I’ve been pretty vocal about my criticisms of HBO’sThe Last of Usas its second season airs. By no means do I believe thatan adaptation has to stick strictly to its source material, but the television show has so far struggled withThe Last of Us Part 2’s non-linear deuteragonist structure, attempting to solve it bydiluting the nuancerearranging the timeline in which events are shown and splitting the events of the game into multiple seasons.
It was initially assumed that we’d be getting two seasons – one focused on Ellie’s half, and the other on Abby’s half. Butaccording to showrunner Craig Mazin, “There’s no way to complete the narrative in a third season. Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome.”
The Second Season Hasn’t Covered That Much Ground Yet
If you’re a fan of the games, this might not come as a surprise. The second season of the show has, so far, not actually gone through that much of Ellie’s half of the game, let alone the game as a whole. We’ve only seen Seattle Day One from Ellie’s perspective, but most of her important flashbacks were folded into episode six, The Price, and Ellie and Dina have already had an altercation with the WLF and the Seraphites in Day One. Seattle Day Two might technically be covered from a content standpoint, if not a temporal one.
I hated The Price, if you were wondering.
Considering how much shuffling of the timeline season two has done, it’s a bit hard to nail down what the last episode will cover and if it’ll wrap up Ellie’s half of the game. It’s likely that we’ll see the standoff between Ellie and Abby in this episode, and that the next season will focus primarily on Abby’s part of the narrative. But then what will that fourth season be about? There isn’t all that much after that apart from the ending.
My guess is that the show will start to meander into exploring side characters’ stories, like it did in Long, Long Time,that excellent episode from the first season about Bill and Frank. We didn’t really get an episode like that in season two, and Mazin cites Joel’s death as the reason: “It’s such a narrative nuclear bomb that it’s hard to wander away from it.”
But I don’t really want to see a fourth season of the show, considering the way it’s going. I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with how the show has handled the game so far – a lot of the reason that the second season is taking a while to tell is that a lot of stuff about Jackson has been added to the story. This isn’t in itself a bad thing – Jackson is cool, and an adaptation is a great place to tell stories that couldn’t be told in the game – but in combination with the wider changes to the structure of the show, it doesn’t really add anything to the complex themes the show is ostensibly trying to explore.
More concerning is the way that television seasons function, which is obviously very different from playing through a single video game. The writers have to set up situations that eventually pay off, but there can be years between seasons, and audiences can get frustrated or lose interest in that time. The showrunners have tried to solve this problem by rushing through conversations and events that, in the game, took place over years.
Slowing down the pacing further with a fourth season is only going to exacerbate that problem. There’s value in exploring the spaces around the central narrative, of course, but that comes at the cost of weighing down a story that, lest we forget, mostly takes place over the course of three days. I’m not sure the show will sustain itself over four seasons – at this rate, I’m doubtful that its third season will be well received either.
But that’s just my opinion, and I’ve already decided that I hate this season of the show. I’m still (naively) holding out hope that things will come together once Abby is properly in the picture, but it feels like the show has already botched its timeline, and it doesn’t work as good television nor as a good adaptation. Maybe I’m just dreading having to retread the same old discourse about The Last of Us for yet another year.
