By Gary

Welcome to the mushroom apocalypse.

The Last Of Us debuted on Sky Atlantic on Monday at 2am or 9pm depending on how much of a night owl you are.

The series is an American post-apocalyptic drama television series created by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann for HBO and is based in the game.

The Last Of Us, 2013 video game developed by Naughty Dog, follows Joel (Pedro Pascal/Game of Thrones), a smuggler tasked with escorting the teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsey/Game of Thrones) across the United States after a fungal zombie apocalypse.

The supporting cast features Gabriel Luna as Joel’s younger brother Tommy, Merle Dandridge as resistance leader Marlene, and Anna Torv (Fringe) as Joel’s smuggler partner Tess.

I want to try to keep comparisons and mentions of the video game to a minimum and treat this as a separate entity as it must work as a standalone, not just for fans of the game who know what’s coming but so far, this series has done an amazing job of transporting the characters to screen.

The first episode of a hugely promising start, with a lot of setup to get through with it taken place in two time frames.

John Hannah plays Dr Neuman, who foreshadows the series, when speaking about pandemic causes and his biggest worry is a fungus that mutates to take control of humans.

There are several fungi that control animals in real life, Cordyceps is one of these.

Joel is living with his brother Tommy and daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) when the apocalypse starts with sound bites in the background.

It then jumps twenty years into the future as the world has become used to the new way of living.

Ellie is infected but immune to the fungus and is to be moved out of Boston by the rebellious Fireflies to another part of the county.

Joel and Ellie, a pair connected through the harshness of the world they live in, are forced to endure brutal circumstances and ruthless killers on a trek across post-pandemic America.

This Series has elements that you will have seen before like in The Walking Dead, The Resident Evil movies and other zombie apocalypse movies of series.

Newcomers and original gamers will be amazed.

Whether Pascal can fully capture Joel’s brutality remains to be seen, but if anyone can, it’s him.

It’s early days, but so far, Bella Ramsey is Ellie, a perfect, contradictory mix of innocence, naivety, brattishness, street smarts and swearing.

It’s early days, but this video-game adaptation about the world being overrun by fungal zombies is expertly done.

My Rating: 7/10 – A promising start lets hope the rest of the series doesn’t disappoint.