Whose Story Is ‘The Last of Us,’ Really?
The story of Ellie and Joel? The second season of HBO’s adaptation has only challenged this assumption
Briefly, for only the first few minutes of The Last of Us game, which I’ll henceforth refer to as Part I, you play as Sarah, a preteen girl awakened in her bedroom by a panicked phone call from her uncle, Tommy, as their hometown, Austin, Texas, becomes Hell on Earth. Sarah creeps downstairs. The next-door neighbor chases Sarah’s father, Joel, into the house. Joel shoots the neighbor dead and explains to Sarah that something’s gone horribly wrong with the world. Sarah, Joel, and Tommy race out of town.
We, as Sarah, witness the outbreak of a world-ending pandemic; an airborne fungal parasite is rapidly spreading and transforming humans into fearsome zombie-esque monsters, and U.S. Army patrols are shooting suspected infecteds on sight. One soldier opens fire on a terrified man with a helpless young girl in his arms. Joel survives. Sarah doesn’t. So now, for most of Part 1, you’re playing as Joel.
The Last of Us becomes the story of the hardened smuggler Joel and the precocious orphan Ellie embarking on a post-apocalyptic trek from Boston to Salt Lake City to Jackson, Wyoming. These people, who at first can barely stand each other, gradually become essential to one another. With Ellie, Joel becomes the sort of dad he should’ve gotten to be, to Sarah. Ellie, on the other hand, is a girl born a few years into the plague, so she’s young enough to have only ever known this world of ruin; she never knew her parents; with Joel, Ellie comes to love and trust someone for the first time in her life, despite how treacherous and cynical the whole world has otherwise become. Ellie and Joel come to complete each other. So intense and inviolable is their bond by the end of Part 1 that Joel, on his own strength, canonically massacres dozens of people, soldiers, and civilians in a hospital rather than turn his not-daughter over to a team of scientists who’d sacrifice her—who’d extract the parasite from her brain and inevitably kill her in the process—to develop a cure for the Cordyceps plague that has ruined mankind. And we root for this profoundly selfish rejection of humanity’s salvation. Because Part 1 isn’t the story of humanity. It’s the story of Ellie and Joel.
The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us, adapting The Last of Us Part II, begins to challenge this assumption. Whose story is The Last of Us, really? In Season 2, Episode 2 (“Through the Valley”), adapting the most harrowing and indelible moment of Part II, Joel is ensnared and executed by the vengeful daughter of one of those dead doctors in Salt Lake City. So now you’re playing as Ellie, except for the long and controversial stretch of Part II—about 40 percent of the game, actually—where you’re instead playing as Joel’s murderer, Abby, in flashbacks, as a bitter witness to how vengeance has deformed her and doomed her own found family in Seattle. Without Joel, Part II becomes a murkier, messier story. It’s the story of Ellie and Dina and Jesse and Abby and still, I suppose, in some abstract sense, the dearly departed Joel. The love triangle and the plot-twisting pregnancy of Part II would be the stuff of serial teen dramas if it weren’t for the rugged circumstances and everyone being soaked in vengeance and death.
Joel, Ellie, and Abby each have the person they love most violently stolen from them. Each struggles, destructively, to fill this void in their lives. This, too, is the story of The Last of Us.
You’ll sometimes hear fans frame Part II as some widely despised or at least deeply polarizing sequel when, in fact, it got great reviews and sold a ton of copies and ultimately won Game of the Year. That said, I don’t think you’ll find many gamers who will tell you that they prefer the second game to the first or else hold the two titles in similar regard. Part II is unfortunately one of those modern works of mainstream entertainment that was subject to some relentlessly asinine and self-radicalizing discourse about its supposed wokeness and gayness; but it’s also a game that’s drawn several sensible criticisms of its shifts in tone, themes, and perspectives. Why is vengeance this game’s big idea? Why am I playing as Joel’s murderer? Whose story is this anyway? Of course an adaptation provides an opportunity to reach a new (and in this case wider) audience through a new medium; to cast an old game in a new light. There are plenty of players who prefer the more aggressive gameplay and/or the more intense characterization in Abby’s sections of Part II. There are, likewise, plenty of viewers who adore Kaitlyn Dever and would surely love to see her spend a full season leaning into the role of Abby, as she almost certainly will do in Season 3. I’m not without hope, even, ironically, as these characters plunge into utter hopelessness.
Co-showrunner Craig Mazin has said that he and the series creator Neil Druckmann will need at least four seasons to properly adapt the two games. The second-season finale seems to be setting up a third season that’s squarely focused on Abby. This would ultimately amount to a TV adaptation that’s one-quarter Part I—the game that everyone loves and rightly respects as a milestone in the creative maturity of the medium—and three-quarters Part II—the more divisive game that sits somewhat awkwardly in the shadow of its predecessor, largely due to the decision to rip Joel from the story of Ellie and Joel.
Two years ago, there was so much hype and so many outsized hopes for HBO’s The Last of Us. Sonic, Super Mario, and Detective Pikachu had dispelled the so-called curse on video game adaptations, as far as kid-friendly comedies were concerned, but dramas were still dicey. On paper, The Last of Us was the foolproof adaptation; a third-person shooter exquisitely engineered in the first place to play like a prestigious film drama, a video game so intrinsically cinematic that surely all you’d have to do is faithfully recreate its cutscenes with a competent director and a strong cast. And even then, the first season of The Last of Us, adapting Part I, was more successful than fans of the game might have dreamed, with nearly 32 million viewers per episode and now eight Primetime Emmys to its credit. Mazin and Druckmann have certainly earned the benefit of the doubt. The third season will tell the story of Abby, and perhaps, in this new medium, with this new audience, she’ll truly own The Last of Us. The show isn’t quite the same without Pedro Pascal, who rekindled a bit of the old magic in the season’s penultimate episode (“The Price”), in flashbacks to his final years with Ellie, with a final scene that ought to win him every acting award in the business; but then, The Last of Us has always been a story of loss and persistence. Here’s to hoping that Mazin and Druckmann fill this awful void and dispel these familiar doubts, with a vengeance.
