If the first season of “The Last of Us” is about survival, the second is fueled by revenge.
Or, if you want to get all existential about it, consequences.
For those who know anything about the video game on which the series is based, this will come as no surprise. For those who don’t, well, early moments of the Season 2 premiere (Sunday on HBO) make it clear that the sins of the fathers will, in one way or another, define the futures of the daughters.
The show opens with a brief flashback to a scene from the Season 1 finale, in which Ellie (Bella Ramsey) asks Joel (Pedro Pascal) to swear that what he has told her about their escape from the Firefly headquarters in Salt Lake City is true. We know it is not. Season 1 chronicled Joel and Ellie’s perilous journey across a country ravaged by a cordyceps pandemic to a hospital run by a militia group, where Ellie’s unique immunity to the infection could be used to create a cure.
Once there, however, Joel learns that Ellie, whom he has come to love as a daughter, will be sacrificed in the process. In rescuing her from the operating table, he kills pretty much everyone in the place, including the doctor who claims to have devised said cure. When Ellie wakes from the anesthesia, they are headed back to the relative safety of a burgeoning settlement in Jackson, Wyo. Joel tells her that she is not the only one who is immune, that the Fireflies had tried and failed to find a cure and that a murderous attack by raiders forced Joel to take Ellie and flee.
The scene reminds us that Ellie never really bought the tale, but when Joel swears it is true, she chooses to believe him and so they carry that little time bomb of a lie with them into Jackson.
Back in Salt Lake City, another bomb is ticking. As the Firefly survivors gather around the graves of their dead, the doctor’s daughter, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) vows to find the man who murdered her father, for reasons she claims not to understand, and kill him. Slowly.
Flash forward five years and Jackson has grown into a busy and well-fortified refuge overseen by Joel’s younger brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley). Life has normalized enough to include community dances and comfortable homes. Ellie even has an age-appropriate bestie named Dina (Isabela Merced) and a martial arts trainer — Jesse (Young Manzino), Dina’s on-again, off-again beau and Jackson’s up-and-coming leader.
At 19, Ellie is in full young-gun mode, demanding the right to make her own choices and pushing back against authority figures, particularly Joel; the two are barely speaking. “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 more cocky, Joel has become careworn; he’s even seeing a shrink, paying local 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 until Gail snaps about his boring parental issues. She has her own beef with Joel and she knows he is lying about something: “Say the thing you’re afraid to say,” she demands.
But of course he cannot. Neither, it seems, can Ellie. Out on patrol with Dina, for whom she has feelings that are clearly more than friendship, she behaves with a reckless swagger that youth and her still-hidden immunity only partly explain.
Still Ellie and Dina share a teen-spirit energy that establishes the returning normalcy of life in Jackson even more than the therapy sessions or the shots of bustling streets and quietly smoking chimneys.
But the simmering tension between Joel and Ellie is not the only reminder that the horrors of the past are still present. Jackson is experiencing growing pains as refugees continue to pour in; the infected remain a constant threat, and it becomes clear that the passing of time has done nothing to quench Abby’s desire to exact revenge.
Creator Craig Mazin has compared this season to “The Empire Strikes Back.” That only works thematically if one views Joel’s actions in Salt Lake City as heroic, which many do not. (Though why some random doctor was ready to kill the only known immune person because he theorized that he would need to cut up her brain instead of first trying to make a vaccine from, say, blood or tissue samples, remains mystifying. As does the decision to tell Joel the plan beforehand. What did they think he’d do? Grab a few snacks and be on his way?).
Still, the logistical parallels — in a world beset by evil, peace exists to be shattered — holds well enough. “The Last of Us” is based, after all, on a game in which characters are inevitably set on quests, and, without attempting to spoil how the series hews to the narrative twists of the game, neither Ellie nor Abby are content to let their resentments go.
As Joel and Ellie made their journey across many of these United States, viewers were treated to near-empty cities and towns being reclaimed by nature (game creator Neil Druckmann based his vision, in part, on Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us.”) The terrible, hypnotic beauty of silent streets, giraffes grazing amid ruined skyscrapers and abandoned cars covered with moss and flowering vines was underscored not so much by the horrors of the infected — runners, clickers and bloaters — but by the violent, warring factions of the survivors. No one is uninfected by this particular plague; monsters also lurk in militias, cults and FEDRA, the tyrannical government agency assembled in the early days of the pandemic.
The second season adds the Washington Liberation Front, or the Wolves, a paramilitary group that fights both FEDRA and a medieval cult called the Seraphites (referred to as “scars”), all of whom Ellie, Dina and other members of the Jackson community encounter as they attempt to balance the needs of community with the more personal drives of the individual.
Like any continuation of a fantasy/sci-fi franchise, the second season cannot match the world-building revelations of the first. There is still plenty to see and learn in a landscape being devoured by primal forces, and many battles to be fought, whether with assassin stealth or full-blown epic intensity. It is an oddly constructed season of television — some questions are answered almost immediately, while others are left to linger for an unusual number of beats.
But as previously noted, the real narrative of this season is about consequences, and by extension, choices, which makes it far more inward-focused than the first. The terrible choice Joel faced in Salt Lake City is echoed again and again as Ellie struggles to become the hero of her own journey.
Though two years older than the character she plays, Ramsey has a baby face, and there has been some complaint that they have not visibly aged enough to play the older Ellie. But in many ways, their appearance works to the character’s advantage. Despite her experiences, Ellie is still emotionally immature, seeing independence as its own authority. But as “The Last of Us” reminds us again and again, with authority comes power, which can be a corruptive force when wielded with too much self-righteousness.
In the hostile land of “The Last of Us,” survival is not just about staying alive, but making choices about what that life will look like, and mean, in the end.
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