In today’s ever-fractionalizing world, there are perhaps only two thing harder than being a hit out of the box. Improve upon your rookie performance as well as at least maintain where your platform is if it happens to be going well.
In HBO/Max’s case, the challenge for the second season of THE LAST OF US, which finally debuted last night after a more than two-year hiatus, to achieve such lofty goals has recently become a little more daunting. It was a critically acclaimed hit for Casey Bloys and team the first time out, building nearly 75 per cent from its premiere to its conclusion in a winter arc and scoring extremely strong support from Rotten Tomatoes’ critics. Pretty darn good. But on the heels of the far more dramatic surge in popularity and zeitgeist of WHITE LOTUS’ season 3, which hit its zenith last week when 6.2 million Nielsen viewers watched the 90-minute conclusion on Sunday night alone–a +150% built from its post-Super Bowl premiere, the goalposts to hit a similar nerve have moved considerably.
So if for no other reason than force of habit, I returned to HBO last night to check out where our friends in the apocolyptic world two decades removed from a pandemic (so, roughly 2040?) were last seen hiking somewhere talking about Fireflies. THE NEW YORK TIMES’ Noel Murray picks it up from there:
The second season of “The Last of Us” begins with two prologues. In one, we meet Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), one of the surviving Fireflies from the Season 1 finale’s Salt Lake City massacre. Abby and her fellow resistance-fighters gather around their loved one’s graves to discuss a plan to retaliate against Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), the man who slaughtered so many of their people. (“Slowly,” Abby says, when her allies say they will kill Joel.)
In the other prologue, we flash back to the final scene from that finale, when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) made Joel swear that he took her away from the Fireflies because they had given up on finding a cure for the cordyceps plague. Joel gave Ellie his word, which she warily accepted.
And with that, we embark on a journey that may not quite have the comic relief and sexual tension that we left behind in contemporary Thailand, but nevertheless is captivating enough to at least prompt a whole bunch of questions. Like, for example, where does a young woman find some action in a far less populated and arguably dangerous world?
THE WRAP’s Lucas Manfredi teased out this juicy possibility that caught my eye:
Episode 1 reveals that Ellie previously had a relationship with Cat, her now-ex who is seen leading her and her friend Dina’s patrol unit. Meanwhile, Dina has just gotten out of her on-again, off-again relationship with Jesse and its immediately clear Ellie has developed a crush. The romantic chemistry developing between Ellie and Dina becomes more pronounced as the episode progresses, with it culminating in a kiss between the pair at the New Year’s Eve dance.
But there’s much more substantative goings-on as well that provoke still more theroies, as Murray continued:
(B)ased on the premiere, it seems this season will also be driven by one simple idea: that when Joel saved Ellie from the Fireflies and then lied to her, he made a godawful mess. (O)ne of my great fascinations with any postapocalyptic story is in seeing how people make fortresses for themselves, sealed off from the surrounding mayhem — and also seeing how they try to build fulfilling lives inside their hidey-holes.
To be sure, there’s a good deal new that we’ve been introduced to as well, including one particularly familiar face, as Murray offered:
We meet…(an) important new character (in) Gail (Catherine O’Hara), a therapist who has been helping Joel process his feelings about past mistakes. These therapy sessions have been hampered by Joel’s unwillingness to come clean about everything he has done. Also, Gail resents Joel because he killed Eugene, her husband of over 40 years. (The details of this killing are unrevealed in this episode, but given that the season’s cast list includes Joe Pantoliano as Eugene, expect a flashback.)
And as CNN’s Alix Rosenbloom confirmed, that’s a curveball that even the most devoted fans of the IP didn’t see comingL
The role is original to the series, as the character is not featured in the video game. Expanding the character of Joel in this respect was important to (executive producer and creator Neil) Druckmann, who told IGN in an interview in March that they created Gail for the show to help Joel “figure out why Ellie is icing him out.” “He’s quite a bit in denial about the real reason (for) what’s happening there,” Druckmann said.
The biggest question at the end of Season 1 was whether Joel’s choice to save Ellie rather than (potentially) saving the world was selfish and shortsighted. On the one hand, keeping Ellie alive reaffirms one of the series’s central ideas: that we must make the most of whatever kind of life we have. Yet the ramifications of that choice keep causing problems — including at the end of this episode, when we see Abby and her armed Firefly comrades arriving just outside Jackson.
And the Fireflies are not the only looming trouble. Early in this episode, Dina mentions to a preoccupied Joel that one of the community’s underground pipes — connected to the outside — has been rendered useless by encroaching roots. Devoted “Last of Us” fans know not to take any tendrils lightly, since they could be part of a larger cordyceps hive-mind. Sure enough, we later see that crumbling pipe again, and see the roots within ominously squirming.
Yes, it’s pretty dense. And after coming off the breakneck pace of WHITE LOTUS’ gripping expanded season finale, this episode practically sashayed its way through its own 80 minute opener. Bloys and company have already seen enough of what they apparently like to have announced a Season 3 pickup last week, so our own expectations were admittedly raised that much higher going in. There’s certainly enough here to at least bring me back to see how these storylines develop and evolve. But TBH I’m hardly as giddy as I was with the previous season, let alone the previous time period occupant. And I’ll be awful curious to see where HBO’s audience resets to in order to determine if the early pickup was driven by actual potential or–as I warily suspect–merely the public announcement of something that was pre-ordained for budget optimization.
I’m sticking around at least for a while to get my own answers. But much like civilization in Jackson is, we’re on the clock.
Until next time…