'Last of Us' succeeds, 'Slow Horses' shines, 'Velma' stinks

Recommended viewing: 'The Last of Us' on HBO

I have noted before that I am not an avid video game player, but I have several friends who are, and they all recommended I check out the TV series adaptation of "The Last of Us" on HBO.

I'm glad they did, because what the first episode on Jan. 15 delivered was a genuinely novel twist on the zombie apocalypse genre, that managed to be both surprisingly plausible and all too relevant to our modern era of global pandemics and ongoing climate change.

"The Last of Us" front-loads an alternate history with back-to-back establishing prologues, the second of which replaces the past 20 years with a fungal plague that effectively destroyed society as we knew it all the way back in 2003.

The narrative makes the bold move of getting us emotionally invested in one particular character, to the point that they arguably qualify as the protagonist, until they're cut down.

Pedro Pascal continues to rack up well-realized roles, this time as the video game's Joel Miller, a weary, weathered, traumatized working-class survivor who, like "The Mandalorian," finds himself responsible for an adoptive kid, even as he copes with the family members whom he's either lost for good, or who have gone off his radar.

Both Joel and his younger brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, were living in the suburbs just outside of Austin, Texas, before anyone became infected with mind-controlling fungi that turned them into homicidal plague-carriers, but while Joel wound up in what became the Boston quarantine zone, Tommy established himself in what sounds so far to be a similar encampment in Wyoming.

Joel was already doing a brisk trade as a black marketeer in Boston to build up the supplies to travel to Wyoming since Tommy went radio-silent a while back. That happened when the skirmishes between the martial law-enforcing FEDRA (Federal Disaster Response Agency) and its insurgent opposition group, the Fireflies, dropped 14-year-old Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey, from "Game of Thrones") into Joel's lap.

Hints of why Ellie matters so much are dropped in the first episode, and while Joel's plan is still to return custody of Ellie to the Fireflies by the end of the pilot, it's already clear that she'll be joining him on his cross-country trek westward.

While the world of "The Last of Us" is unafraid to wear its storytelling influences on its sleeve, its world-building remains richly immersive, as the initially mutually antagonistic Joel and Ellie are shown sharing a viciously feral streak in common, with Ellie glaring in grim approval when Joel beats a FEDRA soldier to death with his hands.

I'll be intrigued to see where the story goes, once it's completed its quest plot arc, but in the meantime, the main characters and the transformed environments they inhabit are successfully maintaining my interest.

Must-see streaming: 'Slow Horses' on Apple TV+

When I previously solicited TV show and movie recommendations in my column space, one of my alert responding readers was John Skans, who listed two streaming series; the British spy thriller "Slow Horses," and the Native American teen dramedy "Reservation Dogs" on Hulu.

"Slow Horses" wrapped up its second season Dec. 30, on Apple TV+, with third and fourth seasons already confirmed, and I'm kicking myself for not checking it out sooner.

The premise of the show is that MI5 - Military Intelligence, Section 5, the same real-world UK security agency that James Bond works for - maintains a branch called "Slough House," as a purgatory for agents now known as "Slow Horses," due to them having performed poorly in the field, but not quite badly enough to be fired.

Part of the fun in the premise is the gradual reveals of the unlucky missteps and/or catastrophic ineptitude that condemned each agent to Slough House, as well as whatever connections, favors or blackmail have kept them liminally "in the game."

Ever since Tom Stoppard's 1990 film adaptation of his own stage play, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead," Gary Oldman has been one of those old British actors whom I would gladly watch reading the phone book aloud, and he's in fine form as Jackson Lamb, the aggressively unhygienic and unrestrainedly flatulent head of Slough House.

Lamb's openly expressed contempt for his own "Slow Horses," and his warnings to those agents to avoid any involvement in high-stakes missions if possible, belie his well-hidden but heartfelt loyalty toward his "Joes," as well as the savvy insights he's retained on spycraft.

Oldman's acting is ably supported by Saskia Reeves as his long-suffering office administrator, Catherine Standish, whom he emotionally abuses and safeguards in equal measure, and his more posh colleague and frenemy, MI5 Deputy Director-General and "Second Desk" Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas as a mashup of Lady Di's social grace and Maggie Thatcher's steel will.

As the "Slow Horses" are put through their paces by domestic terrorists, racist hate groups, "false flag" operations, backstabbing coworkers and conspiracy theories regarding Russian sleeper agents supposedly left over from the Cold War, all the obvious comparisons to John le Carré ("The Spy Who Came In From the Cold") and Armando Iannucci ("Veep" and "The Thick of It") occurred to me, and are well-earned by this show.

But what it reminded me of most strongly was a single-season Stephen J. Cannell cop show from 1990, "Broken Badges," which starred Miguel Ferrer and Ernie Hudson, because both shows feature colorfully unbalanced characters who run as much risk of sabotaging themselves as they do of running afoul of their would-be opponents' plots.

"Slow Horses" ultimately betrays an unexpected sentimentality, as much because of its ruefully wry wit as in spite of it.

Avoid at all costs: 'Velma' on HBO Max

When I first heard the news that Mindy Kaling of "The Office" was heading up a Cartoon Network "Adult Swim"-style animated reboot of "Scooby Doo," complete with a more racially diverse recasting of its core characters, I eagerly anticipated the result.

When Kaling recruited fellow proven comedic talents Constance Wu from "Fresh Off the Boat" as

Daphne, Sam Richardson from "Veep" as Shaggy, and Glenn Howerton from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" as Fred, I only grew more excited.

"Velma" premiered on HBO Max on Jan. 12, and for once, professional reviewers and online commenters are in complete agreement about a sweepingly changed reboot of a familiar franchise: In the words of "Mystery Science Theater 3000," it stinks.

The puerile humor smacks of a pathetic desperation, in its bid to be in-your-face transgressive, but it's not even inventive or committed enough to be as offensive as it's aiming for.

Most of the jokes feel like they were cut from early script drafts of "The Venture Bros." and "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law" for being weak and overly self-indulgent, and in spite of Kaling's quickness to attribute criticisms of the show to racism, its portrayals of the now-racially diverse Mystery Machine gang suffer from what comes across a lot like internalized racism.

Top this all off with the blatantly pandering sexualization of underage teen characters, and a random one-liner that seems to blame the #MeToo movement for a decline in standup comedy, and you've got a total failure to entertain that both sides of the political aisle can loathe equally.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]