The second season of The Last of Us started with a bang when lead character Joel (Pedro Pascal) was murdered in front of his daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Ellie spent the rest of the season trying to get revenge; she traveled to Seattle to hunt down Joel's killers, accompanied by her friend Dina (Isabela Merced).
Along the way, the two became more than friends. At one point, Dina learned she was pregnant by her ex-boyfriend Jesse (Young Mazino), and plans hasty plans were laid for the three of them to raise the child together. Realizing the life that could be in front of her, a smile creeps onto Ellie's face. "I'm gonna be a dad," she says.
That line inspired a bit of a firestorm online, with fans calling it cringe, bad, dumb and also gross. Speaking to Gamespot, showrunner Craig Mazin explained how the line came about. “Bella and I were talking about that episode, and I like to run things past them all the time. And I was like, 'okay, this just popped into my head. I don’t know why. It just felt right,'” he said. “It’s not an expression of even gender as much as just state of mind. Bella said, ‘Oh, I have to’...The joy that just burbles out of Bella when they say ‘I’m gonna be a dad.’ It’s wonderful.”
The exchange happens in the fourth episode of the season, "Day One." When I first saw it, I was pretty much in line with Mazin; I thought it was a charming expression of Ellie's excitement, and the gender-bending element didn't bother me at all. If that's where Ellie's mind went, that's where it went. It felt extemporaneous and genuine to me.
But a lot of people get very, very touchy whenever anyone, fictional or otherwise, says or does anything implying that the line between male and female is less than completely impermeable. Gender in general is a sore spot for a lot of folks, and when The Last of Us dared to graze against the subject, the internet had a minor meltdown. It wasn't the first time and won't be the last.
There will "definitely" be a fourth season of The Last of Us
We're currently in the long wait between new seasons of The Last of Us. The upcoming third season will switch perspectives to focus on Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the woman who killed Joel. That's pretty much in keeping with how the story goes in The Last of Us Part II, the video game on which the show is based.
Mazin and his co-showrunner Neil Druckmann have hinted before that there may be a fourth season of The Last of Us coming after that to wrap up the story. Composer Jake Staley basically confirmed that during a visit to The Last of Us Podcast: Savage Starlight. “There’ll be at least two more seasons, no question. At least, that’s all I’m gonna say,” he said.
If the show sticks to the structure set up by the game, that means the next season will cover Abby's half of the story, and then the fourth season will return to Ellie's perspective to round things out. And Staley makes it sounds like there may be more beyond that, saying there will be "at least" two more seasons. But unless something dramatic happens, like the announcement of The Last of Us Part III, I expect the fourth season will take us through the end of Part II.
But we're getting way ahead of ourselves. The third season of The Last of Us may not even start filming until next year; if that's true, we won't be watching new episodes until 2027.
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