Early in The Last of Us Part II, Joel, the main character from the first video game, dies. He is brutally murdered by a new character named Abby while his surrogate daughter Ellie watches. For the rest of the game, players switch between playing as Ellie and Abby, as the one goes on a quest for revenge and the other recovers from her own.
Critics loved the game, but players went berserk. There was an online backlash so loud you could not avoid it if you were even passingly interested in gaming and owned a phone. Offended fans raged and ranted; the low point may have been when Laura Bailey, the actor who voiced Abby, received death threats not only against herself but her 2-year-old son.
The Last of Us Part II was released in 2020, and time has vindicated it. It sold less than the original game, but it still sold over 10 million copies, making it one of the most successful games on the PlayStation 4. Critical praise was always in abundance, and fans are still hoping for The Last of Us Part III to come along some day. And in 2023, people embraced The Last of Us TV show with open arms; the first season won eight Emmy awards and was a huge hit for HBO.
That show is back on the air now, with the second season adapting the second game. And lo and behold, Abby came on the scene to smash in Joel's head with a golf club in the second episode. Would there be a second backlash? The answer is...kind of.
It depends on where you look. If you go on IMDb, you'll find that the episode where Joel dies is tied for the highest-rated in the entire series: a 9.4/10 score based on 42k reviews, a huge number. But if you go to Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, you'll find sky-high scores from critics alongside tons of 0/10 scores from users, who vow not to watch now that Pedro Pascal's character is dead, decry the show's politics, or complain that Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, is a bad actor.
I think there are legigimate criticisms of The Last of Us TV show to be made, but so many of these user reviews read like tantrums. Complaints about the show's politics only make sense if you think that featuring gay characters and women in prominent roles amounts to pushing a political agenda, which I'm sure many of the people leaving these reviews do. Complaints about Bella Ramsey's acting boil down to people not finding them attractive; cracks about Ramsey's appearance are omni-present. Somehow Ramsey will have to soldier on with their Emmy nomination for the first season, something I can easily see happening again for season 2; they kill it this season.
"I stopped watching this after the second episode," one person writes on MetaCritic. "Also, I am considering no longing playing golf." Okay, that one's funny; it can stay.
The backlash against the TV show seems as silly and overwrought as it was for the game. The good news is that it does not seem as unavoidable. This time, it's cordoned off in select corners of the internet rather than spilling onto everyone's feeds. Buzz for the show overall has been very positive, with Twitter/X lit up with discussion every Sunday, positive reviews are rolling in and HBO is already prepping a third season.
So consider that a silver lining. For all those who partake, the next episode of The Last of Us airs this Sunday night on HBO and Max.
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h/t Collider