The Last of Us Season 2

The first season of The Last of Us was perhaps one of the best video game adaptations that we have ever gotten. It was emotional, action packed and had some truly incredible performances from the cast. It was also some of HBO Max’s best storytelling. When they announced there was going to be a season two there was some immediate concern from gamer fans regarding the next season. The second Last of Us game received very mixed reviews. Now I am not a gamer fan and I have not played the game but I have talked about it at length with my husband who has explained the ins and outs of the plot and character problems.

Now the overall plot line from the second game did not have to be inherently bad, from what I understand the real problem with the second game was how the story was told, not so much what the story was. So from a writer's standpoint the flaws were extremely easy to fix. However the hesitation comes from whether or not we trust the writers to make said fixes. Based on the first episode of the season the answer to that was no.

The foundations of the problem come from the fact that the very beginning of this season needed to not focus on Joel and Ellie. It needed to center on Abby, her anger, her grief, her revenge process. All we got to see was the aftermath of the Fireflies massacre. What we NEEDED to see was Abby discovering her people dead and not understanding what happened. Being fed only rumors, desperately trying to save whomever was wounded and watching them die slowly. And we needed to see that BEFORE we saw anything else with Joel and Ellie. Flaw number two was clearly the time jump. Whenever you do a time jump you are risking losing some of the emotional weight behind whatever character development you are trying to depict. If you are introducing a new character, that the audience does not care about and this character kills a character that we do care about then you need to make us give a shit about the new character.

So we needed to spend the whole first probably 2 episodes with Abby. We needed to see the context behind her emotions and see her process of figuring out how she was going to get her revenge.

Instead we got a single scene at the beginning and then saw her and her friends emerging from the woods outside of the commune. We spent the first episode with a very mopey Joel and Ellie. They have clearly drifted apart in the last five years and they are going to do 1 of 2 wildly predictable things; They are going to stay estranged until Joel dies, leaving Ellie with immense guilt OR they are going to reconcile right before he dies, leaving Ellie feeling like she wasted too much time being mad at him. Either way is kind of fine, they are just a bit boring. Making their story feel formulaic and mechanical.

Then we have the evolution of the clickers. They can now apparently think, and plan. So I assume that is going to come back at some point.

And then we have Ellie and her best friend. We got some kisses which means that her best friend is probably going to die at some point this season as well because if the story is going to be revenge quest vs revenge quest then they are going to strip Ellie of anything and everything that makes her happy.

I hate the use of flashbacks but as we did an entirely unnecessary time jump we really need some context for Abby BEFORE she kills Joel. So I am hoping that the writers have the sense to give us that. The first episode was not emotionally where I thought it should be, especially since I have yet to sell a script but I know for a fact I could have written it better then the people that got paid to do so. I don;t have a lot of hope for the season but we will continue watching to see what happens. The problem is that the first season was so damn good, the second one has to work that much harder to measure up.