Two teenagers plan how to dispatch their latest undead enemy: a kill-shot to the head, or a knife in the side of the neck? One of them throws a glass bottle, distracting their prey. Then she goes in for the kill with all the breezy confidence of a kid playing a video game on easy.
It’s a rare moment of playfulness in the second-season opener of The Last of Us, a show that generally takes its storytelling deadly seriously. While the wildly lucrative Minecraft movie strip-mines its IP for laughs, this celebrated HBO series, adapted from the PlayStation titles of the same name, is as focused on taut character drama as the thrills and spills of the zombie genre.
