The Last of Us review: Prepare to be shocked by this compelling new season

In television, as in life, nobody knows what is coming next. When Game of Thrones debuted in 2011, there was a widespread expectation that the HBO adaptation of a nerdy fantasy saga would pass without trace (sneery earlier reviewers certainly thought so). Instead, it grew into a global phenomenon. That was likewise the trajectory of Succession – a parody of the Murdoch media empire’s familial wranglings that gave us the most compellingly amoral on-screen family since the Corleones and clocked up stellar viewing figures. Who could have predicted it?

Question marks similarly hung over The Last of Us (Sky Atlantic, Monday, 9pm) when the small screen retelling of the hit video game arrived two years ago. The game was hugely beloved, but then so were Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark and Uncharted. Look what happened to them when they were repurposed for the screen. Or, rather, don’t. Much like the zombie-like “Infected” in The Last of Us, the results were not pretty.

The Last of Us was different. For starters, everyone involved was respectful of the story of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a proxy father and daughter thrown together when a fungoid infestation triggers the zombie apocalypse.

It helped, too, that the source material was so heartbreaking – culminating, as it did, in a final shoot-out that will have seared itself into the memory of everyone who played the game. The show – created by The Last of Us writer Neil Druckmann and Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin – re-created this, and other significant plot points beat-for-beat and was rewarded with blockbuster ratings.

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The opening episode of season two is just as compelling and lays the groundwork for a series that, if it is anything like The Last Of Us 2 video game, is sure to depart from the original The Last of Us in several radical aspects. Prepare to be shocked.

But the bombshells are for now in the future. The story takes up five years after season one when Joel rescued Ellie from a hospital in Salt Lake City where doctors hoped that her unique immunity from the zombie plague could be the basis of a vaccine that could save humanity. The procedure would have cost Ellie her life – a twist which prompted Joel to slaughter everyone involved. He had rescued Ellie at the price of dooming humanity.

As the action commences, Ellie is now 19 and still ambivalent about her relationship with Joel and his actions to save her (about which he has never been entirely honest). They have returned to Jackson, Wyoming, a fortified settlement that they discovered when Joel went in search of his brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna).

In Jackson, life is almost normal – until you step outside the town walls. That is where we find Ellie, who sets off on a patrol with friend Dinah (Isabela Merced) and, poking around in a deserted supermarket, gets more than she bargained for when she discovers a new “intelligent” strain of Infected zombie that outflanks and creep up on their victims.

Other shocks are coming down the pipeline, too. That is because Joel’s rampage in Salt Lake City did more than save Ellie. It also made him a lifelong enemy in Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), a woman with a connection to the victims of his massacre. She has pledged her revenge, and now she is on his trail.

Pascal and Ramsey are great as an adoptive father and daughter who found each other at the end of the world, and viewers will look forward to seeing where their relationship goes in the weeks ahead (we hear Joel is eager to brush up on his golfing). For now, what matters is that this absorbing show is back and that, on the evidence of the first episode, its zombie game is stronger than ever. Fungoid fun and post-apocalyptic angst are unlikely raw materials for a prestige smash. However, much like Game of Thrones and Succession, The Last of Us has taken outlandish ingredients and spun them into TV gold.