Spoiler Alert: Possible spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 lie aheadAfter a wait that’s felt like an eternity, the crown-jewel of video-game adaptations has finally returned, and no, it’s notMinecraft.The Last of UsSeason 2 is here. While its first episode is mostly set up, it’s nonetheless a welcome return to Neil Druckmann’s post-apocalyptic world, hinting at intriguing directions for the weeks ahead. Set five years after the events of the first season, this week’s premiere sees Joel and Ellie, now living in Jackson, Wyoming, trying to navigate a newly strained relationship.
The premiere also introduces a newly expanded ensemble cast, including Joel’s therapist, Gail (Catherine O’Hara, whose scenes provide a killer acting showcase),and Ellie’s new girlfriend, Dina(Alien Romulus’s Isabel Merced). Most intriguingly, we also get our first glimpse of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), a hardened survivor who proves a key figure in the video gameThe Last of Us Part II. While she only gets a pair of scenes to bookend the episode,it’s already clear that the show’s creative team is taking some massive creative liberties from the games.
The Last Of Us
What Does ‘The Last of Us’ Change From the Games?
To avoid the risk of spoiling the journey ahead for the show’s new season, we shall tread carefully, butThe Last of Us Part IIwas surprising in its structural innovation, which gave a lot of emotional power to the story (even if it polarized fans). Early in the game, Joel and Ellie rescue Abby from a horde of clickers and take her back to their camp to heal, but it quickly becomes clear that Abby has more vengeful intentions.
After tragedy strikes, Ellie embarks on a quest for revenge, and since Abby has been thus far explicitly set up as an antagonist, the player is inherently put in a position to similarly want vengeance. However, halfway through the game, the story flashes back in time, and the next series of levels forces us to play as Abby as her backstory is gradually revealed.
‘The Last of Us’ Does One Thing So Much Better Than ‘The Walking Dead’
‘The Last of Us’ clickers are a far greater and more present threat than ‘The Walking Dead’s walkers.
Neil Druckmann approached bothLast of Usgames with the intent of forcing gamers to navigate morally complex situations, arguably to the point of intentionally inflicting guilt on the player. In the climax of the first game, when Joel shoots up the hospital to save Ellie, we’re given no path around violence, and even though we realize we don’twantto kill the Fireflies, we’re given no choice.The Last of Us Part IItakes this even further.Because Abby is initially introduced as a villain, the player is meant to gain satisfaction in playing as Ellie and vengefully killing her teammates, only to realize that things aren’t quite so simple after seeing Abby’s perspective.
However, the second season premiere ofThe Last of Usentirely dispenses with this mystery. The opening scene,which sees the polarizing Abbyand her friends (revealed to be Fireflies) burying comrades killed in the hospital massacre, explicitly states that the group is seeking revenge against Joel. While they discuss retreating to safety in Seattle, Abby refuses, instead vowing, “When we kill him, we kill him slowly.”
‘The Last of Us’ Wisely Changes Things To Work as a TV Show
Needless to say,this is ahugestructural change, andit admittedly runs the risk of diluting the story’s emotional power. In the game, Druckmann tells a story about how the cycle of revenge only hurts everybody involved and how violence only begets further violence. It worked so well because we only gradually came to understand how morally nuanced the conflict actually was.
However, the TV incarnation ofThe Last of Ustells a story in an entirely different medium. Thus,the storytelling mechanics that work in a game would likely prove more divisive on the smaller screen. Empathy is an important storytelling device in visual mediums, and it’s harder to get viewers emotionally involved with key characters if their motivations are shrouded in mystery for too long. Thus, it’s easy to imagine that spending weeks without understanding Abby’s backstory is immensely frustrating in practice.
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The series is sure to satisfy fans of ‘The Last of Us’ as this tale finds a group a survivors fighting for their lives after a deadly snowstorm.
That’s part of why the hospital massacre, as depicted in the show, arguably didn’t hold the power for many that it did in the game, because itcouldn’t. Players were forced to reckon directly with the moral complexity of the situation because Druckmann gave them no alternative path, and on TV, you can’t do something like that. The video game was explicitly designed to take advantage of being a video game. Druckmann and co-showrunner Craig Mazin wisely didn’t even try to replicate that experience for the show. They correctly understood thatthe weight of Joel’s decisionwould speak for itself on television, and they were right.
So,while it’s a bit disappointing that some of the biggest surprises inThe Last of Us Part IIwill not carry over to the show, it’s ultimately not that much of a shock. Druckmann and Mazin are working in a completely different medium, and it’s nice to see that they understand that inherently means viewer expectations will be different. If anything, it’s nice to see a slightly different take on the story; it’s the same theme but a variation on it, and we’re excited to see how that plays out.The Last of Usseason 2 is streaming onMax, with new episodes every Sunday.
