From Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead and beyond, the zombie story will always find a way to resurrect itself and keep shambling forward. The premiere zombie story running right now is The Last of Us, HBO's adaptation of Naughty Dog's video game series. The trailer for the second season, which premieres next month, was seen by 158 million people in just three days, breaking records HBO and Max.
And the show has earned it: the first season was a smash success, moving and dramatic in ways people aren't accustomed to from a zombie story. Even Alex Garland, the guy who wrote the breakthrough 2002 zombie film 28 Days Later, admitted that no one's doing it like The Last of Us.
"Let me say this: The Last of Us is better than 28 Days [Later]," Garland told The Last of Us co-showrunner Neil Druckmann on an episode of the Creator to Creator podcast. "The Last of Us is better than 28 Days, or at least the writing is. I'm not going to talk about directing, that would be a silly thing. So not that. I know what 28 Days is, I know what I did. I know what that process was."
"The thing about The Last of Us, I was like, "Oh, this is so much more sophisticated and moving." It was moving. I'm not dissing 28 Days, I'm very proud of it. It's a nice part of my life. But seriously, The Last of Us is on another level - so yeah, of course, I was influenced by it."
Garland has re-teamed with 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle for a sequel: 28 Years Later, which comes out this June. Look out for The Last of Us inspiration when it does.
Joel and Ellie are "not the best of friends" in The Last of Us season 2
As for the second season of The Last of Us, it will pick up a few years after the end of season 1, when Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) returned to the town of Jackson, Wyoming intending to settle down. But there are complications: in the season 1 finale, Joel learned that the Fireflies may be able to use Ellie's immunity to the zombie spores to synthesize a cure. The catch? She'd die in surgery. Unwilling to let that happen to his surrogate daughter, Joel killed dozens of people before getting an unconscious Ellie out of the building and then lied to her afterwards about what happened, even as he swore he was telling the truth.
Those chickens will come home to roost in season 2; in the trailer, we see that there's tension between the pair. “[Joel and Ellie’s] relationship has changed a little, and we start to see why,” Bella Ramsey said on an SXSW panel, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I mean that ‘you swore’ kind of gives you a little idea of where Ellie is at. I think Ellie has that in the back of her head this whole time, and that’s where we pick them up. And they’re not best of friends. She’s quite sad. But I mean, there’s a lot of layers to friendship.”
While Ellie is dealing with that, she'll get to play off a couple of new characters, including her girlfriend Dina, played by Isabel Merced. "[She's] a love interest to Ellie, but as way more than that. Like, she's absolutely not just the love interest of the show – she really plays such a pivotal part in the season," Ramsey told Empire. "She brought such a light and energy and silliness to the show in such a brilliant way. I was so tired and beaten down throughout some of it, and she always had a way of just making it light. I think we really carried each other through this season.”
For her part, Merced had no trouble bringing lightness to the new season. “It wasn't really a stretch for me. I'm quite a positive individual myself,” she said. “I do think that in the middle of an apocalypse, I would be the first one cracking jokes in the most inappropriate times, just because I think humour is my coping mechanism.”
Another major new character is Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever. Without going into spoilers, she will shake up Joel and Ellie's world in a huge way, setting a course for the next couple seasons of the show. “I think I just wanted to really focus on who Abby is in her core and her emotional journey and establishing her grief and how broken she is. That was the main goal for me," Dever said.
The Last of Us season 2 is "crazier" than season 1
If the show follows the game, and all indications are that it will, the character drama will be very much present and accounted for. But what about the zombies? Co-showrunner Craig Mazin promised that everything about the show will level up. “A lot of what’s going on in the season is evolution and change,” he said. “Ellie is growing up, and she is changing. This town of Jackson is growing up. It is expanding. It’s taking in refugees. And the world outside is changing. It was important to us to always move the ball forward with the infected. It’s not a question of just more, but something else, something that is meaningful to what is going on, so they don’t just become NPCs. So definitely an escalation, we’re careful about it because we know we have space yet to go [in future seasons]."
One new thing we'll see with the zombies this season involves how they spread. In the games, you become infected if you breathe in toxic spores. In the first season of the show, they switched over to tendrils creeping on the ground. But in the trailer for season 2, we see that the spores have made the jump! "There had to be a dramatic reason to introduce [spores] now, and now there is," Druckmann teased.
It sounds like Druckmann and Mazin were feeling their way through a lot of the infected scenes in season 1; fans complained that they didn't play a big enough part. Now that the pair have some experience under their belt, it sounds there will be more of the buggers in season 2. "Now, we know what we’re doing and we swung for the fences," Druckmann said. "In the game, we talk about how Jackson has had these attacks, but now we get to show it. And the reason we do it is we show you what’s at stake, not for individuals but for an entire community."
We do indeed see infected attacking the walls of Jackson in the trailer. It sounds like the town will become something of a character itself. "[W]e get to see them settled in Jackson, that’s their home, and there’s a love there for a community," Druckmann said. "That gets us into tribalism… what happens when you go against another group and you don’t see the humanity in them and how far will that take you, especially when they hurt someone you love."
"What happens if someone in your tight group is taken from you, and you feel alone? One thing Ellie said in season one was the thing she’s most afraid of is ending up alone. So all these characters have to face this potential threat of being alone, and without a tribe, and then what do you do?"
Despite the expanded scope, and the arrival of more infected, and bigger action scenes, Druckmann assures fans that everything comes back to the characters in the end, as it should. “For us, everything is drama. Even the action sequences are drama," he said. "Season one, we were picking and choosing our moments because we weren’t sure what we were doing. Now we know what we’re doing. We swung for the fences with some of this. There’s pretty intense stuff you don’t even see in the trailer. People ask if season two is better. I often say, ‘It’s crazier.'”
The Last of Us season 2 premieres on April 13 on HBO and Max.
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