Christmas is coming early, because HBO has just dropped a teaser trailer for the upcoming second season of its zombie apocalypse show The Last of Us. And this might just be me, but it looks deliciously, wonderfully good. Watch above!
The Last of Us show is based on The Last of Us video games from Naughty Dog. The first season covered the first Last of Us game and the second will take a bite out of The Last of Us Part II, which is a bigger game that will take multiple seasons of TV to adapt. Unfortunately, it sounds like The Last of Us season 2 will only run for seven episodes, down from nine in season 1, but based on this trailer, it looks like they're going to be good episodes.
At the end of The Last of Us season 1, Joel (Pedro Pascal) murdered a bunch of doctors and militia members to save his surrogate Ellie (Bella Ramsey). That sounds somewhat defensible, but the rub is that the doctors were going to operate on Ellie in order to synthesize a cure to the zombie plague that had toppled civilization. The procedure would kill her, but millions more would be saved. So did Joel do the right thing?
Apparently he had misgivings, because he lied about what happened to Ellie after she came to. In The Last of Us Part II, she finds out the truth, and things get really dicey and complicated.
I can see several moments from The Last of Us Part II brought to life in the trailer, including Joel teaching Ellie how to play guitar, Ellie bonding with her girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced), and confrontations with the fanatical Seraphites. We also catch a glimpse of important new characters from the game like Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), as well as a new character invented for the show: a therapist played by comedy legend Catherine O'Hara. It looks like she's trying to get Joel to spill the beans about what really happened with Ellie's operation.
I really liked the first season of The Last of Us and I really liked the games. I feel like I might love this second season. If they build on the momentum from the first, we could be in for something special.
The Last of Us season 2 will air on HBO and Max sometime in 2025, although we don't have an exact release date yet.
The Last of Us creator promises new backstory for important character in season 2
Speaking to Variety, The Last of Us creator Neil Druckmann promised that the TV show will bring in some new elements that will please fans of the games. "here’s stuff in this season that I’m really excited about — stuff that we hinted at — one scene in particular comes to mind that I think fans of the game will eat up, because it really kind of tells you a lot of backstory of this important character that there wasn’t really a way for us to even do that in the game,” he said.
The first season successfully walked a fine line between adapting the events of the game and expanding on them. A good example is the story of Frank and Bill as told in "Long, Long Time," the third episode of the series. "In the game, you get to know Bill through action, because the game really relies on interactivity and action,” Druckmann explained. “And if we were to translate that sequence of Bill, it might be OK, it might even be good. It wouldn’t be great, because that amount of action on screen, when you’re not interacting with it, you don’t get the kind of tension or immersion you would get in the game. So instead, you just get spectacle, and that spectacle eventually would wear thin. So we knew that needed a big change.”
"When you come into the game, Frank is not alive anymore. So we just hinted at this relationship between these two men. And here, instead, we said, well, let’s focus on that relationship"
Druckmann said that it's important to “recognize areas that just don’t work because they’re designed for this interactive medium, and then start brainstorming. How do we expand this world? How will we build this world? Sometimes the best surprises for players are when they get to see a backstory or like, oh, this was mentioned in the game, and now they get to see a full episode about this thing, again, like Bill and Frank. It makes the game richer. To me, that’s the best kind of adaptation."
"Long, Long Time" was easily my favorite episode of the season, if Druckmann and The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin have something similar in the tank for season 2, I am there with bells on.
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