a job, she can fall in love, she can build a life.

But consider “endure and survive” as more than a slogan for children in a nightmare world, and the words take on an almost proto-American, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps quality that The Last of Us reflects and distorts in unexpected ways. Ellie’s father figure, Joel, and their brief traveling companion Henry might have dismissed the phrase as redundant, but the words’ interconnected emphasis on individuality is key to unlocking the narrow-minded worldview that motivates so many of The Last of Us ’s disparate groups. The phrase that drives Ellie forward says nothing about community, collectivism, or unity, and the devastated America she explores is one defined by tribalism and selfishness, filled with national archetypes — cowboys and settlers, priests and revolutionaries — who have endured and survived at the expense of others.

In the Last of Us premiere , “When You’re Lost in the Darkness,” the pre-outbreak United States of September 2003 is a reminder of American exceptionalism as government policy: George W. Bush as president, the War on Terror two years in. Twenty years later, the post-outbreak United States is a reckoning with American exceptionalism as internalized ideology: leaders as fascists, communities as closed doors. The creators of The Last of Us insist that their story differs from previous entries in the apocalypse genre because it is less interested in the danger of the Infected than in what humans will do to sustain themselves, but what they’ve also done is craft a series that, perhaps unconsciously, punctures the myths America tells about itself. “We’d do whatever was needed for our people. Imagine the life we could give them,” says cannibal Christian and pedophile David to Ellie in penultimate episode “When We Are in Need,” but The Last of Us has painted a portrait of an American identity incompatible with drastic change.

The term “American exceptionalism” is used both to describe the country’s unlikely mixture of defining qualities (born of revolution; ensuing democracy; capitalism that discourages government intervention), and to critique the belief that said exceptionalism is preordained, often by a Christian god, and makes America superior. Realities of America’s past, like the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery , and settler colonialism, are all interruptions to the idea that America’s inherent goodness and worthiness gilded it into a first-world country. Exceptionalism on a macro scale includes the arguable hypocrisy of America’s possession of nuclear weapons, use of torture , and international military intervention, while on a micro scale, it manifests as deep-seated individualism, born from “the American ethic of self-reliance and independence,” according to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, authors of America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked .

In The Last of Us , nearly every group Ellie and Joel encounter on the road is warped by self-reliance allowed to fester and toxify, and by the certainty that any action is justified if one is to “endure and survive” — American exceptionalism, shrunk small. In “When You’re Lost in the Darkness,” a global pandemic is shrugged off by an epidemiologist who rationalizes that “sometimes millions of people die, as in an actual war, but in the end, we always win.” In 2023, more than 60 years after that statement and two decades into the Cordyceps outbreak, the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA) uses those same victory-at-all-costs tactics to fight the Infected, revolutionary group the Fireflies, and regular people who live in the country’s remaining quarantine zones. Each QZ operates like its own fiefdom; although “federal” is in the agency’s name, there’s no discussion of a larger national governing body, of the decision-makers at the top. FEDRA does what it wants, and anyone who isn’t them is an enemy. All Infected, even children, are killed. Survivors are tasked with menial labor like burning corpses or cleaning sewers, soul-deadening work for which they’re paid barely nothing. Snipers post up on roofs at all times; public executions are regular occurrences; the Military Court of Justice doesn’t seem to believe in the “not guilty” concept.

The police-state panopticon of Boston seems fairly average by The Last of Us standards. While Ellie and Joel travel to Kansas City, they pass ditches full of skeletons, including a baby’s, all executed by FEDRA in the early days of the outbreak. When they make it to Kansas City, they learn that FEDRA there were monsters who “raped and tortured and murdered people for 20 years.” FEDRA’s consolidation of power, and their faith in themselves, is total. When Captain Kwong calls Ellie into his office in flashback episode “Left Behind” to remind her to follow the rules, his lure is that “when you’re an officer, you get to tell the Bethanys of the world exactly where to shove it” — Ellie’s power against people like her former bully would be absolute. And his self-congratulation that FEDRA is “the only thing holding this all together” doubles as rationale for their brutality: They were chosen to do this job, and they’re the only ones who can, and they’re better because they can. But the claustrophobia and cruelty of the QZs undermine the idea that FEDRA’s military dictatorship is successful in restoring any meaningful kind of freedom. There are people alive within the QZs, but whether they’re living is another matter.

If The Last of Us were to paint only FEDRA this way, it would simply be an examination of the efficacy of internal imperialism: How quickly can a country that was once a democracy slide into authoritarianism when the circumstances allow for it? Over and over again, though, the same type of assuredness that defines FEDRA’s version of American exceptionalism defines other groups in the series, too. They all think they’re the ones doing things the right way — the only ones doing things the only right way — and they all condone that thinking by pointing to various aspects of American identity. In Kansas City, Kathleen and her followers are revolutionaries in the mold of those who wrested the colonies away from the British: fighting against tyrants and collaborators, seizing control from those unwilling to surrender it. Their choice to ignore a sinkhole and the Infected teeming beneath it is that misguided primacy at play, and their downfall in Kansas City isn’t dissimilar from FEDRA’s; the threat they took for granted is the one that hurt them most.

