HBO’s hit collection The Last of Us is predicated on a well-liked online game from Naughty Dog. Science fiction writer Zach Chapman appreciates that the present is a trustworthy adaptation of considered one of his favourite video games.

“The show is in many episodes a shot-for-shot remake of the game,” Chapman says in Episode 539 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The script is almost exactly the same, you just don’t get the gameplay.”

The Last of Us has a repute as among the best online game tales ever advised. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley thinks that repute is well-deserved. “This is definitely a must-watch show,” he says. “It almost seems like a story that’s so good that someone had to write it sooner or later. It’s almost like it exists in the ether and was just waiting for somebody to instantiate it.”

The Last of Us is about in a post-apocalyptic America crawling with zombie-like “infected.” Horror writer Theresa DeLucci says the present’s likable, well-drawn characters set it aside from different zombie tales. “Here’s a story where things are shitty, but also hopeful and loving and humorous and complicated, and not everybody you meet is going to be an absolute shitheel looking to screw you over,” she says. “You might make some friends, you might fall in love, you might find a family. And I think that’s what makes people like this show a lot and come back to it and not feel like it’s a Walking Dead retread.”

One of the present’s strongest episodes, “Long, Long Time,” explores a same-sex relationship because it develops over the course of 20 years. Fantasy writer Erin Lindsey thinks that episode was the spotlight of the present. “I would love to see more scriptwriters and networks take a risk on putting out episodes like that that are more about heart and more about people, and less about moving at breakneck speed from one slaughterfest to the next,” she says.

Listen to the whole interview with Zach Chapman, Theresa DeLucci, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 539 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And try some highlights from the dialogue under.

Theresa DeLucci on expectations:

I’m a super-fan. I’ve been enjoying this sport for the reason that beta in 2013. Right earlier than it got here out I went to PAX Prime and bought to go see an early preview of the sport, and I nonetheless have my T-shirt and my poster. I’ve cosplayed as Ellie earlier than with my husband, who performed Joel—he’s a lot taller than me, and has beard. I’ve written about it and replayed this sport again and again. So I had some fairly sky-high expectations. … I went to an early screening at a theater right here in New York City that they fully re-dressed to appear to be the New York QZ with actors and zombies. You might inform they’re doing the Game of Thrones therapy for this. They knew what they’d after they picked this up.

Erin Lindsey on world-building:

I feel the [show’s] time-frame is implausible bordering on ridiculous. Everybody eats this flour throughout the similar 48-hour interval, and every part begins to go to shit. You would see some type of staggered timeline, I feel, relying on the origin of this flour and the place it will get to grocery store cabinets the soonest. … You see by Episode 2 that these vestigial establishments nonetheless exist. In no matter mangled, fascist kind, we kind of acknowledge life within the QZ. There is a few authority established, there’s nonetheless operating water in some locations, an countless provide of ammunition for some purpose. And that to me is incompatible with the timeline that they put ahead. If you’ve witnessed crises escape on the earth, you understand that even essentially the most ready army or federal catastrophe authority on the earth doesn’t arrange with the snap of a finger.

Zach Chapman on The Last of Us online game:

You must strategize the way you’re going to go about taking out these monsters, and often you’re doing it in a quiet means. A number of the sport you’re strategizing, utilizing improvised weapons that you just’re choosing up and creating, like bricks. You decide a brick up from the nook of a constructing and bash considered one of their heads in. And there have been no examples of Pedro Pascal doing that within the present, that made him appear artful. … There was not one of the brutal “smash someone multiple times in the face with a brick” or “stab them with a shiv.” That doesn’t occur within the present, and I feel, at the very least for me, it dropped the ball a bit bit.

David Barr Kirtley on characterization:

When Ellie first sees the Mortal Kombat II machine, she’s simply fully exuberant, and is like, “Oh my god! It’s Mortal Kombat II! This is so awesome. There’s this character and she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones!” And we discover out later that simply a few days in the past, her finest buddy and first crush died underneath horrible circumstances shortly after they’d performed Mortal Kombat II collectively for the primary time. And it simply appeared odd to me that she didn’t have a extra detrimental response when she noticed the Mortal Kombat II sport, given what associations you’d suppose it will need to have had for her—and pretty recent ones. I assumed in among the early episodes she was spunky in a means that didn’t completely match for me as soon as we discover out what occurred to her only a couple days earlier.

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