When you actually think about it, the rapid, sudden, turnaround of the video game adaptation is something that needs to be studied. In a few short years, a genre that consistently turned in entries that simply couldn’t fathom what made video games work finally started becoming big business as the likes of Sonic, Mario and (believe it or not) Minecraft started pulling in some serious revenue. However, while colourful family movies are all well and good, possibly the one adaptation that truly drove home that something based on a video game could hold significant artistic merit was HBO’s take on The Last Of Us – a brooding story about a zombie apocalypse that prioritised character and story over everything that had more spills, chills and heart than the last few seasons of The Walking Dead combined.
Well now it’s back and as anyone else who played the original games knows, there’s some pretty heavy shit in store for Ellie and Joel. Can the second season of arguably the greatest videogame adaption of all time manage to keep up that insanely high quality – or has the mold set in…?
When last we saw makeshift daddy/daughter duo, Joel had potentially doomed mankind when weighing up the fate of the world with the young life of Ellie who apparently had a potential cure for the grotesque Cordyceps virus running through her veins. Discovering that the operation could kill Ellie, Joel went on a rampage, killing most of the group known as the Fireflies in order to protect his surrogate daughter and after a prologue that sees that the survivors aren’t going to take that shit lying down, we bounce ahead five years to catch up with how the apocalypse is going along.
The settlement based in Jackson, Wyoming is going rather smoothly considering and Ellie, now nineteen and just as difficult as ever, has settled in and forged a close friendship with Dina whom she goes on recon missions with. However, this doesn’t mean that her relationship with Joel is going particularly well as the two are barely talking. Yes, this could be typical nineteen year old behavior, but Joel is worried about it enough to visit psychotherapist Gail for advice; but even this comes with some pre-packed issues as we come to discover that Gail holds some resentment due to Joel being responsible for the death of her husband.
Meanwhile, while Joel us wrestling with the angst of the terrible things that he’s done, Ellie and Dina, while out on patrol, stumble across a completely new breed of infected that seems to have the ability to think more than your average Clicker.
As the New Year approaches, Ellie finds that her romantic feelings for her best friend might actually be reciprocated, which causes some issues when when a homophobic member of the town speaks out. Of course, Joel responds with his usual overprotective nature, but as if to highlight the fact that his sins will eventually catch up with him, we see that not only that some winding vines of Cordyceps have infiltrated some pipework to the settlement, but the survivors of the Firefly massacre have finally located Joel’s whereabouts.
This may be a strange thing to say about a world ravaged by a zombie/plant epidemic, but I found returning to the mainly bleak, but occasionally moving, world of The Last Of Us, to be oddly reassuring. There’s something about a show that has the confidence and self awareness to not open its sophomore season with instant threat and chaos and instead eases us back in to a period in the show that almost feels curiously relaxing. K owing full well that the dark shit will come along all in good time, series creator and director Craig Mazin rebuilds this world once again, step by step by plonking us in five years ahead and while this means we’re playing catch up with a lot of the relationships, it also means that we’re immediately invested in trying to fill in the gaps.
While life in Jackson, Wyoming seems as idyllic as it’s ever going to get (marauding mushroom zombies, remember?), the imploding relationship between Joel and Ellie is deliberately left vague. Is this just a case of Ellie acting out like all kids her age do or is she resenting her surrogate father because she knows what ungodly acts he performed to keep her safe? Again, the season isn’t about to give up all the goods in the first episode and this is only one plot point that will eventually be laid out as we go along. Another intriguing detail proves to be the relationship between Joel and his shrink, played by Catherine O’Hara, and the bitter history that exists over the untimely death of her husband.
It seems that the Fireflies weren’t the only lives Joel has taken for “good” reasons during this five year gap and no doubt things will get cleared up with a flashback episode down the road, but it all adds to the nature of unspoken truths slowly poisoning all the good things that Joel has.
In the episode’s efforts to reestablish its human world, some might complain that the infected are pushed a little into the background save a single scene set within a supermarket that feels a little too “Walking Dead” for comfort. I mean, the set up is certainly memorable (the aftermath of an infected vs bear fight is certainly rather novel) and the design of the new, smarter infected is certainly the stuff of nightmares – but you have to remember that the reason the first season was so affecting was precisely because the zombies didn’t dominate the plot and thus are far more of a threat once they do turn up and proving this point completely is the relationship between Ellie and Dina.
Taking the centre stage and powering the entire installment is the palpable chemistry between Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced which positively crackles with easy banter and really helps take the edge off Ellie’s continuous, abrasive nature. While there’s echoes here of Ellie’s doomed friendship with Riley from season one, we soon find that they have an attraction that runs far deeper than that and even though LGBQ+ themes are no stranger to The Last Of Us, it’s interesting to see that the same instances of homophobia that plagued the community before rise up in a world that’s lost so much.
So a deliberately slow start for The Last Of Us season 2 means that we’ve plenty of revelations ahead as the show will no doubt zig zag to catch us up throughout the seven episode run. But then that’s how the show always managed to remain so compelling before and with Kaitlyn Dever’s vengeful Abby waiting in the wings, new breeds of Infected lurking in the shadows, Cordyceps crawling through the pipes of the settlement and Joel’s explosive secrets barely bubbling under the surface, the rest of the season will no doubt start spreading like a weed – or something more malicious. But make no mistake; The Last Of Us is defiantly back, but it’s not about to rush through its plot points when it has so much enticing charactization to wade through.
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