HBO’s video-game-inspired, postapocalyptic hit “The Last of Us” likes to cover all its zombie bases. The first season emphasized urban hellscapes — lots of cowering and running in the ruins of Boston, Kansas City and Salt Lake City — while moving toward the open spaces of Wyoming. Season 2, premiering Sunday, goes the other direction, starting out as a grisly western — stockaded town, horse patrols, waves of attackers — but moving back to the city, this time an emptied-out Seattle.
Wherever it goes, though, “The Last of Us” remains (as my colleague James Poniewozik pointed out in his Season 1 review) a zombie tale that polishes and elaborates on the conventions of the genre but does not transcend them. The course of its action and the dynamics of its relationships run in familiar grooves, lubricated by generous applications of blood and goo.
Where the show has differed from the genre standard is in the dramatic weight and screen time it devotes to those relationships, or, seen another way, in its sentimentality. (I say potahto.)
Other zombie shows flesh out love, friendship and loyalty just enough to provide a little extra frisson when a character becomes lunch. “The Last of Us,” which was created and is still overseen by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, doesn’t reverse that equation — it still spends time, and a lot of HBO’s money, on elaborate scenes of mayhem, in close quarters or on broad canvases. But it really wants you to care. If the Hallmark Channel had a zombie drama, it might look like a PG version of “The Last of Us.”
At the heart of the series, making the greatest demands on our emotions, is the Mutt and Jeff pairing of Joel (Pedro Pascal) — a hard case whose daughter was killed at the beginning of the show’s zombie-spawning fungal pandemic — and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager he met two decades later. Ellie, who would try the patience of adults far saintlier than Joel, happens to be immune to the fungus, and in Season 1 Joel reluctantly agreed to take her on a cross-country journey in pursuit of a cure. They emerged from the perilous, season-long road trip as each other’s surrogate family.
Season 2 begins five years later, at the human outpost in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where Joel and the now 19-year-old Ellie have found a home. They are respected members of the community’s warrior class, but their status with each other is less secure: Ellie is seriously mad at Joel, an anger that springs from the usual teenage orneriness and from her suspicion, which we know to be justified, that Joel has lied to her about some critical events at the end of the first season.
The fallout from those events, which will not be spoiled here, gives the new season its shape. A small band sets out from Salt Lake City in search of Joel, starting a chain of events that eventually puts Ellie on the road to Seattle. The stakes of the story become ever more human-on-human, with zombies largely relegated to one epic battle that sits at the cinematic junction of western, medieval and samurai.
The presentation of the Joel-Ellie relationship remains cogent and believable, and you can enjoy it on its own terms, though there is an incongruity about it that dogs the show. Psychological chamber drama and scary-monster action do not necessarily amplify each other, no matter how adroitly and handsomely each is staged. (And no matter how much you want to believe that simply having both is an accomplishment in itself.) Trying to do each justice can leave “The Last of Us” feeling neither here nor there. The relatively cynical but relentless mechanics of the early seasons of “The Walking Dead” can start to look pretty entertaining in comparison.
The new season, to be fair, expands its focus beyond the battle-scarred Joel and the fiercely stubborn Ellie. Isabela Merced has a major role as Dina, a friend of Ellie’s who becomes central to the action. Catherine O’Hara is sharp as a therapist who offers postapocalyptic counseling despite her own despair. A pair of fine performers, Jeffrey Wright (as the leader of a Seattle militia) and Kaitlyn Dever (as a single-minded new antagonist), are given surprisingly little to do; presumably their characters will be more prominent in the third season that has already been ordered.
On the road again, and cycling through the same limited stock of in extremis scenarios, “The Last of Us” does not provide many new reasons to watch in Season 2. But it still offers a consistently reliable one: Ramsey’s hard, nervy, wonderfully impertinent performance as Ellie. The 19-year-old character is not as fresh and funny as the 14-year-old was, but Ramsey continues to cleave through the well-made melodrama and get to something real.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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