‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 Premiere Recap And Review: I Have Some Concerns

After watching the season premiere of The Last Of Us Season 2, I reinstalled Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part II on my PlayStation 5 and played through the opening hour of the game. Something about the first episode rubbed me wrong and I couldn’t quite place it. After playing the game’s opening again, I think I figured out what it is, though the answer isn’t entirely straightforward. Spoilers ahead.

I don’t want to review this season only as it compares to the video game it’s based upon but it would be equally impossible to simply ignore the source material. However mixed my feelings were about the game, there’s no denying that it is, in many ways, a masterpiece. I grappled with my feelings about the game for months before I put pen to paper for my review, and even afterward I wasn’t sure I’d fully explored the depths of my feelings toward this sprawling, bleak sequel.

But regardless of how I felt about the ending, or about the various story choices made throughout, it evoked strong emotions in me, as well as complicated feelings about its characters. Because of this, and because of how much I loved the first game, and because of how powerful both games were in so many ways, I became attached to these fictional people. That’s more than I can say for most games. And I am far from alone. Fans of this series are passionate, and that makes the adaptation a somewhat perilous endeavor.

I enjoyed Season 1 well enough. At times it was genuinely brilliant. Showrunners Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (who created and directed both games) were incredibly faithful to the game, often right down to individual shots. They also made some questionable changes. I loved the third episode with Bill and Frank, but didn’t love the decision to never have Bill and Ellie interact, because their interactions were so enjoyable in the game. Changes to some of the villains were also questionable, and the world never felt as dangerous as the game world’s, where far more Cordyceps lurked in the shadows.

But the biggest change of them all was to Ellie herself, played in the series by Bella Ramsey. I have expressed misgivings about this casting choice in the past, not because Ramsey isn’t a talented actor, and not only because she doesn’t look at all like the video game version of Ellie (though we’ll get to that) but because of Ellie’s role in the second game. In the sequel, she’s older and tougher and far, far more dangerous. Ramsey is very small and looks much younger than she actually is, and during Season 1, I worried that this would be a problem when it came to the events of Part II and its adaptation to TV.

Beyond the casting, Ellie was written very differently for the TV series. While Joel is essentially the same character in both, Ellie was changed in pretty baffling ways for the show. She is a lot more rebellious, much more of a smart aleck, far more unpleasant and argumentative, and basically more of the “pissed off annoying teenage girl” trope than her video game counterpart, who was simply more likable all around, while still coming across as resourceful, intelligent and pretty badass for a 14-year-old.

So we come to Season 2 and Ellie is now supposed to be five years older, and already my concerns are feeling justified, which I’m not happy about. I want to be wrong, and maybe future episodes will change my mind, but in the first episode Ellie is once again constantly belligerent. When she’s not outright hostile, she’s an obnoxious teenager, only now more confident and full of herself than before. She argues with Tommy about being assigned to gate duty, ignores warnings from other residents of Jackson, WY, mouths off at every opportunity and is generally nothing at all like the character I came to love (and later despise) in The Last Of Us and The Last Of Us Part II.

And she looks fourteen still. This is hard to look past. There is a stark difference in Ellie from the first game to Ellie after the time-jump. She’s older, stronger and more mature. Playing through the opening moments of the game again, I realize that she’s taken on some of Joel’s qualities. The weight in her shoulders. A deep sadness has worked its way in around her edges. She’s not a spunky teenager anymore. She’s a young woman who takes her duties seriously. Ellie in Season 2 is still a brash teenager who thinks she’s invincible. They’re just not the same characters at all.

Her youthfulness is weird in other ways. Isabela Merced has been cast as Dina, which is an odd casting choice for one thing because Dina is a Jewish character in the game, which is an important part of her identity that appears to have been removed from the show, and because Merced is just far, far more good-looking than her video game counterpart. She also looks quite a bit older than Ellie, and when the two are at the party and kiss, it really looks like a 20-something-year-old making out with a young teenager. Again, in the fiction Ellie is 19 and Dina is around the same age, but what we know about the characters and what we see are not one and the same. Bella Ramsey is 21, Isabela Merced is 23, but the age-gap looks much wider.

All of this bugs me, but let’s set it aside for a moment. Perhaps the events of this season will transform Ellie into something closer to game Ellie, if not physically than at least emotionally. She will have to toughen up, set aside her childish ways, and go kill a bunch of people. Maybe they’re making her act younger on purpose to make the contrast more stark. We shall see. There are other problems.

In the opening moments of the game, Joel sits with an unstrung guitar, cleaning its neck while he relays to his brother, Tommy, what happened with the Fireflies. He tells Tommy about the lie he told Ellie. And he utters one powerful line when Tommy presses him on the details: “I saved her,” he says, his resolve firm. We, the players (and the audience) are left to judge whether his actions were justified.

In any case, this scene is gone in the TV show. It’s been replaced by a much less effective moment between Joel and his therapist, Gail, played by Catherine O’Hara. I love O’Hara, but it’s a bit tricky to watch her in this role while also watching her play her usual, comedic self in The Studio on Apple TV+. It’s harder still because they gave her dead husband the name Eugene. Is this an intentional Schitt’s Creek reference? (O’Hara stars alongside Eugene Levy as a married couple in the wonderful Canadian comedy series). I laughed out loud when she said the name, but I’m not sure that was the intention. We learn that Joel killed Eugene and she hates him for it, which makes me question why either of them have agreed to therapy sessions in the first place. Surely conflicts of interest still apply in the apocalypse. (He pays her for the sessions with weed, which is an interesting touch).

