The Last of Us Season 2

The Last of Us Season two, episode 2….oof. Like I anticipated, the creators of the show did absolutely nothing to fix the problems that the game had. They decided to double down on their poorly structured, emotionally hollow story for no other purpose other than shock value. Yes Joel died, but that is genuinely not the problem with this story. From what I understand the “theme” to The Last of Us 2 is about grief, loss and the destructive cycle of violence. However the ending of the game does not, at all, line up with Ellie’s story throughout it. And as they have not changed anything about the delivery of the first part of the story, I have no hope for any correction of the ending.

The main problem with how the central conflict of the episode played out in the show is that it was entirely emotionally disconnected. It's very clear that Abby is a little psychotic, she has fully lost her mind but as we did not get to see any of it that doesn’t mean anything.

I liked that we got to see the siege on Jackson, it helped carry through the storyline that the infected had evolved and this was the next phase of that. The nerdist said it was what we wanted from the Battle of Winterfell…now if you are referring to the fact that we could actually see the battle then sure. But the main problem with the battle of Winterfell was that not enough people that we actually know and cared about died. In a complete plot armour way. And that problem was present in The Last of Us as well. The only people besides Joel and Ellie that we care about are Tommy and his wife…who both live, so it actually suffered from the exact same problem.

Then we have the fact that at the moment Abby is not a character. She is nothing but a plot device because the writer accepted none of the criticism that the second game got and insisted on sticking to his shitty structure. Had we been given literally any meaningful scenes with Abby before the moment she kills Joel then maybe she would have a personality, perhaps her friends would matter at all but this is all information that the writers want to deliver after the fact for some reason. It's simply poor narrative structure.

The fixes are so simple it's so frustrating that not only did they not do any of them, but there was no fix to the structure whatsoever;

Fix #1: We should not have seen Joel or Ellie for the first 1 ½ - two episodes

The first episode should have started with Abby and her friends walking through the carnage of the fireflies, we needed to see Abby’s big reaction to her father being dead. We needed to see these kids gather up their wounded and do everything they could do to save them but instead they lose them one by one. We needed to see how the grief and anger built up inside of Abby with every death.

We can then do a ONE year time jump to see Abby planning, training, tracking. This is where you also develop her friends as a group. None of them seemed super on board for her revenge plan so we need to see each of their relationships with her and their attempts to pull her back from the edge. During which time you introduce the flashbacks with her and her dad, furthering her psychotic break.

Then they find out about Jackson and come up with their plan. Now we can see Jackson and learn about this new evolution of infected.

The other huge major flaw in the way they wrote this is that they really had Ellie mope around for 5 years. If you wanted to include that Joel’s lie had consequences to him and Ellie’s relationship then we need to SEE THEIR RELATIONSHIP. The fundamentals of any VISUAL medium is SHOW don’t TELL and that is something that the writer clearly does not understand.

At this point there is no saving the show though I will continue to fix the episodes as we go along. Because conceptually there is a good story here. And the idea of running parallel stories where the girls are foil of each other is great, the problem is that it was all executed so poorly.