The Last of Us Season 2

Well Joel died and my investment in this series went down about 99%, not because he died but because the way he died was executed terribly. I still feel nothing for Abby, not hatred, not anything. She simply isn’t a character yet and quite honestly it is too late to make her one. It doesn’t matter how they tell the rest of this story they have already fucked up the catalyst to it's existence and therefore there is really no way to come back. But we will finish the season for no other reason than journalistic integrity, so here we go with season 2, episode 3 of The Last of Us.

We go right into another fucking time jump. I swear to god these writers don’t have any concept of how a narrative works. 3 months later. Why not a year? Why not 6 weeks? There is no rhyme or reason to these time jumps. They just don’t want to be bothered with actually writing emotional fallout, or they are simply incapable of doing so.

Ellie is very clearly putting on a front for Gail, it's evident in the way that she talks to her that she is just saying what she needs to so that she can get cleared to leave the hospital.

Bella Ramsey is great, grief isn’t exactly hard to portray but masking your emotions is and she is incredible.

Now we start Ellie’s revenge quest, her friend is relaying information about names and location. She tries to recruit Tommy in her little revenge quest who is way more level headed about the situation.

Then we jump to this random what seems like a cultist group hiding from the group that Ellie is trying to track down. And this revenge mission is being left to the council. The entire town gets to talk and discuss whether or not Ellie gets justice which I think is a little insane but sure.

Ellie pulls herself together enough to eloquently articulate why she wants and needs to go after the people who killed Joel. And she does such a good job, I love her so much. Well her proposal was rejected, but the proposal was for a team of 16 of them to go, no one can tell her that she can’t go and handle this by herself.

Her best friend decides that she is going with her, which is very cute and everything but most definitely can’t lead to anything good. Grumpy old man is the one that helped them get their supplies and sneak out.

So one of the things that made the first season so good was how heavy every single second was. There was not a shot of that show that wasn’t emotional and weighted. And this season just feels so disconnected. Because they chose to make Joel and Ellie estranged for that weird and unnecessary five year time jump it takes all the wind out of these grief scenes. We’ve already talked about how Abby’s story has no emotional grounding but unfortunately neither does Ellie’s.

And now we just have faded in and out shots of the girls traveling, seems lazy. Again, if you are going to tell a side by side narrative then you need to actually do that. This time could be spent desperately trying to make me care about Abby.

The girls come across the bodies of the cultists and attribute the massacre to Abby and the wolves. Okay well there is a lot more wolves then we thought, that is going to end badly. Obviously best friend here is going to die, but that seems like a pretty obvious next step in this painfully predictable story.