BRUTAL POST-APOCALYPTIC DRAMA THE LAST OF US WAS A SPECTACULAR SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM. BUT AS WE FIND OUT ON SET OF SEASON 2, ALL HELL IS ABOUT TO BREAK LOOSE…

WORDS DAN JOLIN

“PLEASE DO NOT STEP IN THE BLOOD,”

A CREW-MEMBER INSTRUCTS EMPIRE.

This requires some careful footwork: there is quite a lot of the sticky red stuff puddled around the floor. And, oh, there’s a severed leg. It is lying not too far from a body we presume it once belonged to. Well, half a body. Its entrails cascade from its torso, and there is a disturbing look of surprise on its gaping face. Judging by the blood-trail that snakes away from this SFX horror, it appears it’s been dragged into this dark, dank, industrial hellscape in which we’ve found ourselves. By someone —or something. “I’m sorry we’ve brought you to an old, abandoned factory,” apologises Craig Mazin, co-showrunner of The Last Of Us. It’s the middle of July in Vancouver, and Day 150 of production on the second season. But the warmth and light of the Canadian summer cannot reach where we’ve found him, in the belly of a defunct milk-bottling facility which hunches in a flyover’s long shadow. The ceilings are oppressively low; the walls are bare, grey concrete; the floors are panelled with metal. It is an ugly, lonely and profoundly desolate place, even before you get to the scattered viscera.

For this is the late 2020s and the fungal apocalypse —overseen by Mazin alongside fellow showrunner and The Last Of Us video-game creator Neil Druckmann —is still in full swing. As it should be: the first season was a colossal hit, a cultural phenomenon, even. HBO’s mostwatched debut season and winner of eight Emmys, it’s fair to say it finally, spectacularly broke the video-game adaptation curse, smartly giving more attention to the palpable human impact of its nightmarish pandemic than the zombie-like, cordyceps-mutated creatures it spawned.

While we appreciate Mazin’s apology, it’s entirely appropriate that he should have brought us somewhere so cold, so dingy, so grisly. Because if you thought the first nine episodes were a rough ride, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As Bella Ramsey, aka teenage survivor Ellie, warns Empire: you better “strap in”.

W hen we last saw Ellie, she had just been rescued from a surgical demise by her protector-turnedsurrogate-father Joel (Pedro Pascal). Except, the surgery was intended to extract from her —as apparently the only living person immune to cordyceps infection —the key to saving our species. Plus, the rescue involved the massacre of an entire hospital’s worth of medical staff. A fact that Joel kept from Ellie with the lie that the procedure was simply unsuccessful, and that there are other immune people out there. It was a devastating finale which encouraged strongly conflicted emotions with its happy-questionmark ending.