If the primary season of “The Last of Us” is about survival, the second is fueled by revenge.
Or, if you wish to get all existential about it, penalties.
For individuals who know something concerning the online game on which the sequence relies, this can come as no shock. For individuals who don’t, properly, early moments of the Season 2 premiere (Sunday on HBO) make it clear that the sins of the fathers will, in a method or one other, outline the futures of the daughters.
The present opens with a short flashback to a scene from the Season 1 finale, wherein Ellie (Bella Ramsey) asks Joel (Pedro Pascal) to swear that what he has advised her about their escape from the Firefly headquarters in Salt Lake Metropolis is true. We all know it’s not. Season 1 chronicled Joel and Ellie’s perilous journey throughout a rustic ravaged by a cordyceps pandemic to a hospital run by a militia group, the place Ellie’s distinctive immunity to the an infection could possibly be used to create a remedy.
As soon as there, nevertheless, Joel learns that Ellie, whom he has come to like as a daughter, will likely be sacrificed within the course of. In rescuing her from the working desk, he kills just about everybody within the place, together with the physician who claims to have devised stated remedy. When Ellie wakes from the anesthesia, they’re headed again to the relative security of a burgeoning settlement in Jackson, Wyo. Joel tells her that she shouldn’t be the one one who’s immune, that the Fireflies had tried and did not discover a remedy and {that a} murderous assault by raiders compelled Joel to take Ellie and flee.
The scene reminds us that Ellie by no means actually purchased the story, however when Joel swears it’s true, she chooses to imagine him and they also carry that little time bomb of a lie with them into Jackson.
Again in Salt Lake Metropolis, one other bomb is ticking. Because the Firefly survivors collect across the graves of their useless, the physician’s daughter, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) vows to seek out the person who murdered her father, for causes she claims to not perceive, and kill him. Slowly.
Flash ahead 5 years and Jackson has grown right into a busy and well-fortified refuge overseen by Joel’s youthful brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and his spouse, Maria (Rutina Wesley). Life has normalized sufficient to incorporate neighborhood dances and comfy properties. Ellie even has an age-appropriate bestie named Dina (Isabela Merced) and a martial arts coach — Jesse (Younger Manzino), Dina’s on-again, off-again beau and Jackson’s up-and-coming chief.
Isabela Merced, who joins the present’s second season as Dina, with Pedro Pascal as Joel.
(Liane Hentscher / HBO)
At 19, Ellie is in full young-gun mode, demanding the best to make her personal selections and pushing again in opposition to authority figures, notably Joel; the 2 are barely talking. “Why is she so mad at you?” asks Dina. “I figure it’s normal,” Joel says. “Her being 19 and me being … what I am. No one likes their parents at that age.”
Um, OK.
If Ellie has grown extra cocky, Joel has turn out to be careworn; he’s even seeing a shrink, paying native psychotherapist Gail (Catherine O’Hara, marvelous as ever) in weed. (“Shake and stems? What am I, in high school?”) As Gail’s literal timer ticks, Joel kvetches about how Ellie treats him like a stranger till Gail snaps about his boring parental points. She has her personal beef with Joel and he or she is aware of he’s mendacity about one thing: “Say the thing you’re afraid to say,” she calls for.
However in fact he can’t. Neither, it appears, can Ellie. Out on patrol with Dina, for whom she has emotions which are clearly greater than friendship, she behaves with a reckless swagger that youth and her still-hidden immunity solely partly clarify.
Nonetheless Ellie and Dina share a teen-spirit vitality that establishes the returning normalcy of life in Jackson much more than the remedy periods or the pictures of bustling streets and quietly smoking chimneys.
However the simmering rigidity between Joel and Ellie shouldn’t be the one reminder that the horrors of the previous are nonetheless current. Jackson is experiencing rising pains as refugees proceed to pour in; the contaminated stay a relentless menace, and it turns into clear that the passing of time has performed nothing to quench Abby’s need to precise revenge.
Creator Craig Mazin has in contrast this season to “The Empire Strikes Back.” That solely works thematically if one views Joel’s actions in Salt Lake Metropolis as heroic, which many don’t. (Although why some random physician was able to kill the one recognized immune individual as a result of he theorized that he would wish to chop up her mind as an alternative of first making an attempt to make a vaccine from, say, blood or tissue samples, stays mystifying. As does the choice to inform Joel the plan beforehand. What did they assume he’d do? Seize a number of snacks and be on his manner?).
Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is one other ticking time bomb this season.
(Liane Hentscher / HBO)
Nonetheless, the logistical parallels — in a world beset by evil, peace exists to be shattered — holds properly sufficient. “The Last of Us” relies, in spite of everything, on a recreation wherein characters are inevitably set on quests, and, with out making an attempt to spoil how the sequence hews to the narrative twists of the sport, neither Ellie nor Abby are content material to let their resentments go.
As Joel and Ellie made their journey throughout many of those United States, viewers have been handled to near-empty cities and cities being reclaimed by nature (recreation creator Neil Druckmann based mostly his imaginative and prescient, partly, on Alan Weisman’s e-book “The World Without Us.”) The horrible, hypnotic great thing about silent streets, giraffes grazing amid ruined skyscrapers and deserted vehicles coated with moss and flowering vines was underscored not a lot by the horrors of the contaminated — runners, clickers and bloaters — however by the violent, warring factions of the survivors. Nobody is uninfected by this specific plague; monsters additionally lurk in militias, cults and FEDRA, the tyrannical authorities company assembled within the early days of the pandemic.
The second season provides the Washington Liberation Entrance, or the Wolves, a paramilitary group that fights each FEDRA and a medieval cult referred to as the Seraphites (known as “scars”), all of whom Ellie, Dina and different members of the Jackson neighborhood encounter as they try to stability the wants of neighborhood with the extra private drives of the person.
Like several continuation of a fantasy/sci-fi franchise, the second season can’t match the world-building revelations of the primary. There’s nonetheless a lot to see and study in a panorama being devoured by primal forces, and plenty of battles to be fought, whether or not with murderer stealth or full-blown epic depth. It’s an oddly constructed season of tv — some questions are answered nearly instantly, whereas others are left to linger for an uncommon variety of beats.
However as beforehand famous, the actual narrative of this season is about penalties, and by extension, selections, which makes it much more inward-focused than the primary. The horrible selection Joel confronted in Salt Lake Metropolis is echoed repeatedly as Ellie struggles to turn out to be the hero of her personal journey.
Although two years older than the character she performs, Ramsey has a child face, and there was some grievance that they haven’t visibly aged sufficient to play the older Ellie. However in some ways, their look works to the character’s benefit. Regardless of her experiences, Ellie continues to be emotionally immature, seeing independence as its personal authority. However as “The Last of Us” reminds us repeatedly, with authority comes energy, which generally is a corruptive power when wielded with an excessive amount of self-righteousness.
Within the hostile land of “The Last of Us,” survival is not only about staying alive, however making selections about what that life will seem like, and imply, ultimately.
