Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us season two through episode one as well as references to the games. Read at your own risk.

Intro

Welcome back everyone! Hard to believe it’s been so many years since The Last of Us first aired. But it kind of brings a sense of realism to the show’s five year time jump, right? So much has changed. HBO doesn’t even go by HBO anymore, if you can imagine.

Season two of The Last of Us the show (because I have to do something to differentiate it from the game and who the hell calls it ‘Max’ other than David Zaslav?) brings us to part two of the game. During the hiatus I debated if I wanted to use the time to get as reacquainted with part two as much as I had part one. In the end I decided not to. The show’s doing the same story but making some changes in how the story is told - more on this in a sec - and I decided that I wanted to meet the show on its own terms. No quibbling about “Um, ACTUALLY this scene happened before that scene” or whatever.

So if you don’t see me making as many direct comparisons to the game that’s why. But it is worth talking about the game, how it hit culturally, and how the show is approaching a difficult story to tell. Which is what I’m going to do right now.

But don’t worry, I won’t give away any game spoilers. You’re not going to learn anything here you didn’t learn by watching this episode, I promise.

How The Last of Us the Show Translates Part Two of the Game

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think The Last of Us needed a part two at all. I thought the power of the first game was in part due to how it was a closed story. You get to the end and you don’t get to know the answers. You have to sit in the discomfort of what Joel did, same as Joel and Ellie do. I’ll be even more honest and say that once I saw The Last of Us part two I don’t know that the game sold me on the need for that story to be told.

That being said, there are a lot of people who disagree with me. They feel it told a powerful story that resonated for them personally. Likewise it can’t be argued that the second part didn’t level up the gameplay and the worldbuilding, so credit for that as well.

Picky as I am that continuing Ellie’s story to me felt more like milking a franchise than telling a tale that needed to be told, I will however give Neil Druckmann credit for the approach that he took to it. And here I can’t get into too many details without giving away spoilers, so put a mental pin on that because I will come back to it for sure as the season goes on.

What we can talk about, because it happened in the episode, is the introduction of Abby and her friends. A change the show makes from the game is letting you know right away who Abby and her group are. In the game you meet them without context, and are thrown in to playing as Abby with no explanation whatsoever. The game forces you to empathize with her because you are her. You’re keeping her alive, same as you kept Joel’s daughter alive - or tried to- back at the start of the first game.

The game doesn’t give you any context for who Abby is until much later. Craig Mazin elected not to do it because he knew with the second game needing to be broken up until two seasons, it would be far too long to ask a TV audience to care about a character you knew nothing about. You care about Abby in the game because you play her. On TV a direct translation would be a nameless girl who shows up on screen to say a few lines you don’t understand and then vanish for a few more hours. Doesn’t work.

(I’m not linking to any interviews where he said it because it runs the risk of giving game spoilers away for those who don’t want them. Just trust me, you know I don’t fib about these things.)

So the show takes a huge departure right away by opening with letting you know who Abby is. She and her friends - all various ages of children, albeit some older teens than others - are orphans. Not only that, orphans because of Joel.

And here we get into people’s reactions to both the first game and the second.

As I talked about after the finale of the first season, the entire point of the first game is that Joel is not a good man. You can argue whether he is the bad guy of the first game but you cannot argue he isn’t a bad guy.

The more detailed reasons are all in the link I just gave, but to quickly refresh your memory part of the point of the game - and then the first season - was to get the audience to realize that the typical video game/action hero character who shoots first and asks questions later is actually a monster. The audience is meant to question what various forms of media have told them and get them to wonder about what sorts of messages they take for granted about who we admire.

To say that there was a section of players in The Last of Us fandom who did not get this message is a VAST VAST understatement. To this day they argue that that’s not what the game says, it’s never what the game said, it doesn’t matter what anyone who worked on the game claims, Joel is the hero full stop. There are people out there who passionately argue that the Fireflies who Joel killed were actually child murdering serial killers who deserved to die. You cannot change their minds about this.

So I cannot blame Neil Druckmann who, when coming up with a story idea for the second game, decided okay, we need to spell this message out more for people who missed it the first time.

(Put a pin in that too, because believe me we’ll get back to it as the season goes on.)

To that end, I like how Craig Mazin translated this for the show. Abby isn’t a mystery, we’re told right away who she is. And more specifically we are directly confronted by the horror of what Joel did. These children are orphans with no resources (Joel took what little they had) and few prospects for survival. These poor kids had to try to tend to their wounded loved ones, failed to save them, and then had to dig the graves of their parents, siblings, cousins, friends, all by themselves.

Again I’m going to stress: AS CHILDREN.

Yes, they’re teenagers. But they are still children. It doesn’t take seeing Abby’s birth certificate to guess hey, maybe she and Ellie are about the same age? Maybe there’s a purposeful comparison being drawn here? Maybe Neil Druckmann is telegraphing to the cheap seats that as much as you may sympathize with Joel’s desire to save Ellie in order to do that Joel unarguably traumatized close to a dozen Ellies and very possibly left them to die?

