SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 2 premiere of The Last of Us.
The Season 2 premiere of HBO‘s The Last of Us drops in on what seems to be a quiet and calm existence in Jackson, Wyoming, about five years after the arrival of Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey).
But, under the surface, there’s a looming sense that something isn’t right. First of all, Joel and Ellie are barely speaking — and the issue appears to go deeper than just teenage angst. Also, the episode opens with the introduction of Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby with a group of Fireflies, seemingly mourning the losses at the hospital where Joel murdered everyone to save Ellie. Abby vows in that scene to eventually go after Joel.
This is an earlier and somewhat different introduction to Abby than in the game. Creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have explained that they chose to lay out Abby and her motivations this way to establish the best emotional connection with the audience in just seven episodes of television. Dever, who was a fan of the video game well before she was cast, also spoke positively of the change.
“Just the amount of time that we would have to spend in order to get to Abby’s core and to why she has so much rage, it would take a lot of seasons to get to that,” she said. “I think it’s really important for the viewers to see this side of her first from the jump. We are finding her in a very raw and vulnerable place. I think it humanizes her a bit more than than the game, and I think that that is important.”
One of the hallmarks of the first season of The Last of Us was how closely it mirrored its source material at times. However, The Last of Us Part II is much bigger in scope and scale than its predecessor, which presented different challenges and, at times, the need for larger structural changes to properly tell the story. In essence, make watching the show feel the same as playing the video game.
“You begin with the biggest possible view. What is this about? What matters to us? What made us feel, and why?” Mazin said of the process to adapt The Last Of Us Part II. “Then, as you go and find agreement and consensus, you just keep narrowing down…Eventually you get there, but it’s work, and it’s careful work, because we know how we ultimately decide episodically, and even season-to-season, how this will lay out, informs all the things that happen inside of every moment of the show.”
The Last of Us has already been renewed for a third season, and Mazin and Druckmann have indicated that the second video game would require multiple seasons to adapt.
That being said, there are many scenes in the first episode of Season 2 that will feel quite similar to the opening scenes of the video game, even if things aren’t unfolding exactly the same. Druckmann points to the supermarket sequence, which occurs without the introduction of the Stalker, and Joel’s conversation with Gail (Catherine O’Hara), as two examples of this.
“There’s this conversation that Joel has with Gail…it’s very similar to a conversation that Joel had with Tommy at the beginning of the game,” he told Deadline, adding that they introduced Gail to “have someone that really challenges Joel in a way that maybe Tommy wouldn’t. In the game, we use that Tommy conversation like, ‘Okay, how do we dramatize what happened in the first game? In case people haven’t played the first game or they forgot.’ Here, we’re using it as drama to feel the ripple effect of Joel’s choice at the end of Season 1, because so much of the season is about consequence.”
There’s a lot to unpack from this episode, including what appears to be the evolution of the Infected. While Ellie and Dina (Isabela Merced) are out on patrol, Ellie encounters an Infected that has a level of intelligence, stalking her through the aisles and baiting her into traps. This is another early introduction from the game, which Mazin explained was a way to “fire a warning shot over everyone’s head to say, ‘This is not as simple as it looks.’”
At the end of the episode, the camera settles on what seems to be cordyceps growing in some of the pipes in Jackson. And, it looks like Abby has finally made it to Jackson to make good on her promise. All of these external threats are also coming as Jackson is trying to rapidly expand to accommodate the influx of refugees they’ve had lately, placing them in a vulnerable position.
By the end of the episode, it starts to feel as though some of these characters are about to be caught on the back foot.
“In fact, part of the problem is, at least for the first part of that episode, you get the sense that people are getting a little cocky about all this. Ellie and Dina are like, ‘Oh, let’s go kill some clickers.’ Season 1, Joel and Tess were deadly terrified of clickers because they lived in a QZ where they weren’t facing them all the time,” Mazin said. “But now we’re out here in Jackson, where it seems like people have kind of gotten good at this, and they know how to kill these things. They’re having fun learning how to use them as sniper rifle practice. That is the kind of hubris that comes back to bite you every single time, and we wanted to bite people quickly, literally and figuratively.”
While things remain safe and sound for now, don’t expect it to stay that way. In fact, the premiere episode has not even scratched the surface of what’s to come for The Last of Us Season 2.
“Nothing is frivolous, nothing is done just for decoration,” teases Halley Gross, who co-wrote the game with Druckmann and also co-wrote several of the season’s episodes. “Everything is a setup for a payoff…So I would pay attention to who are they when they feel safe, because things are about to get really dangerous.”
New episodes of The Last of Us Season 2 air on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT and are available to stream on Max beginning at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT. The finale airs May 25.
