This story contains spoilers for the first season of “The Last of Us.”
It’s a testament to the unusual terrain “The Last of Us” has carved out that its first season ended on the exact opposite of a cliff-hanger. Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the cocky teenager whom smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) was charged with delivering to a Firefly lab in Salt Lake City at the start of the series, asks Joel to swear that his story about how they escaped is true. He swears it is. She says okay, but she looks troubled. Roll credits.
For a series based on a video game in which a Cordyceps epidemic turns humans into fungal zombies, that final beat — which, in television, typically sets up the season to come — is surprisingly quiet and 100 percent fungus-free. The stakes are more interpersonal than existential. The tension, such as it is, comes from the fact that both protagonists are lying.
That’s an intriguingly small-scale button for a season that covered the collapse of the world as we know it. It suggests that the new season will focus on the rather fiddly question of whether Ellie believes Joel’s lie, and the ramifications if she doesn’t. That might seem a little weird or myopic, at least at first. Ellie’s developing bond with Joel over the course of the first season was unquestionably important, but it seems strange for their dynamic — no matter how much they mean to each other — to trump questions about the survival of the species.
End of carousel
That disjunct between personal feelings and more universal questions is more or less what the second season, which covers parts of “The Last of Us Part II,” the game Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross co-wrote as a sequel to “The Last of Us,” is about.
The new installment, which premieres Sunday on HBO, picks up five years after that freighted conversation between Ellie and Joel. The pair are now safely entrenched in Jackson, Wyoming — where Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley), preside over a functional and democratic community. Stability has given the two protagonists, who bonded through trauma and disaster, enough space and calm for Joel’s lie to fester. Ellie, now 19, has moved out of their house and into the garage. Both she and Joel (now in his 60s) spend time patrolling the perimeter for “infected,” but they’re rarely together. Ellie, whose immunity to Cordyceps remains a secret, hangs out (and hunts infected) with folks closer to her own age, including her trainer, Jesse (Young Mazino), one of the town’s promising future leaders, and his on-again/off-again girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced).
Joel’s distress at the growing distance between them is such that he even tries seeing a therapist, played by the incomparable Catherine O’Hara. That she despises Joel — and barters counseling in exchange for intoxicants — is beside the point (though it’s great fun to watch O’Hara casually shrug off the basic tenets of her character’s profession). Introspection is a luxury, and “The Last of Us” reopens in a slightly less desperate world, one where shrinks exist and violence is more a choice than a necessity.
That fragile peace feels precious but embattled; Jackson is functionally a frontier settlement. The paradoxes of the second season are heavily informed by Druckmann’s experience growing up in Israel. (Druckmann co-created the series with Craig Mazin.) In discussing his inspiration for TLOU Part II (the game), he described watching footage of two Israeli soldiers being lynched in 2000, wanting to destroy those responsible, and — some time later — feeling “gross and guilty” for harboring thoughts that murderous. “I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann said. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
It’s hard to say whether the series will pull this off (I have not played the game). Mazin and Druckmann are splitting TLOU Part II over multiple seasons, and this season — compared with the last — feels incomplete. It has the partial, stunted feeling of a Part I. The world outside Jackson is only lightly sketched in; while we briefly meet some characters that will come to matter, including Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and Mel (Ariela Barer), their roles (and the functions and ideologies of various other groups) remain hazy.
Jackson, by contrast, is crystal clear. So is Ellie’s role within it. She’s training hard, pushing for more responsibility, and taking a lot more pleasure in her work as a sniper and defender than she does in being a member of the community. If you feel a twinge of unease at the delight with which she shoots and maims faraway infected, that’s the show gearing up to supercharge the discomfort most of us felt in the Season 1 finale.
“The Last of Us” has always been invested in re-sensitizing viewers to the violence baked into a lot of apocalypse (and zombie) stories. Joel’s massacre in the hospital at the end of the first season could have been filmed as an awesome action sequence. It isn’t. It is, however, lengthy, ugly and packed with direct, irrefutable evidence that the morally gray hero you’ve been rooting for is a terrifyingly effective mass shooter. His decision to rescue a kid he’s learned to care about is reframed as horribly selfish as well as loving; in saving a person he values, he’s also depriving all of humanity of their last hope for a cure.
The questions that Joel’s choice raised were largely philosophical in the first season. In this one, they’re practical. The sequel to the first game famously refuses to treat video game casualties as non-player characters by insisting that (some of) the people players casually kill have networks and love stories of their own, and might want revenge. Joel’s rampage in Salt Lake City might be theoretically excusable on the grounds that he adored Ellie and the Fireflies were killing her without her consent. The show takes that logic, which viewers can probably squeamishly accept, and proves that it works just as well for the other side. Enter Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), Ellie’s main antagonist throughout the game, and throughout this series.
I won’t say more about Abby for fear of spoiling some plot points, but also because her presence this season is fairly marginal (disappointingly so). The season fulfills the promises that the Season 1 finale made by homing in on vexed interpersonal dynamics. Much of the story revolves around Ellie’s evolving relationship with Dina and Jesse (Mazino, whom you might know from “Beef,” is terrific) and her anger at Joel for rescuing her. By saving her life, he deprived her of a sense of purpose she desperately needs.
“The Last of Us” tenderly unpacks the way that need for purpose becomes a problem, but this isn’t a perfect season. It doesn’t really feel like a season; so much remains shadowy, undeveloped or underexplained that the finale feels like it stops more than it concludes (although the point where the story cuts off makes sense now that I’ve read about where the game’s story eventually goes). Even the fungus, despite some spectacular battles, feels a little beside the point. But, if this were a 14-episode season, these seven would probably be very good table-setting for the second game’s legendarily ambitious narrative experiments, most of which are still to come.
The Last of Us premieres Sunday night on HBO and Max, with subsequent episodes airing weekly.
