Sequels are hard. Television series past season number one are hard. The moment right before you start to tell a story is magic. You have a bank page and an entire universe set before you. As you create characters and develop them, when you begin to build your world, that universe gets smaller. Every decision you make eliminates certain possibilities.
Buy The Last of Us: The Complete Second Season 4K UHD SteelbookWhen you start to tell your first story, whether it is in a book, a movie, or a TV series, you have to introduce your characters and then develop them. You invent your setting and build your world. Then you give your characters a quest or a mission, or just something to do. But with sequels, all of that stuff has already been done. You’ve established your characters. You’ve built your world. Sure, you can add nuance and development to your characters. You can even introduce us to new ones. And you can explore new places in this world you’ve created. But you are always working within a pre-existing story framework.
That’s the hard part. Without all that world building, you have to find something else for your characters to do. Think about superheroes for a moment. In the first film, we’re introduced to our character, and he’s developed a little. He doesn’t get along with his parents, he likes a cute girl at school, etc. Then he’s bitten by a radioactive spider and gets some superpowers. Then he has to learn how to use those powers. And then he fights the villain. But in the sequel, we know who he is; all that’s left is maybe having a falling out with his girlfriend and fighting another villain. Unless that villain is fascinating, the film feels padded out.
It isn’t just superhero stories. All sequels have that challenge. There needs to be a reason to bring us back into that world again. And if you don’t get it just exactly right, or rather, if you don’t get it exactly like your fans want it to be, then there is going to be a backlash.
There has been a lot of backlash to Season Two of The Last of Us. I’ve not played the video games upon which the series is based, but my understanding is that the second game in the series (upon which Season Two was based) also received a lot of fan hate. The series gets all of that and more because they made some changes to the game so that even fans of the second game wind up hating the series due to those changes.
Personally, I found Season Two to be terrific television. It wasn’t quite as perfect as Season One, and there were definitely moments where it was doing a lot of table setting for Season Three, but I mostly found it incredibly compelling.
Set five years after the events of Season One, we now find Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) fully settled into the town of Jackson, Wyoming. This is where they found Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), living. The people of Jackson have created a thriving community and some semblance of normalcy. They’ve fortified their defenses and have regular patrols to ward off roaming infected. But more than that, they each have their own homes. They have regular meals and even a bar. There are jobs and resources. They even have a burgeoning government with a city council that makes decisions for the people.
It is about as close to paradise as anything we’ve seen in this world (save for the home Bill and Frank made for themselves in Episode Three of Season One, “Long, Long Time.” Season One showed us other communities (and we’ll see some more in Season Two). FEDRA, the fascist remainder of the government, controls many of the cities on the East Coast. And there are other militaristic communities roaming in the West. Later in Season Two, we’ll come to know a strange, religious cult. But no one else seems willing or able to create anything resembling what used to exist.
So why aren’t Joel and Ellie happy? They are hardly speaking to one another, and when they do, it usually ends in anger. Part of that is typical teenaged angst. Ellie is 19 now; she wants her independence, but Joel is still protective. Part of it is…well, that gets into spoiler territory.
Actually, this is a pretty good place to note that there is a major event that occurs in Episode Two, “Through the Valley.” I won’t spoil it, but it is a hugely important event (and one that will certainly create those fan divides I talked about earlier). It also makes it difficult to talk about the rest of the season without spoiling it. I’ll tread lightly.
Again, for reasons I won’t spoil, Ellie finds herself on a quest without Joel but with a newfound friend turned love interest named Dina (Isabella Merced). They trek to Seattle and come across a militaristic group led by Isaac Dixon (Jeffrey Wright) and a religious cult. Both of these groups are given short shrift this season, but it’s a pretty good bet they will feature heavily in Season Three.
Let’s back up a minute to the end of Season One. Joel has taken Ellie to a hospital where they think they can extract whatever makes Ellie immune to the infected and create a cure. But when Joel learns to do this, they will have to kill Ellie, he goes berserk and kills everyone in the hospital. It is an intense scene and a hell of a way to end the season. But the thing is we didn’t really know those people he killed. A few of them were given a few moments of screen time, but we didn’t really care about them.
Season Two makes us care. Or rather, it makes us understand that those characters had people who cared about them. Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is the daughter of the doctor Joel killed in cold blood. She’s out for revenge. Revenge becomes a common theme for the series.
Season Two goes into some dark places, some of which will undoubtedly irritate and anger some viewers. It also feels unfinished. Some major characters are introduced and then kind of tossed to the side. Show creator Craig Mazin has likened this season to The Empire Strikes Back. That feels apt. I can’t wait to see what he does for his Return of the Jedi season. I hope there are fewer Ewoks.
HBO presents Season Two of The Last of Us with a gorgeous looking 4K UHD transfer. Extras include numerous making of and behind-the-scenes featurettes, plus a couple of videos that catch you up on Joel and Ellie’s journeys up to this point. It comes in both a regular case and a Steelbook. I received the Steelbook and it is disappointing. The whole reason I’m interested in Steelbooks is they usually come with fun and creative artwork. This Steelbook comes with the standard Season Two art and it is rather plain.