As a counter to Kansas City’s spin on nationalism is Silver Lake’s version of religion, depicted in “When We Are in Need” as a mishmash of Christian doctrine that former math teacher David selects to serve himself. The Bible doesn’t say anything about cannibalism or pedophilia, but David uses Revelation 21 to anoint himself as chosen for “a new heaven and a new earth,” and to pardon his myriad crimes against both body and spirit. “I’m a decent man, just trying to take care of the people who rely on me,” he tells Ellie, which includes feeding dead fathers to their daughters, and then assuming a role of authority and paternalism in those same girls’ lives. Cordyceps didn’t kill the patriarchy, but David’s inability to truly see a young woman as his equal (a fairly American quality , actually) makes for his eventual undoing at Ellie’s hands.

Even in subplots where The Last of Us is seemingly approving of its characters’ actions, there’s an intriguing undercurrent of how American thinking defaults to exceptionalism. In “Long, Long Time,” Bill’s resistance to FEDRA as “new world order jackboot fucks” and “Nazis” and his doomsday prepping are the ultimate acts of individualism; he seals off his town and labels it for “authorized personnel only,” with himself as the only authorized person. Even when he and Frank fall in love and start a life together , Bill wants to keep being self-sufficient; even after Bill and Frank have both died, Bill’s goodbye letter to Joel focuses on how “men like you and me … have a job to do.” The Last of Us suggests that Bill was right to protect himself and Frank because of their eventual love story, but seen another way, Bill for years hoarded resources others could have used.

The show makes a similar point when Ellie and Joel reach Jackson, Wyoming , a place that Ellie is thrilled to learn “actually fucking works.” The focus is on the pride Maria, one of Jackson’s elected leaders , feels for the gated community they’ve built, the new construction going up, and the electricity they’re drawing from a nearby dam. (Although it’s not really “communism,” as both Joel and Maria call it, since there’s no production apparent in Jackson and no owner class from whom workers are restructuring profits; maybe political education dropped off after the apocalypse.) What’s fascinating is that despite all this domesticity, Jackson’s citizens have styled themselves after American cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers; everyone’s got a horse, a big belt buckle, and a gun. They’re tight-lipped about all the killing they’ve done to protect themselves and the infamous reputation they’ve built past the River of Death, where they dump the bodies of Infected and non-Infected alike, but insist it’s in service of the new society they’ve built. Worth pondering, though, is the possibility that Jackson wasn’t abandoned once Maria and the others showed up. The idea of manifest destiny is foundational to American lore, and The Last of Us shows it in action. The people of Jackson don’t want to share, don’t want others to know they’re there, don’t allow radio communication or signaling with the outside. This land is theirs and theirs alone, and who was there first doesn’t matter.

The question mark in all of this is the Fireflies, who with one episode to go in this season remain unresolved within the show’s imagination. Where will their seemingly collectivist thinking, which FEDRA smears as terrorism, land them on The Last of Us ’s American-exceptionalism scale? Is the fact that they can’t maintain strongholds a sign of their refusal to engage in the type of exalted thinking that defined Kansas City, Silver Lake, or Jackson? The series’s primary protagonists are initially disapproving of the Fireflies’ efforts: Tess disparagingly calls Boston Fireflies leader Marlene “the Che Guevara of Boston”; Joel resents Marlene for turning his brother Tommy into “a follower”; Ellie blames the Fireflies for transforming best friend and crush Riley into a bomb-making wannabe revolutionary. Yet Marlene’s care for Ellie seems genuine, and her plan to adapt Ellie’s Cordyceps -immune blood into a vaccine for everyone is laudable. Unlike so many of the series’s other characters, whose decision-making is shaped by sectarianism masquerading as safeguarding, the Fireflies’ motives seem to be bigger than themselves — placing them on a contradictory path to The Last of Us ’s opinion of the American way.

Whether The Last of Us will sanction or undermine the Fireflies’ plans for Ellie is a narrative question mark going into this weekend’s finale, but expanding “endure and survive” into more than a solitary goal shouldn’t be treated as an impossibility. After spending so much of this season in the darkness, The Last of Us could spare a light.

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Den of Geek

The Last of Us: Every Major Difference Between the Game and the Show

The first season of HBO's The Last of Us largely stayed true to the game, but a few significant differences threw fans for a loop.

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This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us HBO show and The Last of Us Part 1 game.

The Last of Us first season is finally over. While many predicted that the show had the potential to be the finest live-action adaptation of a video game ever, it really was remarkable to see all the ways the show successfully adapted the game’s legendary story . Of course, as with all adaptations, there are some major differences between the HBO series and its source material.

While you’ll find a list of those differences below, keep in mind that we’re emphasizing the word “major.” That means this article doesn’t reference things like different camera shots, different actors, or even slightly different dialog sequences. Instead, we’ve primarily focused on changes that either impacted The Last of Us ‘ overall narrative (or specific character arcs) in significant ways or notably altered a memorable event from the game. If you spot any significant changes you think we missed, though, let us know about them in the comments.

The Last of Us Episode 1: “When You’re Lost in the Darkness” Differences

The talk show opening.

The very first scene in HBO’s The Last of Us is unique to the TV series.