Back to the kissing scene. Dina kisses Ellie and a nearby hick gets upset because this is a “family event” and makes a homophobic remark. Ellie starts to get in his face when Joel bursts out of nowhere and knocks him to the ground. He asks Ellie if she’s already and she angrily tells him that she doesn’t need his help (but with more swearing). This is very similar to the game version, but different in one key way that I just find very puzzling. In the game, Joel intercedes by shoving the man, Seth, and telling him to get the hell out. Seth starts to get back in Joel’s face but they’re broken up by Maria, one of the leaders of the Jackson community. In the show, Joel flies in like a bat out of hell and violently knocks Seth to the ground before telling him to get the hell out. Ellie looks completely shocked by this, and with good reason. It’s a massive overreaction on Joel’s part.

I’m left scratching my head. Why have Joel behave this way? It makes him seem erratic and desperate, but it just doesn’t come across like the Joel we know, who might shove a guy for being a prick, but not actually seriously injure him without further provocation.

Then there are the moments that are missing, or at least one moment that’s missing, from the game. In the game, after Joel tells Tommy his big secret, they ride through the gorgeous Wyoming hills back to Jackson, where Joel pays Ellie a visit. This is sometime after the events of the first game, but before the big four-year time-jump that kicks off the story proper. Ellie is living in the detached garage and Joel brings her a gift: The guitar he was just working on. And before he gives it to her, he sings her a song, “Future Days” by Pearl Jam:

He gives her the guitar after he sings the song and tells her he’ll teach her how to play it starting tomorrow. It’s a really sweet moment, a beautiful reminder of their bond and how much they care for one another, before we see their relationship crumble. Then the game jumps ahead, to a snowier and more bitter world. These are the moments in the second game that makes it hit so hard. And what a perfect song for Joel to sing to Ellie, who saved him from himself as surely as he saved her from the Fireflies. And it isn’t here, in the opening of Season 2. And without it . . . I don’t know. What else will be missing? Will we get it in a later episode, a flashback perhaps? The flashbacks in the game were often my favorite parts.

If I ever were to lose you
I’d surely lose myself
Everything I have found dear
I’ve not found by myself
Try and sometimes you’ll succeed
To make this man of me
All my stolen missing parts
I’ve no need for anymore

I believe
And I believe ’cause I can see
Our future days
Days of you and me

Instead, we get Ellie and Dina out on patrol, fighting some clickers, one of whom Ellie notices is behaving with some kind of terrifying intelligence, and that’s certainly interesting and scary and I enjoyed these moments a lot other than how glib both young women were about such a dangerous encounter. Again, perhaps this is to show them in times of peace so that they can change for times of war.

Because war is coming and her name is Abby.

Abby is played here by Kaitlyn Dever, and without the game version’s enormous bulk. Dever, thankfully, did not try to achieve a bodybuilder physique for the show, and Abby never should have had one in the game. It’s one thing to be lean and strong the way a survivor of the apocalypse might be, but game Abby was comically muscled. How did she find time to hit the gym every day to achieve such gains? (I’m reminded of Jack Reacher, who describes his physique in the books as the opposite of a bodybuilder’s but of a street fighter’s; this isn’t because Abby is a woman, in other words).

We meet Abby in the first episode shortly after Joel has absconded with Ellie, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. She’s standing next to a couple dozen graves with several other Fireflies. I admit, this scene threw me off as well, though I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. And then I realized that they all look so . . . clean. Why are they not unkempt and dirty and ragged like all the other Fireflies we met? Or maybe it’s because in the game, we meet these people in the snow, in their heavy coats and beanies, trudging through the Wyoming winter to find Joel and get revenge for what he did.

The episode doesn’t really reveal what that is beyond his murder spree to save Ellie, so I won’t go into detail here, either. Suffice to say, it’s very personal for Abby in ways that it isn’t for the rest of these young people with their weirdly perfect hair and their Firefly necklaces. This young, attractive cabal that all seem so out of place in a show that normally does a really good job at making survivors look like survivors, not the cast of a CW show.

We get a brief glimpse of Abby and her people at the end of the episode, now in the snowy mountains near Jackson. They crest a ridge and see the lights glimmering below. The episode ends on Abby’s face, looking grim and filled with resolve. Things are about to go very badly.

The above image is taken directly from the game, and I do love little details like this. We also get Ellie grabbing her knife from its pointed perch before she leaves for patrol, just like in the game. Nice touches, nice little callbacks. This review has been very critical so far, but I don’t mean it to be just that. The acting is generally great. The production values are superb. I was entertained throughout the episode, but I had trouble shaking the feeling that it’s all just a facsimile of something much better and more powerful and more comfortable in its own skin.

I should stress that I don’t need it to be a 1:1 adaptation, that even while I enjoy the moments that are reproduced almost exactly from the game, they aren’t what I’m necessarily looking for. I expect and embrace changes, so long as those changes remain true to the source material. It’s where this season has already strayed, and in Ellie most of all, that I become a little worried. I want it to be true, not exact. I hope I’m just jumping the gun.

Also, is it just me or does Pedro Pascal look a little less grey and more svelte than he did in Season 1? Even just watching the opening moments taken from last season to the scenes with Joel in Jackson, he looks younger to me. His hair is so wavy and slicked back. In Season 1 he looked like this:

Maybe he just found a good stylist in Jackson.

You can watch my video review of this episode below:

What did you think of the Season 2 premiere? Am I making mountains out of molehills? Should I try to turn off my “game brain” and just enjoy this for what it is, or are some of these weaknesses going to impact the season even if you haven’t played the game? Curious to hear your thoughts, as always.

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