Stream It Or Skip It?
Two years ago, the first season of The Last Of Us became a big, buzzy hit for HBO because it took the apocalyptic drama and made it very personal, whether it was via the journey of Pedro Pacal’s Joel and Bella Ramsey’s Ellie or the intensely-intimate episode starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett. The second season takes place five years after the events of the first season’s finale, which Joel still hasn’t told Ellie about.
THE LAST OF US SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We start with the last scene of Season 1, with Ellie Williams (Bella Ramsey) saying to Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true.” Joel’s not at all true response is, “I swear.” “OK,” she says, and she starts walking down the hill towards Jackson.
The Gist: Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, a group of Fireflies is sharing a park with some wild giraffes, mourning their fallen comrades. One of them, Abby Anderson (Kaitlyn Dever) is determined to find Joel and take revenge on what he did in order to rescue Ellie.
Five years later, the community in Jackson, Wyoming is going strong. Ellie is training under under the tutelage of Jessie (Young Mazino), who leads the patrol that helps protect the walled community from people infected with the cordyceps fungus. Joel is leading the efforts to get the town’s infrastructure built, but things like root-infiltrated pipes are slowing things down. The town’s leader, Maria Miller (Rutina Wesley), who is also married to Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna).
Another thing that concerns Joel is that the now 19-year-old Ellie is freezing him out. He says as much to Ellie’s best friend Dina (Isabela Merced), who often checks in to see how Joel is doing. When Joel goes to see Gail (Catherine O’Hara), the town’s psychotherapist, she basically tells her that she’s 19 and exerting her independence like every other young adult her age. But she knows something deeper is going on with Joel, and she thinks if she admits to some of her own dark thoughts, he might do so as well.
Ellie and Dina go out on reconnaissance patrol, after Ellie convinces Tommy to not sideline her on fence patrol. Despite instructions by the patrol’s leader, Lisa (Noah Lamanna), to not engage with infected people unless necessary, Ellie and Dina go into an abandoned supermarket and flush a couple of them out. But when Ellie falls through the upper floor office into the store itself, she encounters an infected person she’s never seen before.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? More and more, The Last Of Us, adapted from the hit video game by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (Mazin wrote and directed the first episode), feels like The Walking Dead, complete with walled off communities trying to establish some normalcy in a crazy post-apocalyptic world.
Our Take: The second season of The Last Of Us starts out looking like how Joel and Ellie integrate themselves into the community in Jackson and how it will defend itself against the fungus. Ellie’s immunity is still an issue, though right now it only gets brought up to the audience when an infected bites her. Will her immunity become a driving force in the season like it was for Season 1? Only time will tell.
What the season really feels like it’s going to be about is Joel dealing with the external and internal consequences of his actions in Salt Lake City. He’s killed a lot of people, and not just people overtaken by the fungus; the body count he inflicted in rescuing Ellie from a certain death at the hands of the Fireflies was really high, and he’s been lying to Ellie and everyone else for the last five years about the destruction he caused. As we can see from his session with Gail, that’s eating him up inside, but he knows he can’t say anything.
Speaking of Gail, O’Hara is a welcome addition to the cast, even if it’s just as a guest star (Dever, Jeffrey Wright and Joe Pantoliano are also notable additions to the cast for Season 2). In her brief scenes in the first episode, we get the full breadth of her ability to mix humor with anger, comedy with drama. It’s not that Gail is a laugh-out-loud character; like most people who were around before the fungus killed off most of humanity, she’s mostly sad and lonely, and O’Hara pulls that sadness off with her usual light touch. Hopefully, we’ll see more of her during the season.
This season might also be a bit of a coming-of-age scenario for Ellie. Yes, she’s pulling away from Joel, but that might be because she senses that he’s holding back about what happened in Salt Lake City, and that’s making her trust him less. But we also see during the New Year’s party that Dina is looking to be more than friends with Ellie. While Ellie is pretty secure with her sexuality, this is likely the first time that she’s going to enter into a real relationship. How that affects her choices will be interesting to watch.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: The last scene is a big spoiler, so we can’t mention it.
Sleeper Star: Like we mentioned above, any time Catherine O’Hara is on our screen, we pay attention.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of the second season of The Last Of Us shows us what seems like a settled group of uninfected humans, there’s trouble brewing in a few different ways, which should be what propels the action this season.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