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Whereas the game’s opening takes us back to the early days of the Cordyceps infection (more on that in a bit), the show goes even further back in time than that. It opens with a snippet from a fictional 1968 TV program in which a host discusses global apocalyptic scenarios with two researchers (always a pleasant bit of programming). During that panel, one of the researchers suggests that the greatest threat to humanity is actually a fungal infection accelerated by global warming (though those words aren’t used). As you probably know, that suggestion turned out to be tragically prophetic. 

The showrunners have previously stated that they felt this intro helped set the stage by informing viewers that the people in this show were aware of that threat on a least some level before it actually happened. The team said they were originally going to utilize a David Attenborough-style opening, but felt that the roundtable format was a bit sleeker and more entertaining. As we’ll soon see, this was just one of the many ways the show added new material to the game in the name of worldbuilding. 

The Timeline Changes

As we’ve previously discussed, The Last of Us ’ pilot episode quickly establishes that the show follows a slightly different timeline from the games. Whereas the game opened in 2013 before jumping to the apocalyptic future of 2033, the show opens in 2003 before eventually jumping to 2023. The timeline changes ultimately don’t have a major impact on the rest of the series (aside from some additional 2003-specific references), though the 2023 timeline does hammer home the idea that we’re looking at an alternate timeline rather than a vision of 2033 that could yet come to pass. 

We See a Lot More of Sarah

While The Last of Us HBO series does a remarkable job of recreating the game’s incredible introduction sequence, the HBO version of that incredible opening features significantly more scenes with Sarah. The show allows us to spend much more time with Sarah and witness a pretty typical day in her life (albeit during some quickly escalating circumstances), which arguably makes her eventual fate hit that much harder. 

Tess and Joel’s Relationship Is Much More Obvious

This is a slightly smaller change, but it’s worth noting that the show implies that there is more of a romantic (or at least sexual) relationship between Tess and Joel than the game did. Most notably, we clearly see Tess crawling into bed with Joel and embracing him. While you could argue that the game also leaves you with the impression that Tess and Joel are more than just friends or partners in crime, the show emphasizes that Joel is still looking for someone to love at the end of the world despite his hardened exterior. 

How the Cordyceps Infection Spreads

This is another one of those changes that run throughout the series, but The Last of Us ’ pilot episode quickly establishes (in various ways) that the Corydycpes infection in the show generally spreads via direct contact with the infected rather than through the spores that were such a major threat in the game. The showrunners discussed their reasons for that change before the series’ pilot even aired, and the decision to make the actual act of infection a little more “personal” would pop up in various ways throughout the show (some of which we’ll discuss in a bit). 

Tommy Is Missing

Strangely, The Last of Us show reveals that Joel had lost contact with Tommy quite some time ago (despite the two speaking regularly before that), whereas the game suggests that the two simply don’t talk that much anymore. It’s not entirely clear why the show implies that Tommy may be “missing,” though we some minor ramifications of that alternation in future episodes. 

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The Last of Us Episode 2: “Infected” Differences

The scientist opening.

Much like the pilot, The Last of Us ’ second episode opens with a show-specific sequence that takes us back in time. This time, though, we go to the earliest days of the Cordyceps infection and follow a scientist in Jakarta who learns of the nature of the outbreak and reveals that there is little else that can be done at this point outside of bombing the city.

This new sequence accomplishes two key things. First off, it furthers the show’s message that the outbreak was a global crisis whereas the game focused more on the U.S. (though a global outbreak was certainly implied in the games). Second, it suggests that Jakarta was the apparent starting point of the infection whereas the games were always a little more ambiguous regarding the exact origins of the outbreak. In general, this is one of the many ways that the show directly reveals things that the game only hinted at or simply never said. 

Ellie’s Bite

In The Last of Us game, Joel and Tess are convinced that Ellie is immune after they see her breathe in deadly Cordyceps spores and remain miraculously uninfected. Since the show doesn’t utilize those spores, we instead see Ellie get bit yet again, which eventually helps convince Joel and Tess that she’s the real deal. It’s a logistical change that gets us to relatively the same place via a slightly different route. 

Tess’ Death

In The Last of Us game, Tess is killed by FEDRA soldiers that have been pursuing the trio since they left the quarantine zone. In the show, Tess is killed by a horde of infected (though she manages to take quite a few infected out with her before dying). 

As we’ve previously discussed , this change can likely be attributed to a few things. First off, the showrunners felt that it just didn’t make sense for FEDRA soldiers to pursue Joel, Tess, and Ellie so far into Boston. As we’ll discuss later, it’s also possible that the showrunners also wanted to portray FEDRA as a slightly more morally ambiguous organization rather than de facto bad guys. 

This change also allows Tess to go out in a blaze of glory rather than simply die in a gunfight against seemingly impossible odds. More importantly, having Tess be killed by the infected rather than FEDRA allowed this episode to establish another important change to the functionality and social structure of the infected. 

The Cordyceps’ Kiss/Connections

Early into The Last of Us ’ second episode, we watch as Joel, Tess, and Ellie observe a massive horde of infected from a seemingly safe distance. It’s here that we learn that these larger populations of infected are essentially connected via a fungal network that allows them to detect humans from across great distances and communicate with each other. The implication is that the infected have a strange kind of “society” that allows them to work together more effectively than the survivors often do.

