The Last of Us Season 2 is Terrible

Contains spoilers.

There was a time on the Internet when you could Google “is the Last of Us Season 2 bad?” and have a reasonable chance of coming across a kindred spirit who would have written cogently about the exact same feeling that you harboured in your heart but felt unsure to express. This does not exist now. And so, to satisfy my urge for a proper rant, I have decided to take this matter up myself.

First some context: I have not played either of the two Last of Us video games, but as someone interested in video game and television culture, I have watched countless YouTube reviews of them. I am aware that these games, highly lauded in their genre for gameplay, graphics, and story-telling, are controversial for some cultural and social aspects of their narrative. The grittiness, realism, and depth of the narrative and characters seems to both their main strength and main point of criticism, especially for the sequel.

Inevitably, a TV show was released based on the plot of the first Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. I wasn’t too interested initially; I already knew the story, and was never a big fan of zombies anyway. I am also averse to big budget TV shows on the very distinctive streaming services we have the privilege to choose from today; at some point you just have had enough of troubled detectives hunting serial killers or serial killers hunting other (worse) serial killer or families uncovering their dark secrets or strange things happening in idyllic British villages or kids with super-powers etc. However, out of sheer boredom and an affinity for Pedro Pascal I gave the show a chance, and I have to admit: I was hooked, to the extent that I gave it second place in my modern TV shows to not miss of the century, the first being True Detective Season 1.

Season 1 of The Last of Us is a great example of getting people to care about “how” something happens in a story, rather than “what”. As the show was based on a popular video game with a wide audience, the writers could not rely on the plot to keep viewers interested. The focus had to be on the interactions between the characters, primarily the deuteragonists, Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), whose relationship is central to the story. The value of the show would be based on how well it could leverage its medium to tell the story of Joel and Ellie as distinct from the video game, while hewing closely to its narrative and paying homage to the “game” elements in it.

I felt it did its job exceedingly well. I was especially taken by Pedro Pascal’s portrayal of Joel as the quintessential post-apocalyptic stubborn and rugged man, weary of a world that held no meaning for him and holding on to the pain of his daughter’s death as the only true emotion he felt. The transformation of his attitude towards Bella Ramsey’s Ellie from one of weary disinterest to fatherly love and fierce protectiveness – forming the crux of the story and precipitating its climax – is superbly written and acted out by the two leads.

The ending is a take on the classic hero’s dilemma: save your loved one or save the entire world. Normally the hero is somehow able to bypass this and achieve both outcomes but The Last of Us is not that kind of story. Joel’s decision to save Ellie at the cost of the vaccine cure is a testament to the creators’ commitment to maintaining their characters’ core values over giving the audience a safe or crowd-pleasing ending. We all can, in our hearts, sympathize with Joel; who amongst us would sacrifice their mother, father, sister or loved one for the benefit of an unknown, and at most times, unlikeable humanity? Who amongst us hasn’t lied to our loved ones to spare them (and ourselves) a painful truth? To me, the ending isn’t controversial at all – it isn’t about whether Joel did the “right” thing, but whether he did the realistic thing, given his characterization and humanity. The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.

Apart from the story and acting, I loved the show’s visual effects, production design, and soundtrack. Some episodes were better than others, but the series’ highs were so great that the lows didn’t matter much. The zombies were wonderfully depicted, with each interaction having weight and tension despite me knowing there was no “real” threat to the protagonists’ survival. The novelty of the post-apocalyptic world was wonderfully depicted through Ellie’s inexperienced eyes, with Joel as her weary and irritable guide.

So all of this was great, and while I knew that the story of Season 2 wasn’t the most compelling, I had faith in the creators of the show to re-create the magic. After all, why not?

And it was only a few minutes into the first episode when I realized this was going to be a disaster. The premonition, such as it was, was triggered in my mind by an opening scene that had Joel repairing some circuit breakers in his house and being visited by a new character, Dina, who would eventually become Ellie’s girlfriend. At this point in the story, however, Dina is merely Ellie’s best friend, something that is shoved in the viewer’s face with a blatant line from Joel, which went something like:

I thought she would have told you, you being her best friend.

And prior to this, while expounding on the apparent tension between Joel and Ellie that has developed in the years since the last season, Joel mentions to Dina something about knowing that he is “a hard-ass and protective”. What struck me immediately was the lack of respect the show’s writers had for the viewers, believing them to be incapable of simple deduction. Another example: during their conversation, Dina mentions that she knows that Joel is taking therapy, something he is obviously reluctant to admit to. As she is leaving his room, Joel calls out to Dina and says:

Don’t tell anyone I am seeing a therapist.

Do you see what’s so egregious here?

Joel is universally known for being a ruthless bad-ass. It is obviously embarrassing for him that he is seeing a therapist; everyone, including Dina, should know this. So when she is leaving, and Joel asks here to not to tell anyone “something”, does he really need to mention what that something is, especially when Dina already brought up the therapist a few minutes ago in dialogue, thus establishing it for the audience? If he had just stopped at “Don’t tell anyone.”, it would have been understood by everyone, i.e. Dina and the audience, what the forbidden topic was. It would be narratively superior too because it would indicate to the audience a depth to Joel and Dina’s relationship, a mutual understanding they have of each other. Even if the audience couldn’t immediately work out what this was, they would later muse over it and come to an Aha! moment. Lastly, given Joel’s reputation, isn’t it pathetic he has to plead to a 19-year old to keep his therapy a secret?

