Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey return in first pics from The Last of Us season 2!

The Last of Us, based on the beloved video game series of the same name by Naughty Dog, was turning into a prestige HBO series that debuted to rapturous applause last year. The curse of the crappy video adaptation broken, the team soon got to work on season 2. But don't expect to see new episodes before 2025.

But HBO is getting the hype rolling early. Just today, it released new images of lead characters Joel (Pedro Pascal, above) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey, below), a pair of hardened survivors of the mushroom zombie apocalypse and a surrogate father-daughter team.

There's not a ton to say about the images beyond the fact that Joel has grown out his hair. Based on the lights in the background of his image, it looks like that picture is pulled from this scene in The Last of Us Part II video game:

The gritty brown color palette is still in play and Ellie is wearing some heavy winter wear. At the end of the first season, Joel and Ellie ended their season-long trek across a zombie-ridden United States by returning to their new home base of Jackson, Wyoming, where civilization had started to get going again. But you don't need to have played the video games to know that there's trouble ahead. Ellie held the key to producing a cure to the zombie virus, but synthesizing a cure required her to die. Rather than let him happen, Joel mowed down a whole building full of doctors and Firefly freedom fighters, got a comatose Ellie out of there, and then lied to her about what happened. That's gonna come out.

If you have played The Last of Us games, you know that there are some seismic changes coming in season 2. The second game is set five years after the first and we expect the HBO series to follow suit. We still don't have a release date, but filming started in February of this year and is still ongoing. Again, expect to catch up with Joel and Ellie sometime in 2025.

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