Season two of The Last of Us begins five years on with Joel and Ellie now firmly ensconced in a community in Jackson, Wyo.HBO
The Last of Us is back for a second season Sunday night on HBO and Crave – and the high-budget take on the zombie genre feels more like an actual television series this time around. You know, one with serialized storytelling?
Created by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and game-maker Neil Druckmann, the show’s original 2023 season introduced non-gamers to smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal), who was tasked with taking an immune teenager named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across what is left of the United States after an apocalyptic plague that transforms the infected into the ugly, super-corrugated mushrooms you usually can only find at the best farmers’ markets.
That first go-round provided viewers with many hours of memorable screen content – but was like a string of made-for-TV movies with too little connective tissue linking them.
The film-length episode “Long Long Time,” in particular, won viewers over with its depiction of romance between Bill, a survivalist played by Nick Offerman, and Frank, played by Murray Bartlett, a handsome interloper who stumbled into one of Bill’s zombie pits one day and into his heart.
The regular introduction of fun guys (and gals) like them at the start of episodes who were dead by the end of them became repetitive and manipulative, however. The show’s overreliance on filling in backstories with extended flashbacks lent little in the way of forward-moving momentum to the main story.
That would be the cross-country trek and deepening relationship between Joel and Ellie – which was a familiar one of a father figure and child on a dystopian journey (see Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the X-Men film Logan, for that matter) but was made memorable in short, sharp strokes thanks to Pascal’s soulfulness and Ramsey’s uniquely spiky onscreen presence.
Season two of The Last of Us begins five years on with Joel and Ellie now firmly ensconced in a community in Jackson, Wyo., where Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) lives with his family. The place is surrounded by huge wooden fences, has all the firearms it needs to fight off the infected, and a sense of new normal – small-town, barn-dance American TV normal – has returned.
For the first time in its televisual existence, The Last of Us becomes a proper ensemble drama with a prospective love interest for Ellie.HBO
For the first time in its televisual existence, The Last of Us becomes a proper ensemble drama with a prospective love interest for Ellie in Dina (Isabela Merced), a frenemy in Jesse (Young Mazino) – and, in a pleasantly surprising bit of casting, Catherine O’Hara as a psychiatrist named Gail, there to get the two laconic leads to open up a smidge.
The most consequential addition, however, is Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), introduced in the first episode’s cold open as a young woman with an understandable grudge against Joel.
The Last of Us falls into old habits of storytelling shallowness soon enough, however – ones that seem rooted in its creators’ refusal to break away from the first-person gameplay of the video-game it is adapted from and let secondary characters breathe on their own.
The theme is now revenge – and in addition to the humans who seek it (no spoilers as to who or for what reasons), there’s a plot about a fascistic militarized group in an urban setting fighting against an outsider group of religious zealots.
In a pleasantly surprising bit of casting, Catherine O’Hara plays a psychiatrist named Gail.HBO
While it’s clear the show’s creators see the pointlessness of cycles of violence, they neither break away from it in this season – which ends abruptly after seven episodes – or let characters express any serious misgivings about an eye for an eye.
When writers see themselves as smarter than their characters, it rarely results in truthful TV. The lack of introspection from Ellie in particular feels like a betrayal of the character – and leads Ramsay to give a performance that hits the same wild or emotional notes over and over. Attempts to pull on viewers’ heartstrings amid the brutality and brainlessness backfire.
What is undeniable is that The Last of Us makes great use of its natural locations in British Columbia and Alberta. The snowy scenes shot in the Rockies are particularly gorgeous.
But a shot of a character riding on a horse down a highway full of abandoned cars into a city only summons memories of AMC’s The Walking Dead – which was better at character and world-building before its universe got overextended.
What I particularly miss from that zombie series’ early seasons were the ways its showrunners used the undead – stuck in mud or tied to rocks underwater – to create poetic visuals about the futility of existence that were straight out of Samuel Beckett.
The mushroom monsters on The Last of Us, on the other hand, lack the same metaphorical umami.