Another lore change to the infected’s functionality occurs during Tess’ aforementioned death scene. Right before she blows up most of the pursuing infected horde, a lone infected host corners Tess and essentially tries to “kiss” her with tendrils in order to infect her. That kiss is yet another example of the show altering the portrayal of the infection process to make it more horrifyingly intimate.

The Last of Us Episode 3: “Long, Long Time” Differences

The source of the infection.

Early into The Last of Us ’ third episode, we see Joel and Ellie walking along the countryside and observing some remnants of the world that was. Ellie asks Joel how all of this happened, and Joel theorizes that the infection may have spread globally via contaminated food products (specifically, bread and flour-based products). 

Joel admits that nobody alive probably knows exactly what happened, though his theory seemingly confirms an early fan theory about the show. After all, in The Last of Us ’ pilot episode, we see Sarah and Joel avoid eating a suspicious number of bread products on the day the infection spread. To be fair, fans of the game had also previously theorized that the infection’s spread was likely related to food. 

Mortal Kombat

As Joel and Ellie are heading toward Bill and Frank’s house, they stop off to explore an abandoned gas station. The gas station secretly harbors a cache of supplies that Joel had previously hidden away, but the real prize in Ellie’s mind is a broken Mortal Kombat 2 arcade cabinet. In the game, that isn’t a Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet but rather a cabinet for a fictional fighting game called The Turning .

It’s a minor change all things considered, though the show would eventually revisit Mortal Kombat in ways that make that game’s first post-apocalyptic appearance feel slightly more significant than it did in that moment. 

Pretty Much the Entire Frank and Bill Story

While many viewers (ourselves included) have already discussed the many ways that the Bill and Frank storyline in episode three diverges from the game, it really is worth noting that this episode represents the biggest departure from The Last of Us game by some distance. 

Simply put, Bill is not only dead by the time Joel and Ellie find him in The Last of Us show (which is a major change in and of itself) but the majority of this episode is devoted to showcasing the relationship between Bill and Frank. Perhaps some of those events could have happened in the game, though we certainly don’t get to see them in the game and Bill and Frank have already split by the time we encounter Bill in the game.

While this almost entirely original episode is arguably the show’s finest accomplishment (though not everyone feels that way), it may eventually become a harbinger for things to come. Now that we’ve recently learned The Last of Us ’ second season will make some major changes to The Last of Us Part 2 , it seems reasonable to expect more episodes like this one moving forward. 

The Last of Us Episode 4: “Please Hold to My Hand” Differences

Kansas city in place of pittsburgh.

In The Last of Us game, Joel and Ellie head to Pittsburgh after leaving Bill’s compound. In the show, they instead head to Kansas City. While that change in location doesn’t have a major impact on what happens next (at least not on its own), it’s worth noting that Kansas City is not seen or referenced in the games at all. This is yet another one of those ways that the show emphasizes how far the infection has spread and how much of a world exists beyond what we see in the games. 

The Last of Us ’ fourth episode introduces us to Kathleen: the leader of the Kansas City resistance who has more than a few grudges to settle. As you may know, Kathleen doesn’t exist in The Last of Us games. She is instead a kind of amalgamation of different characters and concepts from those games who helps give Joel and Ellie’s human adversaries more of a face and purpose than they previously had at this point in the adventure. 

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So, in the interest of keeping things as tidy as possible, any scene with Kathleen is obviously a change from the games. As we’ll soon see, Kathleen’s presence and narrative also create a ripple effect that changes a lot of little things that follow in increasingly significant ways. 

Ellie’s Kill

In The Last of Us game, Ellie kills a raider who is attacking Joel. This is the first time we see Ellie kill anyone. In the show, Ellie does stab a raider that is attacking Joel, though Joel ends up killing the wounded raider himself. That change also gives us more time to sit with the pleas and screams of the wounded raider who now seems much more human than he did moments ago. 

It’s not entirely clear why this change was made. Perhaps the showrunners didn’t want Ellie outright killing someone so early on, or maybe they just felt this was a good time to showcase Joel’s more ruthless side. In any case, it’s a brief but notable departure from the source material. 

The Pit of Infected

Though arguably the smallest change on this list, there is a fascinating scene in this episode that sees Kathleen and her right-hand man Perry overlook what is essentially a pit of infected creatures that seems to be boiling slowly to the surface. This scene doesn’t exist in the game, though its presence here both keeps the infected in the conversation and contributes to the idea that the infected are actually growing more hostile rather than simply rotting away underground.

Henry and Sam’s Intro

In The Last of Us game, Joel and Ellie just kind of run into Henry and Sam while wandering through Pittsburgh. In the show, Henry and Sam sneak up on Joel and Ellie while they’re sleeping. Along with giving Henry and Sam a little more agency , this change also allows this episode to end on an effective cliffhanger. 

The Last of Us Episode 5: “Endure and Survive” Differences

Sam is deaf.

Simply put, Sam is deaf in The Last of Us show but seemingly has no hearing problems in The Last of Us game. While Keivonn Woodard (the actor who plays Sam in the show) is also deaf, it’s not clear if this change was made due to casting or if it was another way that the show tries to give Henry and Sam more of a story of their own (which we see play out in several early scenes not present in the game). 

