The Last Of Us Season 2 Is Too Brutal For Its Own Good
Season 2 is bigger and broader than ever, at the cost of some of the fragile human emotion that made Season 1 such a phenomenon.
The world of The Last of Us is filled with life, blooming amid rot. The HBO series (and the Naughty Dog game franchise on which it’s based) sports some of the most beautiful set design and cinematography the post-apocalyptic genre has ever seen. In burned-out buildings, flowers turn their petals toward the sun and creeping vine tendrils turn gray concrete green. In this version of the future, even the rotting corpses of the undead are organic — possessed not by the traditional zombie virus, but by fast-growing fungi.
There’s a message somewhere in there about civilization, or rebirth, or perhaps about the peace that comes with a true neutrality of nature. Whatever that message is, though, the frustrating, morally messy, and occasionally lovely second season of The Last of Us doesn’t care. It’s more focused on the people who stomp through the undergrowth, and the endless excuses they make to hurt each other.
Bella Ramsey’s Ellie goes on a dark and life-altering journey in the second season.
Fans of The Last of Us game series, which, like the TV show, was co-created by Neil Druckmann (Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin also co-created the show), will recognize the broad strokes of the show’s second season. Season 2 introduces a slew of new characters and moves much of its action to battle-ravaged Seattle. The premiere episode picks up some time after cynical smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) slaughtered the team of doctors who wanted to use Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) cordyceps immunity to save the world — and who would’ve had to murder her to do so. Joel slaughters the group to protect Ellie’s future, but also because he selfishly wants to have a daughter again. The story ends with a series of painful, grim trade-offs, including his decision to lie to Ellie about murdering the medical team so the two can start a life together.
Season 1 of The Last of Us worked beautifully in large part because of its scope. Despite its intricate worldbuilding and high-stakes premise, it was ultimately a show about love, mortality, endurance, and parents who would burn the whole world down to save their kid. Season 2, like the deeply polarizing 2020 video game on which it’s based, goes in the opposite direction. It’s bigger and broader than ever, exchanging heart-melting scenes grounded by Pascal and Ramsey for relentless torture and execution sequences perpetuated by unsympathetic warring factions. The unthinkable trade-offs and moral ambiguity that made the first season’s finale phenomenal become the obsessive, dead-end focal point of the entire sophomore season, blotting out the story’s sun — the fragile hope Ellie and Joel built together — in the process.
Kaitlyn Dever plays the antagonist Abby, whom game fans will know well.
It doesn’t help matters that the show’s Seattle storyline functions as an offensively unsubtle take on Middle Eastern conflict — one that works itself into a frenzy trying to decide whether or not either of its major players is justified in the torture and murdering of the other. Druckmann, who is Israeli, once told The Washington Post that his visceral reaction to a violent video from the West Bank was an inspiration for the plot of The Last of Us: Part II. Thus, one group of fighters in the sequel became the IDF-like Wolves, a heavily armed group of people who frequently dehumanize the cult-like Seraphites, or “Scars.” Both groups torture and murder one another, but the Seraphites are religious zealots who live primitively, commit ritualistic executions, and raise their children to murder — a point the show’s characters drive home again and again as a dividing line between the two factions. As Emanuel Maiberg pointed out in an excellent 2020 Vice deep dive on the second game, the Scars seem to be a fairly nasty caricature of Islam, one that barely scrapes the surface of the real-life Palestinian experience.
The HBO version of the story attempts to gloss over this issue by saturating the Seattle episodes with “both sides” language. In one particularly galling scene, an experienced WLF leader tells a bloodied and beaten prisoner that he’s not willing to play his “chicken and egg” games about which group hurt the other first, or worse. In many others, characters try (and often fail) to justify revenge or mass murder, only to find themselves drawn toward it regardless.
Newcomer Isabela Merced is one of the highlights of Season 2.
This heavy-handed, rock-and-a-hard-place moralizing only serves to make the season seem more convoluted and off-putting to anyone who is aware of the staggering fatality toll in Palestine over the past two years, or events like the 1948 Nakba (both of which, curiously, have no allegorical counterpart in the show’s both-sides story). Even if The Last of Us Season 2 existed in a political and historical vacuum, the screen time spent on the WLF-Seraphite conflict and associated acts of vengeance come across as overambitious, unfocused, extraneous, and — perhaps one of the worst crimes for casual viewers — a massive drag with no payoff.
There are a few bright spots this season, and when they arrive, they feel as vital and pure as a gasp of much-needed air. The premiere episode lays the groundwork for the season well, and it’s often surprisingly light and funny thanks to Season 2 MVP Isabela Merced. Her version of Dina, Ellie’s tough but fun friend and love interest, is a delight, and every scene she shares with Ramsey recaptures and expands upon the magic of the show’s indelible first season. New additions like Kaitlyn Dever and Young Mazino and returning players like Gabriel Luna do well enough with the material they’re given, but many of the season’s character interactions feel strangely artificial in contrast to Season 1’s naturalistic road trip.
Pedro Pascal, as always, is terrific as Joel.
Finally, Pascal is incredible here, falling effortlessly back into the performance that gives the series its beating, broken heart. The Last of Us Season 2 strives endlessly to comment on the difficulty of breaking violent cycles (it even adds in a therapist character, Catherine O’Hara’s Gail, to explain concepts like these), but it only really succeeds when its tangled scripts and chaotic plotting get out of the actors’ way. At its best and rarest moments, The Last of Us Season 2 allows Pascal, Ramsey, and their co-stars to sell this emotionally shattering story the same way they nailed the Season 1 finale: with a shared look that tells audiences everything we need to know.
