‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 Review Scores Are Have Arrived Ahead of Its Release Date

There has been a lot of talk this past week about how a “terrible” video game movie like Minecraft just opened with $300 million worldwide, the most for a game adaptation in history. That’s a separate conversation, but also it’s a sharp contrast from a number of high profile video game stories that have headed to TV the last few years, and are amazing. One of those? The Last of Us on HBO.

The adaptation of the Naughty Dog game was beloved by critics and most fans, and now it’s returning for season 2. Reviews are in and there does not seem to be anything like a significant drop-off in quality. The numbers:

That’s a negligible difference, plus there are only 10% of the amount of reviews in (I have not often see a show with 486 reviews in like season 1, which is pretty stunning).

The Last of Us season 2 will reportedly cover half of the second game in the series in its seven episodes, according to its showrunners. Season 3 will be the rest of the story, and fans are debating whether an early “big” moment that defines the rest of the story will in fact be right near the start, or if they might drag it out more than the games did to change the narrative structure. My bet is still early on for reasons I won’t get into, lest it result in spoilers.

The showrunners have confirmed that they are not going to be pulling a Game of Thrones and go past the existing source material, even if one of the showrunners, Neil Druckmann, is the one who would be making that source material in a potential third game.

While there have been hints that maybe, possibly, someday Naughty Dog could make The Last of Us Part 3, it’s now been firmly established that its next project is the sci-fi story Intergalactic, likely not debuting until some time late in 2027, by best estimate. Any potential Last of Us installment would be easily 5+ years away, so we’re talking well into the 2030s to get a season 4 that covers that content. My guess is that simply none of this happens at all. HBO and Naughty Dog will both move on, at least for nearly a decade.

There is little doubt this is going to be an epic television event. There has been some fan concern about Bella Ramsey supposedly embodying an older, more violent Ellie, but in these reviews, she’s receiving a ton of praise. I can’t wait to see what the entire cast puts together.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.