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‘The Last of Us’ review: HBO zombie drama gets even darker in Season 2
"The Last of Us" Season 2 finds Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) at odds. But a much bigger threat awaits them both.
In a scene from the first episode of “The Last Of Us” Season 2, Joel (Pedro Pascal) is told that the Wyoming settlement he helps oversee needs to build housing more quickly, as the town is becoming overcrowded.
“Maybe your council should stop letting so many of them in,” Joel snaps.
If you’re looking for a show to take your mind off the current political climate, “The Last Of Us” Season 2 is not the answer.
The second season of the HBO series based on the best-selling video games of the same name is darker than the first – a tall order, considering the 2023 series premiere showed how a deadly global pandemic turned billions of people into mindless zombies (or “Infected,” to use the show’s parlance).
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After a freshman season that focused almost entirely on Joel and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) lonely journey from Boston (or “10 miles West of Boston”) through the Great Plains, showrunner Craig Mazin uses Season 2 to show how isolation can be preferable to the hell that is other people.
In the series premiere, Joel and Ellie aren’t talking. Ellie is still a peevish teenager who reflexively challenges authority. But now her playful rebelliousness is directed at others in the settlement, including Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna), squad leader Jesse (Young Mazino) and her best friend Dina (Isabela Merced).
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While it isn’t immediately revealed why Ellie is giving Joel the silent treatment, a psychotherapist (Catherine O’Hara) intuits that Joel is hiding something – and it’s fair to assume Ellie senses the same thing.
It’s been five years since the concluding events of Season 1, in which Joel rescued Ellie from the Fireflies, a resistance group who want to operate on Ellie and use her unique immunity to zombie bites to develop a cure. Upon learning the operation will kill her, Joel murders a dozen Fireflies during the rescue, and later lies to a now-conscious Ellie, telling her the attempt to find a cure has failed.
Outside the walls, a group of Fireflies are on the hunt for revenge. All Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) knows is that Joel killed her doctor father, who was convinced Ellie was the world’s last hope for a cure. Later in the season, another antagonist familiar to fans of the video game, played by Amherst grad Jeffrey Wright, enters the fray as well.
On that note, fans of the video game “The Last of Us Part II” will be pleased with how Mazin and co-creator Neil Druckmann have translated the gameplay and plot for HBO. The series has never looked better, with a cinematography that rivals or outstrips many movies. Druckmann faithfully recreates some of the most thrilling moments from the game shot by shot, but also tweaks its plot in inventive ways that we won’t spoil here.
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Season 2 of “The Last Of Us” calls to mind early seasons of “Lost,” in which two tribes with incompatible goals face the prospect of inevitable bloodshed. And just like the mind-bending ABC show, there’s always a bigger threat, or a new group of “Others,” just around the corner.
“The Last of Us” Season 2 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO. All episodes will also be available streaming on Max.
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