The Last of us -- On HBO -- mostly no spoilers.

Just saw the first episode last night. As far as the genre is concerned, it's a little hard to come up with a "the human race is threatened by a" virus/bacteria/fungus/parasite/vampire plot movie without some of it coming across as derivative. But in the end, the main question is, did the opening grab your attention, and, yes, it did. Enough to recommend it to others.

Some of the big pluses: The cast. Lots of familiar faces, so great acting.

As many already know, the human race is being challenged by, what turns out to be a fungus, that is taking over. We do get to see a bit of the before it all happens, and how society quickly devolves afterwards. The dynamic social forces are the government, which is trying to contain the damage by creating safe quarantine zones, but they're doing it with such draconian measures that I suspect it will be the twist to show that they're also making things worse. And in contrast are survivors who are living under the radar, usually living off a blackmarket smuggling industry, but even within this group, nobody really trusts anybody.

The fungus, as far as I can tell, does not have a queen mother or alien spaceship backstory that will play a role, so it's the anti-hero group where we'll probably see the biggest arc.

First episode sets the stage, bringing together the only known survivor of the fungus exposure with a smuggler group. Their objective: Get out of the quarantine area to travel across the country to some destination, were presumably anti-bodies can be collected to save the human race.