The blockbuster first season of HBO Max’s adaptation of The Last of Us features a high-stakes post-apocalyptic story arc that centers on the possibility of quite literally saving humanity. The unstoppable spread of a malevolent fungal strain called cordyceps has ravaged the global population and turned ordinary human beings into zombies who survive only by feasting on the flesh of the uninfected, thereby plunging society into an unimaginable nightmare. In this hellscape, we meet Ellie (played grittily and intensely by Bella Ramsey), a teenager with an unprecedented immunity to bites from the infected.

An obscure guerrilla group resisting the oppression of a largely ineffective remnant of the federal government engages the services of a farmer and mercenary named Joel (a disarmingly noble Pedro Pascal) to spirit Ellie across the country to a secretive laboratory, where her tissues can be analyzed and replicated to inoculate the rest of the remaining population.