Remembering the Dread: The Last of Us, Station Eleven, and the Power of Pandemic TV
Photo Courtesy of HBO
Do you remember the dread? Before the words “unprecedented times” became comical in their frequency. When everything was uncertain, when no one knew how infection truly spread and what the devastation could be. The pandemic was a wave in the distance with no sense of scale. We were huddled behind screens, cleaning produce with Clorox wipes, arguing over how much fear is justified. There was only one thing we could all agree upon: we did not want to see any TV shows about COVID.
There are some natural exceptions. Cable hospital procedurals like The Good Doctor, Grey’s Anatomy, and New Amsterdam were able to fit COVID storylines naturally into their repertoire of possible illnesses. But there are also misfires like You’s COVID storyline or the off-hand mentions in Brooklyn 99’s last season. Bringing up the pandemic can feel too real, too fragile, or just plain weird. The shows don’t feel as fictional as we want them to.
While mentions of the recent real pandemic are mostly unwanted in television, the years since 2020 have brought some great (fictional) pandemic shows. HBO Max’s Station Eleven set a high bar not just in pandemic storytelling, but in TV as a whole. And now there’s The Last of Us, HBO’s adaptation of the hit 2013 video game about an infectious zombie-like fungus that wipes out most of the world’s population. Both of these shows went into development before COVID began, but their storylines are viscerally real in the context of the last three years.
Station Eleven and The Last of Us feature remarkably similar first episodes. They play through the end of the world. The panic, the mayhem, realizing your life will never be the same. Fear of infection turns every moment into a tense life-or-death situation. Both episodes even have airplanes falling from the sky, symbolizing the end of a great technological age and how major catastrophe blends into the horror of modern life’s destruction.
The Last of Us’ Episode 2 cold open of an Indonesian scientist realizing there is nothing that can stop the infection was terrifying. It had something the video game didn’t: someone staring down the end of the world and knowing nothing can be done. The shaking of her teacup on a saucer, the quiet of the room against the roar of the city outside. Episode 2 depicts the onset of hopelessness, of realizing that humans no longer have control over this Earth. And it’s… very familiar.
The Last of Us TV show has benefited greatly from being made in the wake of a global pandemic. Creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman are able to tap into the emotions of a society that is trying to move on. The Last of Us game was praised for its tense and brutal emotional depths; but that was in the context of killing, of complicated people begging for their lives, or characters wrestling with horrible decisions. The TV show asks something else of the audience: to remember the dread.
Episode 3’s tale of Bill and Frank was rightfully praised as being an excellent slice of life and depiction of love in a dying world. But it’s also a story of connection in isolation and fearing strangers. Bill and Frank build their own world separate from everyone else. The love story isn’t just beautiful, it says that love is possible in a world where trust and closeness no longer exist. During the pandemic it felt like emotional ties were severed, meagerly maintained through Zoom calls. Episode 3 said connection is possible, that innate human desire to be with someone doesn’t disappear when the rest of the world does.
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