No Infected In the Tunnels

In The Last of Us game, Joel, Henry, Sam, and Ellie’s journey through the Pittsburgh underworld is interrupted by a steady stream of infected who block their progress. In the show, the group doesn’t encounter any infected in the tunnels. Henry actually makes it a point to mention that he believes the tunnels are mostly clear of infected (minus some possible stragglers). 

It’s another small change that has more of an impact when you weigh it against the previous implication that Kansas City is practically bursting at the seams with infected (as well as what happens next).

Henry Was a FEDRA Informant

In the games, Henry and Sam are just two people trying to survive in the city. In the show, though, we learn that Henry was actually a FEDRA informant whose information led to the death of Kathleen’s brother (and many unfortunate events that followed). Aside from the fact that there is no Kathleen in the game (which also means that Kathleen’s brother doesn’t exist), the biggest reason for this change seems to be the many ways the show tries to highlight the many moral ambiguities and complicated choices people in this world must often face. 

The Bloater

Again, pretty much any scene with Kathleen in it is obviously at least slightly different in the show vs. the games, but one of the more interesting changes related to Kathleen occurs when the Kansas City hunters and our group of protagonists face off against a rapidly swarming horde of infected. The horde is seemingly led by a giant infected creature affectionately known as a “Bloater.”

We actually see a Bloater during the Bill section of the game, but he was moved to this portion of the adventure as a way for the team to show that the infected can grow larger and more dangerous over time. 

Ellie’s Blood

In one of the most heartbreaking moments in The Last of Us show, Ellie learns that Sam is infected and tries to cure him by rubbing her blood into his wound. The “cure” obviously doesn’t take, which eventually forces Henry to shoot Sam before taking his own life. 

While Sam does get infected in the game and is eventually killed by Henry, the scene of Ellie trying to rescue Sam with her blood is a devastating new addition that cleverly showcases that a real cure will be much more complicated than that (if it’s possible to manufacture at all). 

The Last of Us Episode 6: “Kin” Differences

The opening scene of this episode represents yet another opening sequence not found in the game.

In that sequence, Joel and Ellie confront an older couple living out in the middle of nowhere whose day-to-day lives were seemingly not greatly impacted by the end of the world. After some persuading, the couple then send Joel and Ellie in the right direction before warning them of a mysterious danger just across the river. 

Along with expanding the world of the games just a bit more, this scene plays into Joel’s paranoia that Tommy is not well. That paranoia is not entirely unique to the game, though it’s obviously more pronounced due to some of the changes mentioned above. 

Tommy and Maria’s Baby

In both the game and show, Joel discovers that Tommy is actually living a pretty good life for himself in Jackson. He even has a wife named Maria. In the show, though, we learn that Tommy and Maria are expecting a baby. Among other things, that expected child adds weight to Joel’s eventual decision to ask Tommy to risk his life to help Ellie. It also highlights the many ways Joel is slightly pained by Tommy’s ability to make a new life for himself. 

Joel’s Panic Attacks

One of The Last of U s show’s most memed moments actually wasn’t in the games. Yes, the games show that Joel is struggling with the decisions he must make in Jackson, but we don’t see him start to have full-on panic attacks as he does in the show. Again, these panic attacks just make Joel’s vulnerabilities and doubts a little more obvious. 

Joel’s Breakdown When Talking to Tommy

The scene in the show where Joel asks Tommy to escort Ellie the rest of the way also happens in the game, but the conversation between the brothers plays out slightly differently in the show. For instance, Joel is much more open with Tommy in the show regarding both his fears that he can’t get this job done and the ways he now sees Ellie as so much more than just a package that needs to be delivered. Again, the game heavily implies that Joel has these same concerns but Joel doesn’t outright state his concerns in that game at that moment in the same way he does in the show.

Ellie Stays in Jackson

In The Last of Us game and show, Ellie overhears Joel’s conversation with Tommy. In the game, though, Ellie runs away when she learns that Joel intends to hand her off to Tommy. That leads to Joel finding and confronting Ellie. In the show, though, Ellie just heads back to her room and waits for Tommy to pick her up. Along with showcasing Ellie’s increasingly hardened soul, this change allows the show to move at a slightly brisker pace by skipping the sequence where Joel has to look for Ellie and gets into some trouble along the way.

Joel’s Wound

In both the game and show, Joel is wounded while trying to escape the Eastern Colorado campus. In the show, though, Joel is wounded by a raider. In the game, Joel falls onto a metal rod and must fend off several raiders while his wound worsens. It’s likely the showrunners just wanted to simplify this sequence for runtime purposes. It also would have been hard to recreate the full impact of the in-game version of events given that viewers obviously can’t participate in that shootout the same way they can in the game. 

The Last of Us Episode 7: “Left Behind” Differences

There is no mall.

After Joel is wounded, Ellie tries to find the basic supplies needed to keep him alive. In the show, she finds a needle and thread in an abandoned house. In the game, though (or at least the Left Behind DLC), Ellie looks for supplies in a nearby mall filled with raiders she must fend off. The sight of that mall triggers the flashback sequence that follows. 

Again, this change was likely made for logistical reasons. Simply put, it’s easier to shoot in a house than it is to find yet another mall set (and film yet another action sequence). It’s also worth noting that Ellie’s flashback in the show is partially triggered by Joel telling her to leave him and go off on her own. The scene where Joel asks Ellie to leave him to die was also not in the game. 

