What’s Missing From the Grand Finale of <em>The Last of Us</em>
In snapping back to faithfulness to the original video game, the show reminded us of its limits.
This story contains spoilers for the entire first season of The Last of Us.
Video-game adaptations used to be defined by how much they could ignore their source material. A movie couldn’t actually be about cartoon Italians jumping on mushrooms with eyes, a battle against leather-clad lizards in an industrial dystopia. The game is about, well, fighting in the street, but the movie is a rip-off with far-flung action sequences. But as time has passed and button-mashing children of the ’90s like myself have grown up, video games have become hallowed ground: like his pixelated counterpart, or the fans will riot.
