Two Sides of the HBO Apocalypse
‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Station Eleven’ are a natural point of comparison, but what separates the series is ultimately more instructive than what lumps them together
In the first season of The Last of Us, two children bond over a comic book. Savage Starlight may predate the fungal infection that devastated human society, but its slogan, “endure and survive,” nonetheless rings true in the Hobbesian world The Last of Us depicts. Before the devastating climax of the episode that bears the comic’s motto as its name, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard) page through their respective issues and share notes. The exchange is a rare, brief opportunity for the kids to be kids at a time when play is a privilege.
In the first and only season of Station Eleven, two adults clash over a comic book they first encountered as children. The eponymous Station Eleven is its author’s unpublished life’s work, a graphic novel about a lonely astronaut stranded in space. Station Eleven has only two readers, each of whom latches on to a very different excerpt. One, “There is no before,” leads its adherent to renounce all traces of the past—especially the part that precedes the flu that eliminated over 90 percent of the planet’s population. The other, “Survival is insufficient,” suggests the importance of preserving certain ideals and traditions. The quote is a counterpoint, and not just to other excerpts from its source. To endure and survive is simply a starting point. What happens next?
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There are any number of access points for a comparison of these two shows. Both Station Eleven and The Last of Us begin with the world’s end, then fast-forward 20 years to its aftermath. Each show pairs an older man with a tweenage girl who isn’t his daughter, but he protects and cares for her like she is. And both share a parent company as well as a general premise. Station Eleven premiered in late 2021 on the streaming service HBO Max; just over a year later, the pilot of The Last of Us premiered on HBO and Max simultaneously. (Both platforms are owned by Warner Bros. Discovery; they are technically distinct, despite the inevitable confusion.)
When The Last of Us and Station Eleven come up in tandem, it’s usually to comment on the mild absurdity of such similar projects emerging from the same source and so close together. (Imagine if Antz and A Bug’s Life were both Pixar movies.) Some Station Eleven fans have used the blockbuster success of The Last of Us as an opportunity to plug their favorite show, which was critically acclaimed but also under-seen. Station Eleven garnered only a handful of Emmy nominations and was shut out of the field for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series; its end-of-year release was also awkwardly timed, preventing placement on many best-of lists and dropping a weighty drama at a moment when many were in the mood for holiday distractions. Ultimately, it’s not a surprise that an adaptation of a literary novel would get less attention than a big-budget take on a hit video game.
Putting the two shows in conversation can still yield more insight than just pointing out a post-pandemic trend or making a simplistic case of “This is better than that.” What separates Station Eleven and The Last of Us is, in the end, more instructive than what lumps them together. Such differences extend to genre, tone, and overall worldview, but they’re conveniently summarized by a tale of two comic books.
The Last of Us is often described as postapocalyptic, though that’s not exactly true. In this series, the apocalypse is ongoing, a perpetual source of pressure, panic, and dread. The Cordyceps strain that turns its victims into fungal monsters continues to rage, leaving humankind’s dregs in constant survival mode. The Last of Us has heavy overtones of horror throughout, including a nail-biting sequence in which two blind Infected hunt down terrified humans by sound. Thanks to a special effects budget that’s decidedly post–Game of Thrones, gory spectacles, like massive “Bloaters,” are rendered in hauntingly plausible detail. The tension is high, the reprieves are short-lived, and the palette is quite literally dark.
Station Eleven, by contrast, is postapocalyptic in the truest sense of the term. The super flu it depicts may be deadly, but it’s also swift, running its course in a matter of days. The opening episode is sparing in what it chooses to show—a cough here, a frozen corpse there—and draws most of its impact from what it implies about events off-screen. From there, the season hopscotches in time; its present tense plays out in 2040, when the chaos of social collapse has finally settled into something like a status quo.