Fast Times at FEDRA High

While this episode largely focuses on Ellie’s pre-Joel adventures, the show expands on that portion of her life more than the original Left Behind DLC did. Specifically, it includes a few scenes of Ellie’s time at a FEDRA academy that weren’t included in the games. Those scenes show Ellie being reprimanded for attacking another student while also being reminded that she has the potential to be a leader in FEDRA. 

While The Last of Us game does include that sequence where Riley confronts Ellie in their dorm room, the rest of Ellie’s time at the FEDRA academy is unique to the series. It’s an interesting addition to the show that once again portrays FEDRA as more of a morally ambiguous collection of humans than the often slightly more evil organization they often were in the games. 

Playing Mortal Kombat 2

As previously mentioned, most of the references to the fictional fighting game The Turning in The Last of Us game were replaced with references to the very real fighting arcade fighting game Mortal Kombat 2 in The Last of Us show. So, when Riley and Ellie play Mortal Kombat 2 during the arcade sequence in that episode, they’re actually playing The Turning in The Last of Us game. However, that’s not the biggest change the show made to this memorable scene.

See, in the game, Riley and Ellie aren’t able to actually play the arcade machine. Instead, Riley asks Ellie to close her eyes and pretend to play the game while she describes it. In the show, they simply power up the arcade machine and finally enjoy a few rounds of Mortal Kombat . Why the change? The official answer to that question is unclear, though the whole idea of Ellie pretending to play the game probably wouldn’t have translated quite as well to the series. Generally speaking, the entire mall sequence in the show is also more colorful and “alive” than it was in the game, and this change feeds into that part of the fantasy. 

Riley’s Firefly Station

In The Last of Us show, we learn that Riley has actually been stationed at the mall by the Fireflies. In the game, Riley simply chooses to take Ellie to the mall to celebrate their last night together. It’s not clear why this relatively minor alteration was made, though it likely has something to do with the scene where Ellie and Riley argue about the Firefly’s intentions and their plans for Riley. Learning that Riley has been building bombs in this mall was just a perfect catalyst for that discussion. 

A Single Infected Corners Riley and Ellie

In The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC, Riley and Ellie have to fend off (and mostly run away from) a horde of infected. In the show, they are instead confronted by a lone infected host. While both scenarios end the same way (Riley and Ellie are “infected” and choose to spend their remaining hours together), the choice to focus on one infected rather than a horde almost certainly made this scene cheaper and easier to film. It also hammers home just how dangerous a single infected host can be. 

The Last of Us Episode 8: “When We Are In Need” Differences

Hunting rabbits.

In a memorable sequence from The Last of Us game, we watch as a cute snow bunny hops around an idyllic winter woodland area. The bunny is then swiftly killed by an arrow that we soon learned was fired by Ellie. In the show, Ellie does see a bunny but isn’t able to kill it in time. It’s likely that the showrunners were just following a variation of the “don’t kill the dog” rule, but I haven’t heard the official word regarding this change. 

David, The Religious Cult Leader

While David is a big part of The Last of Us game, we still end up seeing a lot more of him in the show than we ever did in the game. The show features numerous sequences of David interacting with his followers and roaming the town that were not in the game. That’s likely because the show is occasionally able to focus on characters that aren’t Joel and Ellie whereas the game kind of had to stick with that pair for gameplay and presentation purposes. Actually, the showrunners have stated that they originally thought about giving David an even bigger role in the show via flashbacks. 

Those sequences aside, David is also presented as more of a religious cult leader in the show than he was in the game. Interestingly enough, some unused audio files from The Last of Us game also portrayed David as more of a religious figure than he was shown to be in the final campaign. It’s likely that the showrunners just wanted to revisit that concept. 

David and Ellie Don’t Bond Over Their Fight Against the Infected

In The Last of Us game, Ellie and David must fight off a pack of infected. Their battle against the infected allows them to bond a bit before Ellie learns of David’s true nature. In the show, we just see Ellie and David bond during a campfire discussion where David’s dangerous charisma does most of the relationship building. 

This seems to be another one of those instances where the infected were cut from the show for both logistical reasons and so the showrunners could focus a little more on the human characters and their interactions. 

Joel Pulls Ellie Away From Her Attack on David

In both the show and the game, Ellie kills David in a pretty violent fashion. In the game, though, Joel pulls Ellie off David while she’s still attacking him. In the show, Ellie finishes the job, walks out of the burning building, and runs into Joel. 

This is another one of those changes that get us to roughly the same place in notably different ways. You could argue that Joel pulling Ellie off of David better emphasizes the idea that Joel is still making these futile attempts to shield Ellie from the violence of the world, though the show’s version of this sequence does a nice job of establishing that Ellie’s independence (especially when it comes to violence). This change also likely sprung from the decision to not show Ellie straight-up kill that raider in the fourth episode.

The Last of Us Episode 9: “Look For the Light” Differences

Ellie’s birth.

This episode features yet another elaborate opening flashback that showcases events not actually seen in the game. This time, we watch as Ellie’s mom (Anna) escapes a pursuing pack of infected and gives birth to Ellie in a remote cabin. Unfortunately, Anna was bitten during the attack. She knows she will become infected.

