The second season of The Last of Us premieres on HBO and Max in just a couple weeks. As you can see from the official trailer, sh*t is going to get real. A new character named Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) will seriously disrupt the lives of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and at one point it looks like an army of infected zombies will attack the town of Jackson, Wyoming, where our intrepid twosome put down roots at the end of the first season.
The attack happens in the depth of winter, with zombies throwing themselves against the wooden walls of the town. For Game of Thrones fans, it might recall the Massacre at Hardhome from the show's fifth season, when the Night King and his White Walkers sicced hordes of wights on a vulnerable wildling settlement. According to showrunner Craig Mazin, that's intentional.
"Certainly as a Thrones fanatic, I remember from watching 'Hardhome' and not thinking about how complicated and impressive the action was," Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter. "What I remembered was how moving and important the things that were happening inside the action were. That Wildling woman [Karsi], seeing her get turned, and seeing The Night King raise the dead and being like, 'Hey, you and me, Jon Snow, we’re on a collision course, my friend, and the more you fight me, the worse it gets for you.' The desperation, the total loss."
"That is really our philosophy about action. What’s the point? So in building this sequence, we were very ambitious because we just wanted to show how bad it could get. But always the question was: Why? What is this about, what does this change, and what does this mean for our people moving forward? Jackson is, as we see in episode one, is growing, it’s expanding. There is a certain cockiness. They don’t seem particularly worried about the trouble outside. They’ve gotten a little complacent. They have a New Year’s Eve dance. They’re going to therapy,. They’re refurbishing homes. They’ve got patrols down to a science. On the other hand, you’re like: 'Guys don’t you know you’re living in a TV show?'"
How The Last of Us season 2 is like The Empire Strikes Back
In general, the trailers for The Last of Us season 2 look very dour and bleak. If you've played the video game The Last of Us Part II, you know that there are some seriously upsetting twists on the way. Mazin agreed with THR that this upcoming season is the show's version of The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars movie where everything got worse for Luke, Leia, Han and the rest of our heroes.
“I think about that a lot — because I love The Empire Strikes Back, and I think everybody should,” Mazin said. “We love that one because the second act is the tough act. That’s when everything is challenged and characters go through these moments where they can’t be who they used to be, but they’re also not ready to be who they’re supposed to be. There’s a sense of feeling lost. And I love that.”
He added: “We were filming in Alberta in the dead of winter, which was very Hoth.” Get ready for snowy action scenes.
How many seasons will The Last of Us have?
The first season of The Last of Us adapted the first Last of Us video game. Makes sense, right? But the second season will only adapt part of the second game. Another season will wrap things up. Actually, it might take another two seasons to fully wrap up the story of The Last of Us Part II. It doesn't sound like Mazin has decided yet.
However, Mazin is firm that after they're done adapting The Last of Us Part II, the show will end. They have no intention of going beyond the source material, despite the video game ending on something of a cliffhanger and creator Neil Druckmann having noodled ideas for The Last of Us Part III for awhile. "Neil and I really are focused on telling the story that's there, and it will come to an end, whether it is in season 3 or season 4,” Mazin told PEOPLE. He expanded on that thought to THR:
"I’m basically setting a decade of my rapidly dwindling life on fire to tell this story. The show is so hard to make. It has to have an end. So I’m not going to go past. Who knows me, there might be a Dunk and Egg The Last of Us show that happens that somebody does. But for me, the only question is: Is it going to be one more season or will it require two more? If this can happen all in one more season, great. If we feel like it makes sense to break it into two, then we will do that."
By "there might be a Dunk and Egg The Last of Us show," Mazin is saying he's not ruling out the possibility of some kind of prequel or spinoff series down the line; Dunk and Egg are the two main characters from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a new Game of Thrones prequel show coming to HBO later this year. But if something like that does happen, Mazin won't be involved. And The Last of Us TV show will end when it runs out of games to adapt.
The second season of The Last of Us premieres on Sunday, April 13 on HBO and Max.
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