Joel isn’t a good guy.

And as nice as it is that Joel is sitting there with his reading glasses and his bum knee being nice to his nephew, note how the show tells us he still hasn’t changed that much. He’s still the guy who left a family with a child to die by the side of the road on the night the infection broke out because all he cared about was protecting his child. He’s changed a little, but he hasn’t changed by much.

Now let’s see how the show handles the rest of the game.

Lagniappe

It’s hard to really dig into the first episode of the show without touching on spoilers, so I’m going to err on the side of caution by throwing my other observations into quick bullet points in this section that will get revisited down the line as appropriate.

• Bella Ramsey is now old enough to count as an adult, so I shall happily say I think they are a great actor doing wonders with Ellie. Anyone who questions it can just look at what they do when Ellie reacts to Dina being close to her, or even in the previouslies from last season where we see Ellie react to knowing Joel is lying to her, knowing he’s lying again when he swears he isn’t, and realizing her relationship with him is never going to be the same. Bella’s killing it and was perfect casting.
• As of me typing this my understanding is that Bella goes by she/he/they interchangeably but unless I hear otherwise I’ll use “they” just for consistency.
• Not that it’s in doubt, but of course Pedro Pascal continues to kill it. I particularly loved the shot when Gail, his therapist, encouraged him to talk. You could see the entire journey of Joel wanting to talk but at the same time rapidly putting so much of himself behind mental walls all in Pedro’s face. Amazing.
• Among the great “show don’t tell” moments of tonight’s ep was the reminder that Jackson is a town that is safe enough for the elderly, young, and disabled to live. It stands as a direct rebuke to the idea that the only way to survive in this world is to be ruthless.
• Another great show don’t tell was letting the audience know how Ellie has leveled up in the past five years. She can handle a man bigger and stronger than she is by far. But you also see how she handles her enemies. She’s not a bruiser, she’s little and fast. This is pulled directly from the game and I think the show translated it well.
• I went on and on last season about how the idea that the infected were connected across a vast root system was a great idea that provably was loved behind the scenes without ever being taken account of in season one’s actual worldbuilding, so I won’t repeat myself. I’ll just say that on the one hand the bit at the end was a potentially nice indication that maybe they’re actually doing more with the concept, but on the other hand I, safe on my couch in the audience, immediately thought “Infected communication system” when I saw that clogged pipe. So why did nobody who lives in this world not make the same conclusion? But hey, maybe episode two will clear that up somehow. Put this down as me raising an eyebrow but not passing final judgement.
• Tonight’s episode was edited by Timothy A Good and Emily Mendez who was we know are gods of editing. I for one am thrilled to see them back. That being said, the cuts of Catherine O’Hara, even when she was talking to Joel, were so harsh and disconnected I was left wondering if she was cast so late into filming that they had to shoot her after all the other actors had gone home. There’s no way I buy that Timothy and Emily do bad edits unless circumstances forced them to. No way.
• Props to set design for details like the mismatched chairs around Joel’s table. Also the insane number of details in Ellie’s room. Many of those came from the game but even so it’s a great job.
• I know a lot of this is due to me identifying with adults more than teenagers (the “Do you sympathize with Ariel or King Triton?” question) but my GOD I would’ve benched Ellie and Dina so fucking hard for the bullshit they pulled. They want to run off on their own and put themselves in danger that’s still dumb but fine. However, they could’ve gotten the rest of their patrol killed too. And this isn’t the first time. Nope, fuck that. Never mind the gate, they get mucking out stalls duty from now until spring at bare minimum.
• That being said, given how much Ellie has been shown to be butting heads with everybody I do wonder how much this is the show deliberately encouraging the audience to see her as being unsympathetic. She’s acting out as a teenager, sure. And unquestionably she’s been affected by the change in dynamic with her relationship with Joel, so her actions are completely spot on there. But my gut says she’s being presented as not just an understandably rebellious teenager, if that makes sense? We’ll see, I could be wrong.
• Lotta insight into Joel and Tommy’s relationship when he says he’s learned not to argue with Joel. Ties back in to how one of the solutions Tommy came up with to handle his dysfunctional relationship with his brother was to cut off all ties. (And remember, now that Ellie is also trying to pull away from him, Joel is yet again trying to push at those boundaries.)
• Great translation of the game’s listening mechanic when Abby and Dina were outside the store.
• Bella’s great but their accent slips a little when Ellie says she just sees a padlocked door. Not a fail, just charming.
• Loved the way the infected in the store was shot so that we the audience always knew where she was in relation to Ellie even if Ellie didn’t. Craig Mazin in the director chair, everyone. Gotta love it.
• If you didn’t watch online you might not know that the Max logo on the website was done to look like it had tendrils all over it. Cute detail, won’t lie.

And that’s all for this week. See you next week as we watch the season unfold!