Two weeks ago, News broke that actress Kaitlyn Dever joined the cast for HBO’s second season The last of us TV series – which are still floating around with no release date, with “sometime in 2025” being the best anyone in TV land can imagine. But despite this slight ambiguity, Dever’s casting sparked a bit of a firestorm of speculation, as it was revealed that she would be playing a character named Abby Anderson when she starred in the second season of the Emmy-winning video game adaptation – meaning The last of us is almost certainly diving full force into the history of the 2020s The Last of Us Part II. And that means things are about to get… messy.
[AnmerkungdesHerausgebers:DieserArtikelenthältSpoilerfürdasVideospiel2020[Editor’snote:Thisarticlecontainsspoilersfor2020videogame The Last of Us Part II– and probably for at least some of the plot elements of HBO’s ongoing second season The last of us TV show.]
Because while there is critical consensus about it Part IIhas mostly calmed down in the four years since its release – one has to accept a certain amount of consternation lately that Sony has already released a “remastered” version of the barely retrospective game last week – the game was something of a Blitz rod when it first came out. Some of this wasn’t developer Naughty Dog’s fault. (A High-profile leak from the game’s developmentwhich introduced multiple cutscenes and character models, ignited the kind of jerks who get angry when female video game characters aren’t “feminine” enough (to name one of the more hateful examples.) But some of it was in direct response to the game’s major narrative shifts, who, depending on who you asked, were either “courageous” or “extremely aggressive and somewhat manipulative.”
We have to assume that many of these will now be adopted by the TV adaptation: With the exception of it critically acclaimed third episodeCraig Mazin’s adaptation of the first game into the series’ first season was almost overwhelmingly faithful – right down to the final scene of the season, which almost exactly replicated both the game’s dialogue and staging famous ending. Since the game series’ creative director, Neil Druckmann, is on board for the second season, as he was with the first season, it would be shocking if the series deviated more than a few inches from the established canon.
What does it all mean? A few things – all of which could make a difference The last of us‘ second season a very strange series on television.
The Pedro Pascal “problem”
Anyone wanting to avoid spoilers for the game series or the next season of the series should get off this train now, because there’s really no way to talk about either without addressing the mushroom-encrusted elephant in the room: the sudden death of the protagonist Joel Miller, an hour or so The Last of Us Part II .
Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel in the series, understandably has I was a little hesitant when asked about this plot element–because how could he not? (Nobody wants the HBO spoiler team in the back of their minds.) But The Last of Us Part II Without them, the story really doesn’t work: Joel’s sudden death at the hands of a group of survivors who arrive in the ridiculously idyllic community where he and Ellie (Bella Ramsay) spent their post-apocalypse has its roots in both the aftermath of the first game and also in the narrative obsessions of the second. Everything The Last of Us Part II What I want to say about humanity – and it wants to say a lot – arises from that early moment of sudden, shocking brutality, a moment of terrible trauma that emerges directly from another.
This was controversial, to say the least, in the games where Joel was a popular character played by popular voice actor Troy Baker. If you apply it to a rising/resurrected star like Pascal – who did so much work in molding some pretty good roles into a beautiful, broken human being with his performance as Joel in the show’s first season – it still could be more disturbing. Pascal and Ramsay both made it through game of Thrones, of course, so both are no strangers to starring in a series that has shed its “star” at a critical early point. But seeing the show’s most marketable star Go the way of Logan Roy One episode of the new season will probably still unsettle fans a bit.
The absolute brutality of Ellie Williams
If the paragraphs above haven’t given you any clue, The Last of Us Part II is an aggressively dark game. Even his genuine moments of love or levity come with the inevitable knowledge that something truly terrible is just around the corner – and rarely in the form of something as simple as a rampaging mushroom monster. This applies doubly to the character of Ellie, who came of age in the first game/season – and who spends the second game chipping away at the last remnants of her innocence little by little.
And really, we’re excited to see what Ramsay, who was excellent in the first season, will do with this material, as Ellie gets harder and harder and harder as she sinks deeper into her need for revenge and descends. But it will be muchfor the audience, even by HBO’s standards: We’ll be curious to see whether the TV show stays true to the moment that, in a less ugly narrative, would be Ellie’s nadir – that is, for the players, the confrontation with Mel – or whether it’s from this level of character-alienating horror. But either way, we’ll likely leave the show’s second season with very little idea of who, if anyone, we want to see get out of this broken and miserable world to do whatever they want.
A question of perspective
There is also a question of structure here that forces us to perish The Last of Us Part II ‘S other Big Twist: The fact that only about half of the game is played from Ellie’s perspective, with the game rewinding at a key turning point to show what the violent three days in Seattle were like for Joel’s murderer, Abby.
On the one hand, that could actually be the case Easier for the TV show than for the game; one of The last of us The franchise’s big trick is to apply techniques from film and media, where they are less known, to the games medium, and this kind of change of perspective is much more old hat for television. That being said, the parts of the game where you play as Abby make up a large part of the game, introducing new characters, stories, motivations, and problems to help players understand that she is just as much a person, a “protagonist.” “, like Ellie herself. A 24-hour video game can take that long to present its arguments – a nine-hour TV series certainly not. It is the key to Druckmann’s vision of The Last of Us Part II that Abby feels just as “real” to the player/viewer as Joel or Ellie. Building this kind of identification without feeling repetitive or digressive will be a fascinating battle for the series to overcome in a fraction of the time.
Is there room for another “Long, Long Time”?
As we mentioned above, the first season of The last of us only deviated from the game’s plot in one serious respect – and was handsomely rewarded for it, with critics and viewers alike clinging to this point of departure: “Long, long time” as a series highlight. While Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett moved mountains to flesh out characters who were an asshole and a corpse in the game, respectively, the episode served as a necessary antidote to the gloom of the rest of the season, reminding viewers that there was still the possibility of life, even for “the last of us”.
Mazin and writer Peter Hoar were able to incorporate this material into the series in part because they adapted a largely episodic narrative: The First Last of us It’s as much a series of vignettes as a more cohesive story, and it was pretty easy to swap out the running and gunning of the game’s “Bill’s Town” section for something with a lot more heart. Equally important, it showed at least some justification for the show as a whole, leading to quieter, more human moments that moved away from Joel and Ellie’s story.
The Last of Us Part IIHowever, it is a much tighter narrative vessel, much of its power coming from the way it buries you first in Ellie’s and then in Abby’s head. So it remains to be seen where Mazin and his team can find space for a little light to shine through. (Even if you ignore the Ellie-Abby conflict, the game’s background plot involves a brutal inter-clan war waged between military despots on the one hand and transphobic religious zealots on the other; there’s not much room for softer shades (there.) We suspect the Abby material will have to step in for this kind of digression, but her story is so closely tied to and mirrors Ellie’s that it will be difficult to carve out any meaningful breathing room from it.
That being said: It’s worth taking a step back and remembering that this is a TV show that hadn’t even been filmed, let alone aired, at this point. Speculation can only go so far before it becomes divination and is just as useful. But The last of us “Nature as an adaptation – and which is particularly indebted to its source material – raises such questions. The Last of Us Part II hit like a bomb in 2020 and sparked video game discourse around the topic for months. We can only imagine what the television adaptation will do when it releases sometime next year.
This story originally published AtThe AV Club.
Table of Contents