As in The Last of Us, that status quo has its share of violence and danger. Visually, though, this new world is bright and lush, filled with sunlight and bold colors. Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), who was given her copy of Station Eleven hours before the outbreak by a castmate in King Lear, has found a refuge in the Traveling Symphony, a touring theater troupe that performs Shakespeare for small settlements around the Great Lakes. The Symphony fashions costumes from goalie gloves and plastic bags, an easy shorthand for salvaging beauty from the abyss. This near future is a blank slate, and empty space affords room to rebuild.
The Last of Us is not without its moments of splendor, but they’re often “nature-is-healing” looks at a world without human intervention. The show’s characters are too concerned with fulfilling their immediate needs to scale any further up Maslow’s hierarchy, with isolated exceptions proving that rule. There’s no baseline of stability to support more cerebral debates like the one between Station Eleven’s Kirsten and Tyler (Daniel Zovatto), who leads a movement of “post-pan” children born after the plague to erase the past and forge a new path. When the future of civilization is not guaranteed, The Last of Us suggests that there’s no time to argue about what it should look like.
The purpose art and culture serve in The Last of Us is instead more nostalgic. (Or practical, like the ’80s playlist repurposed as a radio distress signal.) Sunday night’s episode is a flashback to one of Ellie’s final days in the Boston quarantine zone, a night spent with her best friend, Riley (Storm Reid), in an abandoned mall. Together, the two stumble on a semi-functioning arcade, where Ellie is as awestruck by a ’90s-era console as she is by the concept of air travel. Like Sam and Savage Starlight, Riley and the arcade are a chance for Ellie to experience a faint echo of what came before—then feel the magnitude of its loss. A lone Infected soon intrudes on Riley and Ellie’s gaming session, biting them both and bringing an end to their idyll.
If “Survival is insufficient” fails to resonate in a world still ridden with Cordyceps, another quote from Station Eleven—both the comic book and show—holds true. “To the monsters, we’re the monsters” is one of many refrains Tyler and Kirsten alike latch on to. That it strikes a chord with each of them is essentially the point: The line is a reminder that aggression comes from fear, important in a situation where suspicion of outsiders is intense, automatic, and frequently justified. Every faceless enemy has a faceless enemy of their own. Maybe that enemy is you.
The mantra can work as a call for empathy, though it also flirts with taking moral relativism too far. Tyler is, after all, a zealous extremist who uses children as walking suicide bombs. But in flashbacks, we also see what led Tyler to his harsh conclusions; he spent the earliest days of the apocalypse watching adults lie to assert their authority, then kill an innocent man on sight to protect their community. Tyler is, in the words of his uncle, a “destroyer,” but his delusions have too much underlying logic to make him a true monster. It’s a provocative idea—especially compared to the original Station Eleven, which made Tyler an unambiguous villain.
When applied to The Last of Us, “to the monsters …” has a more sanguine effect. Like a lot of survival fiction, there’s a latent conservatism to the story, from the implication that art is a luxury to its depiction of an anti-fascist resistance doomed by its leader’s vindictive grudge. The Last of Us could easily be a kind of prepper porn, the fantasy of conspiracy types like Nick Offerman’s Bill. The show’s approach to character, efficient and effective, works to offset this instinct. In less than an hour, we come to know both a resistance leader and the former collaborator she decides to hunt down. The takeaway isn’t that the rebels are just as bad as their oppressors; it’s the tragedy of self-interest at odds with collective prosperity and an understanding of all the decisions involved.
The show keeps cultivating this thread throughout. Joel and his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), argue over the atrocities they’ve committed and whether pledging to a cause can absolve them. In the latest episode, the shadowy dictatorship gets a somewhat sympathetic face in a captain who urges Ellie to live up to her potential. Even the Infected, as scary as they can be, aren’t truly malicious.
The Last of Us is not as overtly humanist as Station Eleven. But a shared affinity for their characters’ psychology is what makes both adaptations work, as TV—a medium that rewards fleshing out as many points of view as possible—and as takes on the apocalypse. “Endure and survive” is a lower bar to meet than “Survival is insufficient.” To do so still requires something, or someone, to survive for. Everyone arrives at a different answer. Figuring out what a character’s answer is and why proves far more interesting than outrunning an imminent threat.