Table Setting in Seattle

I think it’s fair to say that The Last of Us has a problem. I think part of it is a premium television problem, to be sure, but there’s also an issue that it’s inherited from its source material. Where the first The Last of Us game had a fairly straight forward plotline, the sequel is more complex, more varied in its storytelling, and that would already prove difficult to bring to the small screen (or even the big screen) even before we have to factor in the cost and expectations of premium, streaming television. An adaptation that might have worked as 14 to 20 episodes (to account for all the story of the sequel) instead has to be stretched over at least two (and a reported third) season just to fit it all in.

Or, maybe, a better way to put it would be: the second season of The Last of Us wastes a lot of time to fit one half of its story into the streaming television model. It likely would have been better if everything had been condensed into a more straightforward 12 or so episodes that told the second video game properly. Instead we have this bloated second season for a show that, before, was tight, interesting, and didn’t linger. It’s amazing how far off track the show has gotten from that in just one season… but it has.

I will be up front (again) and remind everyone that I haven’t played the two games. I think that also means that my expectation for the story, and the content, are based more on what makes sense as a television show and not “this is what we did in the games, so let’s do it again on TV.” Clearly the producers of the show have been willing to diverge from the video game content when it made sense. They changed around the story of “Long, Long Time”, making for a very sweet flashback episode about two gay characters finding each other in the apocalypse, all from the bones of a story that was much darker and more depressing in the first game. There was every reason to think they could do similar here, in the second season adapting part of the second game, and as I understand it some (minor) changes were made.

But the core of the story, and the way it’s being told, feels like the creative team felt like they had to follow the story of the game implicitly. It leads to a season that feels very empty, especially once we’re past the bloody action of the first two episodes, one that’s just filling time because we have this other, more important, story that’s going on in the background that we don’t get to see until next season. It’s not just wasteful, it’s bad storytelling, and it really makes me wish that the people involved in the show, including original game designer Neil Druckmann, weren’t so close to the material that they could see everything needed to be changed up for the television series.

The show opens up a few years after the end of season one. Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are living in the rebuilt human city of Jackson, WY, staying at the same house together although, also, having a very tense, almost estranged, relationship. It’s hinted that Ellie knows what Joel did at the end of the previous season (we won’t spoil it here, just in case you’re reading this review without having seen that season although, really, go watch that first) and it put up a rift between them. Just as they’re starting to mend and become family again, though, Joel gets captured by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of someone Joel killed, and Abby wants her revenge. Which she gets. In front of Ellie.

With Joel dead (it’s two episodes in, so I hardly call this spoilers, and I told you to go watch stuff anyway), Ellie is on the hunt for revenge. With the help of her best friend, Dina (Isabela Merced), Ellie sets out for Seattle, the ruined city where Abby (one of the members of a paramilitary group calling themselves the Washington Liberation Front, WLF, or “wolves”) is holed up. The two are going to get their bloody revenge on her just as Abby got hers on Joel… and they plan to make it take a long, long time.

There are basic, fundamental issues with the story of this season that come from the video game series. For starters, a quest for revenge is far less interesting than a quest to deliver a girl to a hospital so that she can be the cure to save the world. One story, that of the first season, is about hope, change, finding light at the end of a complex and dangerous adventure. Sure, it ends in bloodshed (spoilers again), but there was some urgency to the story that helped keep its momentum going. This second season, by contrast, is just a dark and bloody affair. There’s no hope in the story, no chance at redemption for anyone. People are going out to kill, and then kill again, and there’s no easy way to dress that and make it better somehow. That’s the story the second season inherits and there’s no way, on any front, that you can have it be the same kind of series, or have the same kind of energy, as what we got in the first season.

With that being said, there are ways to address the story that could at least make it more engaging. After the first two episodes (which features a massive fungal-zombie attack on Jackson, as well as the brutal murder of Joel) the series slows down and spends five episodes with Ellie and Dina as they slowly mosey up to Seattle and then spend a lot of time looking around for Abby and never finding her. It’s so much wasted space that could have easily been condensed into two episodes instead of getting stretched out over five. So why do it this way?

Because that’s how it’s structured in the game (at least from everything I could see. The first act opens with Ellie and her going on a quest for revenge. The second act (which is what’s going to serve as the storyline for season three) focuses on Abby, at a parallel time to Ellie’s adventure, going over the same time period so we can see events from a different perspective. Only then (presumably in season four) will we get the big resolution to all this story… eventually.

I get that this works in a video game (maybe), where once you finish one arc of the story the next is there for you to immediately load up and continue in the game. But on television, this kind of spacing and pacing draws everything out. When normally you’d wait 15 seconds for a loading screen and then you’re into Abby’s adventure, now we have to wait a year, at least, to resolve a cliffhanger and see what happened with Abby over this five (or so) episode span. That alone makes this whole structure feel very different.

But it also means that we’re left with seven episodes for a season, with only a third of a story told, and five of those episodes are little more than table setting to a big finale… that doesn’t resolve itself. That shows the biggest flaw of the story: telling it like this, in two bifurcated parts, doesn’t work as television. Instead, the show needed to tell Ellie’s and Abby’s story concurrently and not bury it under all this mystery. If we saw what Abby was up to while Ellie was searching for her then the five empty episodes we get here wouldn’t have felt so empty. It wouldn’t leave this season feeling stretched out and bloating, as if very little happens and nothing resolves itself

Because, no doubt, very little of consequence happens and nothing resolves itself. We have a few interesting things that come up, like the introduction of smarter zombies that hunt and play stealthy games with their prey. We see a new version of the zombie lifecycle where they become airborne fungal spore factories. We get some character development for Ellie and Dine, potentially leading to something… maybe… eventually. But none of this comes together in any meaningful context. It’s moments without a direction that serve a purpose we can’t see because the season ends abruptly so we can go back (next year maybe) and see the same story from a different perspective.

Again, what the show needed to do was not be beholden to the narrative of the game and, instead, find a different way to structure this season and beyond. I honestly think that while the second game had Joel die early (I guess spoilers for that too, although that game has been out for a while) the second season should have delayed that. There’s an episode, “The Price”, that gives us a series of flashbacks between Ellie and Joel covering their time leading up to the start of the second season. If that had been fleshed out and made into a series of episodes, each one tracking a year for the two characters, leading up to a two episode finale where Jackson, WY, is attacked and Joel is killed, that would have been a gut punch of a season after we saw the two main characters grow as a family, fall apart, and then come back together again right before he dies. That’s good storytelling.

But the writers are so beholden to the games that they feel the need to stick to it like gospel. Video games are not television, and you can’t treat one like the other. This season of The Last of Us, while having some great moments, feels sparing, wasteful, and bloated, all because it follows the video game’s pacing instead of finding its own way forward. Things needed to change, and they didn’t, and that leaves this segment of the larger story feeling like far less than the sum of all its parts.