The second season of HBO's zombie drama The Last of Us premieres in just a couple of weeks, on Sunday, April 13. After the hugely successful first season, which was quite possibly the best video game adaptation in history, hype is sky-high. And now, info about the premiere episode is leaking out. According to screenshots of HBO's schedule posted on The Last of Us subreddit, the season 2 premiere is entitled "Future Days." It will run for an hour and feature "Adult Language," "Adult Content" and "Violence."
Interestingly, when I actually go to the HBO schedule to try and confirm this, all I see is a blank spot where information on the season 2 premiere should be:
HBO is blocking out information on the season 2 premiere of The Last of Us from its schedule. No spoilers! pic.twitter.com/QYz8bgmICT
— Winter is Coming (@WiCnet) March 26, 2025
It looks like HBO has edited the schedule so this info doesn't get out, and that the folks posting on Reddit got a look before those edits were made. I guess it's possible that the Redditors are spreading fakes, but there are multiple screenshots. I believe them, at any rate.
Anyway, "Future Days" is the name of a Pearl Jam song from their 2013 album Lightning Bolt. Joel plays the song for Ellie early on in Naughty Dog's video game The Last of Us Part II. It's a tender moment I'm sure will make viewers of the TV show cry just as surely as it made players cry when The Last of Us Part II came out in 2020:
There's actually a lore problem with this. In the games, the zombie apocalypse happens in 2013, the year that Lightning Bolt came out. But on the show, the apocalypse happens in 2003, 10 years before Pearl Jam dropped this track. So how can Joel play the song if the song was never released?
Maybe the episode is just borrowing the title of the song but won't actually feature Joel's serenade...but if it does, I think it can be waved away pretty easily. Maybe Joel was buddies with Eddie Vedder before the zombie apocalypse, I dunno, leave it alone.
As for the episode being an hour long, that sounds about right. There are only seven episodes in this upcoming second season of the show, down from nine in season 1. But the showrunners are playing the long game:
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