However, with the new season, it is now clear that the 2023 season’s success was nothing more than a fluke or an isolated lightning-in-a-bottle moment.
Unfortunately, the second season of The Last of Us handles the source material as literal groundwork. In other words, the game and everything that transpires in it is treated as nothing more than a suggestion, which is how the show’s co-creator Craig Mazin has developed the season.
Set five years after the conclusion of the first season, The Last of Us picks up with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) fully settled into the normalcy of living in Jackson, a barricaded town consisting of other survivors from the Cordyceps pandemic.
At the same time, an infected horde is riled up into attacking Jackson. In the ensuing chaos, the town suffers massive losses. The tragic events on that day lead to Ellie and Dina (Isabella Merced) trekking halfway across the country to Seattle, as they seek to settle the score with Abby.
Though the first season took creative liberties in condensing and expanding The Last of Us Part 1 into a nine-episode season, the second season makes far more radical changes to the point that HBO and Sony’s properties look like different entities.
With the passing of each episode, the aftermath continues to snowball, affecting other aspects, such as how certain main characters have their characterisation either reversed or swapped. A big victim of these changes is the main character herself, a 19-year-old Ellie, who is infantilised by Mazin to behave like a clueless, happy-go-lucky child that constantly needs to be watched over.
In the game, Ellie is persistently wallowing in depression and anger. Fueled entirely by an unquenchable thirst for revenge, Ellie’s descent into an endless pitch black hole forms the crux and backbone to The Last of Us Part 2.
In Mazin’s new version, Ellie is consistently jovial five episodes into the season. In the fourth episode, several major tonal whiplashes occur, frenetically shifting between comically out-of-place jokes and Ellie behaving more her age and in-character.
Fans familiar with the game often joke that Ellie “kills half of Seattle” on her mission, yet this iteration of Ellie by Mazin struggles against the infected and barely kills three people, two of which were accidental.
Missing voices, misguided vision
Already greenlit, the third season will cover the second half of The Last of Us Part 2 and if there is a merciful god, Druckmann and Gross should have majority control over steering the series back to what it is supposed to be: a story that is not dumbed down for general audiences and is brave with making hard decisions in its narrative, without being weighed down by infantilised main characters or having its nuance and complexity stripped.
The Last of Us second season is streaming on Max.
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