The Last of Us Season 2

The structure of the last episode was a little rough. And though they clearly attempted to balance the emotional personal story with the world building they failed at it pretty hard. None of the emotional notes are hitting this season and that is due to the writers clearly not understanding their own story. They have no idea what the theme of the season is. All they have is vague, underdeveloped concepts. The structure currently feels like a rough draft, a first sweep. I can practically see the notecards and the corkboard. But here I am, struggling through the season so that I can give an honest review, so I guess we’re watching season 2, episode 4 of The Last of Us.

We start in a flashback which I already hate. Trying to make the audience retroactively care about anything is just horrible planning and shit writing. Flashbacks should be used to strengthen the emotional depth and our connection to characters that we already know. There is never a reason to use them as an introduction, unless the characters you are introducing are irrelevant to your story and are nothing more than story devices for your main characters. Screenwriting classes save lives guys, and too many

“Professionals” ignore the basics because they think they are better than them and they aren’t. You can only break rules when you understand them and it is clear this dude doesn’t understand shit.

11 year time jump because who cares at this point. The girls have found the general location of the wolves, the exact spot where our unnecessary flashback happened.

Okay then we have an overly long scene of Ellie playing the guitar, that again has no emotional connection to the story. See this is where you would use a flashback, inter-cut with this, her and Joel playing this song together and then Ellie getting emotional.

And then we have this B story with the cultists and the wolves, which in a limited series with very few episodes is a huge mistake. You can either tell an emotional story about the consequences of the cycle of violence OR you can tell a story about how a dystopian world breeds violence and it's kill or be killed. You can not do both. In this context, with this amount of time, you can not do both. Perhaps they would be interesting concurrent stories in the world of network tv, but it does not work for this.

And we start the violence, Ellie has started what is to become her murder spree. Her friend is clearly pregnant but Ellie does not know that yet. And Deena didn’t know that Ellie is immune to the infected. Ellie takes a bite for her and it's going to lead to a very interesting conversation. Ellie is forced to tell Deena her secret and Deena is forced to either kill her best friend, or trust her.

The Deena and Ellie relationship stuff feels super forced. Ellie being gay makes perfect sense to me, but that being an unrequited love story feels like it makes way more sense. In an attempt to give us some LGBTQ representation they are actually going to force themselves into a really shitty trope. I feel like we all know that narratively Deena is going to die so having them get together right before that puts them in a “bury your gays” story. And that is bad.

So not only does the writer not understand basic story structure but he also didn’t bother doing enough research to make his story changes not terrible. Look, I think everything should be gay. I need gay in every story I see but this just doesn’t fit, and it doesn’t make sense, and it brings up some terrible tropes. And this adds to the already bad storytelling. The season is half over guys and it's about to race downhill. Everything they’ve done so far is wrong and there is very few redeeming qualities for this season.