We soon learn that Anna has actually been sharing that cabin with Marlene and the Fireflies. Anna asks Marlene to kill her when she becomes infected, and Marlene reluctantly honors her request. She would have presumably killed the baby as well if she needed to do so, but we know that there was no need. Ellie presumably acquired her immunity to the infection as a result of her mother becoming infected during the birthing process. 

This is a fascinating addition to the lore of the games. Neil Druckmann says that he really wanted to feature the Anna character in the games but just never found the chance to do so before the show. While he mostly wanted to highlight the relationship between Marlene and Anna. This sequence seemingly reveals why Ellie is immune in the first place (a pretty major piece of lore that was never explicitly laid out in the game). It’s another major example of the show outright telling us something the show either implied or simply never directly addressed. 

Joel’s Attempted Suicide

While heading towards the Firefly lab, Joel finally tells Ellie the story of the scar on his head. It turns out that Joel tried to kill himself sometime after Sarah’s death. The attempt obviously failed, but this moment allows Joel to share his philosophy that time can heal most wounds. 

While that conversation doesn’t really happen in the game, the idea of Joel trying to kill himself isn’t entirely new. In the game, Ellie finds the skeleton of a person that presumably committed suicide. Ellie says something about that person taking the easy way out to Joel, and Joel mentions that suicide is never easy. His delivery implies personal familiarity with suicide attempts.

Sarah’s Picture

In The Last of Us game, Maria gives Ellie a picture of Sarah that Joel had previously refused to take. Later on, Ellie gives the picture back to Joel. The implication is that Joel can finally start to accept the past and put it behind him as needed. Strangely, Ellie never receives that picture from Maria in the game so she obviously doesn’t give it to Joel here. 

Once Again, No Infected

On their way to the Firefly labs in The Last of Us game, Joel and Ellie have to fight off one more pack of infected. In the show, there are no infected in that part of the story. It’s another one of those instances of the show skipping a confrontation with the infected. Along with the usual logistical reasons, it seems likely that the infected were cut from this part of the story in the show simply because the writers didn’t need an additional action sequence for gameplay purposes and could instead focus on Joel and Ellie’s interactions. 

Matthew Byrd | @SilverTuna014

Matthew Byrd is Games Editor at Den of Geek and an entertainment enthusiast living in Brooklyn. When he's not exploring the culture of video games, he's…

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Reading the game, reading the game: the last of us.

Jason Sheehan

The Last of Us is as much about the bonds between Joel and his surrogate daughter Ellie as it is about their post-fungal-apocalypse world. Sony/Naughty Dog hide caption

The Last of Us is as much about the bonds between Joel and his surrogate daughter Ellie as it is about their post-fungal-apocalypse world.

For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game , in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective.

I played the game through the first time in something like a perfect state of awe and terror. Enraptured is, I think, the word that best describes it. Carried away completely into this ruined, beautiful world and the story of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Normally such a completionist — so obsessed with exploring every hide and hollow in these imaginary worlds I throw myself into — in this instance I simply rolled with the narrative. Ran when running was proper. Slogged through dark and rain and snow and sunshine. Stood my bloody ground when left with no other options.

Joel came to love Ellie, his surrogate daughter, and Ellie came to love Joel, the only father she'd ever known. And I (a father, with a daughter roughly Ellie's age, with Ellie's four-letter vocabulary and Ellie's strange, discordant humor) loved Ellie, too. So when I reached the endgame and was presented with a terrible choice (no spoilers ... yet), I drew my guns and slaughtered my way to the end credits, alight with fury and sure knowledge that I'd made the only choice I could.

Second run: The beats are all the same, the story a known thing. Joel and Ellie fight zombies and soldiers and bandits and madmen. They lose friends and see sunrises and, this time, I play with an awful wisdom. Cassandra's curse. I know how this story ends and I have made up my mind that, this time, I will make the other choice. The right one (morally, mathematically, humanistically), and so I walk with ghosts the whole way, right up to the end, and then ...

And then I make the exact same choice again. I can't make the other. It hurts too much. Because that is how good the storytelling is in The Last Of Us. It makes you care so deeply for a smart-ass bunch of pixels in the shape of a teenage girl that you will damn the whole world twice just for her.

(OK, so now we're gonna get spoilery. Fair warning.)

Reading The Game: No Man's Sky

The Last Of Us is a zombie story. It is incredibly derivative, borrows liberally from a hundred different books and movies, is structurally simplistic, trope-heavy, melodramatic, viscerally violent, and despite all this (or, arguably, because of all this) tells one of the most moving, affecting and satisfying stories you'll find anywhere. At its heart, it is the story of Joel — a broken and hard-hearted thief and smuggler living 20 years deep into a zombie apocalypse. He and his partner, Tess, are forced into a job that requires them to smuggle a young girl out of the Boston quarantine zone and deliver her to an army of revolutionaries because, of course, this girl is The One — the only person ever to be immune to the spore/virus that turns infected people into gross, murderous mushroom zombies. That young girl is Ellie. And, unsurprisingly, the job does not exactly go as planned.

If this all sounds familiar, that's fine because it is familiar. The story -story is a stock frame — tested and dependable. It is a road trip story in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is, or Mad Max: Fury Road . Go from point A to point B, survive the journey, get there whole. And there's nothing at all wrong with a simple narrative architecture when it is being used to support complex character arcs, as it is here. The Last Of Us is a simple road trip story underneath, existing in service to the complex and rich redemption story on top.

