1 day Ago By Vicky Jessop
Talk about pressure. The Last of Us season two comes hot on the heels of two incredibly successful video games and one stellar first season. Including that episode, featuring Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman as star-crossed lovers trapped in a zombie apocalypse.
Plus, it has the unenviable task of living up to the heights of the season one finale. A quick refresher, in case it’s been a minute: the first season saw Joel (a battered, moustachioed Pedro Pascal ) agree to escort Ellie ( Bella Ramsey ) across a dystopian future America. Ellie’s immune to the cordyceps fungus that turns people into zombies when bitten — and at the end of season one, Joel ends up slaughtering his way through a hospital of rebel Fireflies to save her.
Those Fireflies were planning to dissect her in the hopes of extracting a vaccine for cordyceps: a dream that appears to have died with them. In the world of Neil Druckmann (aka the founder of video game studio Naughty Dog), actions have consequences, and season two opens with a bereft Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) swearing revenge over her Firefly father’s grave. Joel killed him — and now she’s out for a little blood of her own.
But after the fireworks of the finale, season two’s first episode feels like slow going. It’s five years after the events of season one, and the characters have all settled into their lives in the town of Jackson, Wyoming. Not much action here; instead, the script seems content to let those characters go through the motions.
Ramsey’s Ellie is all grown up: cocksure and reckless, with a new love interest courtesy of Isabela Merced’s lively Dina. Her relationship with Joel has deteriorated over the years — though the show takes its sweet time revealing why. Joel, on the other hand, is struggling, and unable to articulate why — even to himself.
He’s now the town’s foreman, in charge of construction. While it’s delightful to see Pascal rocking the glasses and giving the camera sad puppy-dog eyes, it’d be better if the show reminded us what a stone-cold killer Joel actually is. Instead, we get shots of Pascal and Ramsey eyeing each other up across empty spaces without saying much at all.
Those who have played the games, of course, will know how this ends . But where the first season stuck almost religiously to the text, season two appears a little more willing to branch out. There’s a subplot involving a waterpipe in Jackson (which just happens to be filled with cordyceps fungus) that will likely cause havoc later, and Catherine O’Hara gets a nice turn as Joel’s liquor-swilling therapist, who admits that she hates him for killing her husband, Eugene.
That said, there is a slight air of video-game-itis, especially in the scenes where Ellie leaves the town on patrol. One scene, in which she crashes through the roof of a derelict supermarket, only to be confronted with a Stalker, is brilliantly tense, but also feels ripped straight from the game — right down to the torch Ellie uses to light her way in the dark. A few ominous hints lay the groundwork for what’s to come: infected appear to be gathering, and the episode closes with Abby’s gang finally reaching Jackson on their bloody quest to kill Joel — as Abby puts it — “slowly”.
Let’s hope not: the faster the action heats up, the better. The Last of Us season two is streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW.