All the stakes and ruination are laid out in the first 10 minutes, in a prologue so powerful that it'll break your heart even if you don't have one. Joel loses his daughter on the night the world ends, his little girl dying in his arms, under the gun of a panicked soldier trying to hold back the infected. When Ellie floats into his life two decades later, the jaded gamer in you says, Oh, so here's where he learns to love again. ... And you're right.

13.7: Cosmos And Culture

Exploring the 'universe' in a video game.

But then you watch it happen — in tiny moments like when Ellie, blowing off caution, walks a rickety plank between two buildings and Joel glances briefly down at the watch he wears, a gift from his daughter that he's been wearing for 20 years — and you participate in it happening (protecting her, defending her, eventually becoming her for an extended chunk of the game in a brilliant bit of perspective switching), and it all just clicks. This is a love story — one of the best parent-and-child narratives ever told.

Which is when that ending comes and you are presented with the ultimate parental nightmare scenario: Will you sacrifice the life of your child to save the world? Not a stranger, a friend or even a spouse, but your own daughter (which is what Ellie is now — Joel's daughter, blood or no). Because in Ellie lives the cure to the mushroom zombie plague. But in order to create it, she has to die.

I started a third playthrough before writing this piece. I am walking slow, taking my time, listening to Ellie read from her joke book, watching her swarmed by fireflies on the outskirts of Boston and admiring the natural beauty and deep environmental storytelling of the game. Nature has reclaimed most of this abandoned world, giving us an unusual apocalypse run riot with wildflowers. And while I have not made it to the end yet, I know it's coming. I know the choice I'm going to have to make.

And I know exactly what I'm going to do.

Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

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Coco Gauff wins U.S. Open women’s final, defeating Aryna Sabalenka 6-2

Coco Gauff won the U.S. Open women’s final, becoming the latest Black American woman to leave a history-making mark on the most sacred grounds of U.S. tennis

Gauff bested  Aryna Sabalenka  of Belarus on Saturday 6-2 in the final set.

Gauff’s upset win at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows, New York City, etches her name into the history books alongside other Black American women’s tennis icons like Serena Williams, Venus Williams and Althea Gibson.

Gibson won the U.S. National   Championship  women’s singles titles in 1957 and 1958, a forerunner of the U.S. Open. Venus, the older Williams sister, won the U.S. Open in 2001 and 2002 while Serena took the championships of 1999, 2002, 2008, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Those six U.S. Open singles titles by  Serena Williams are only matched by Chris Evert’s  half-dozen championships in the tournament’s modern era, 1975-78 and 1980 and 1982.

Coming into Saturday, Gauff, 19, of Florida, has  won five singles titles  but was still chasing a title in one of the world’s four major tournaments (the U.S., French and Australian Opens and Wimbledon).

She’s come close before as the  French Open runner-up in 2022  and when she reached the quarterfinals in Flushing Meadows last year.

It was in the low 80s when the first ball was served at about 4:15 p.m. EDT in Queens and the roof of Arthur Ashe Stadium was closed to mitigate some of the heat.

The temperature was better Saturday than the withering conditions — mid- to high-90s — that have plagued this tournament.

This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com.

David K. Li is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.

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53m Damen Yachting support vessel Five Oceans delivered to her owner

Related articles, superyacht directory.

Dutch yard Damen Yachting has delivered its second 53.3-metre support vessel, Five Oceans . This follows her launch in March 2024 which was completed in the presence of her "delighted owner" Tommy Allen. According to BOATPro , she is currently anchored in Nice, France ahead of her debut at this year's Monaco Yacht Show .

Five Oceans will now assist Allen with his company Five Oceans Global Solutions – an organisation dedicated to marine conservation, resource management and safe, responsible deep-sea exploration.

" Five Oceans will be used to research life below the surface of our oceans, a topic and cause central to Mr. Allen's operations and an important vision that we are honoured to be contributing to with this Yacht Support platform," said Jan van Hogerwou, commercial executive at Damen Yachting.

Construction on Five Oceans began in December 2022 after two years of design and development. The YS 53  series is an evolution of the YS 5009 , which was originally based on Damen's commercial platforms. Highlights include a vast aft deck across a nine-metre beam for carrying toys and tenders with a 15-tonne deck crane for launch and recovery.

The support yacht is powered by two Rolls Royce MTU engines delivering a combined total of 6,000hp and a top speed of 19 knots. The vessel is also fully IMO Tier III compliant, reducing harmful emissions by 70 per cent for full-range operations with a 5,000 nautical-mile range. According to the shipyard, Five Oceans is "strongly focused on highly demanding performance, efficiency and comfort."

Five Oceans sits beneath the 500GT threshold and can carry anywhere between six and 16 guests or staff, depending on how the owner wishes to use the vessel, as well as accommodation for a crew of 10.

According to BOATPro , Damen Yachting has seven units currently under construction, including a second YS 53. 

The news follows the delivery of the 60-metre superyacht Satemi . Her sistership, the sixth Amels 60, recently completed her sea trials . 

For those attending the Monaco Yacht Show, visit Stand DS103 to say hello to the BOAT International team.

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