The only point of this poor expository dialogue is to bring viewers up to speed with Joel and Ellie’s dynamic, Joel’s personality, and Dina’s role in the story. None of what they discuss is actually useful to them as characters in the story, except for Joel offering to teach Dina how to fix circuit breakers, which never gets developed beyond being a prop to set up this conversation. The show wants to get along with the story as quick as possible, and the writers see each interaction as just a station at which its train must necessarily halt; unlike the first season, there is no awareness that it is the journey, not the destination, that counts.

The lack of care becomes painfully blatant the more you scratch the surface. The events of the first two episodes of Season 2 are set in the self-sufficient survivor community of Jackson Hole, which has achieved a level of complexity and surplus that enables its inhabitants to live relatively comfortable lives, on par with late-20th century suburban America with a 19th-century Wild West aesthetic. We are asked to accept without question that in this post-apocalyptic universe, professional therapists, kids’ baseball, unlimited ammunition stores, and grandiose New Year’s celebrations are normal. There is no attempt to explain the social and economic dynamics of this town, how it interacts and trades with the rest of the world, how it replenishes the supplies it doesn’t, or can’t, manufacture on its own, and how duties are divided amongst its citizens that – I am sorry – a professional therapist can exist. And it appears that this supposedly affluent and complex civilization is powered by a single engine: Joel’s brother, who is responsible for all major town duties: he sits on the council, mans the town defences, organises the patrols, looks after the cows, and supervises major reconstruction works. And of course, amidst all this, he has time to worry about Ellie’s and Joel’s strained relationship which is clearly every character’s major concern in the show, since they seemingly have no issues of their own.**

Joel’s character is assassinated, in part to soften the blow of his murder in Episode 2, and in part to set up Ellie and Dina as the joint badasses in his stead. He is now a confused sad old man who goes to therapy and wishes his cool teenage daughter loved him. His only act of heroism results in his capture by Abby, who he would have never followed or trusted once he had saved her from the horde, had he still been the character he was originally written to be. One could argue that Ellie was the only purpose Joel had to live for, and to see his relationship with her become strained to the point of indifference on her part would obviously break him inside. And perhaps this transition will be showed via flashbacks in future episodes, since we are only given clues up to his death (and since Pedro Pascal is a major draw for the show, and heavily featured in all advertisement). The mystery, of course, is why this happened – what changed in their relationship that Joel turned out this way – and isn’t revealing this mystery the central point of this still-unfolding story anyway?

The show would lend itself to this charitable assessment if it did not put the Joel-Ellie dynamic at the centre of its narrative right from the start, while also being set five years from the events of the previous season and having its characters comment that the breakdown in their relationship has been going on for a while, with the therapist even wryly commenting that Joel’s issue was too commonplace to even merit therapy. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. If Ellie’s indifference is such a massive blow to Joel, we should see him down in the dumps, barely functioning or being actively anti-social – a liability to himself and the town. But he is a responsible citizen, in charge of the maintenance and construction of facilities in the town for existing and new inhabitants***. So the previously grouchy Joel is clearly functional and able to have normal social relationships with everyone else, even to the extent of thinking of Dina as her real daughter as opposed to Ellie, but he is also broken enough to be a loser?

The show reached its apogee of cringe in episode two, where we see Jackson Hole stormed by a zombie horde that had inexplicably been lying dormant under a pile of corpses in the snow to keep itself warm – till the right moment. A snowstorm arrives, and this is apparently the trigger for the zombie horde to erupt from the ground and storm the town, in a large scale repeat of a similar encounter shown in Season 1. But where Season 1 perfectly captured the sense of inevitable, inescapable doom the horde represented, encapsulated so memorably by the huge zombie (I forget what its actually called) bursting from the ground and ripping apart its human enemies, this Season makes it a tired set-piece for showcasing shockingly poor visual effects and fight choreography. You have to see it to experience the level of disappointment I am struggling to describe here.

I couldn’t stop laughing during the scene where Joel’s brother is cornered in a cul-de-sac by one of the same huge zombies and just before being ground into human paste, manages to burn it to death with the last vapours of gas left in his flamethrower. The defence of the town is absurd to the point of being laughable; try resisting that when you see them shout “Jackson Hole” before shooting into a CGI-generated endless horde of zombies, all shot from a distance or behind to save on make-up and special effects costs. For a town council that has evidently thought of everything, a moat where oil could be poured and set on fire to create an impenetrable wall just slipped everyone’s minds; instead, they put down ramps from which oil barrels are rolled down and then shot at. No, I am not joking – this actually happens in the show, and we are meant to take it all very seriously and care immensely about the fate of this stupid town.

I can go on and on about this, but I will stop here and let you, the reader, if you care enough, come to your own conclusions. But you might be wondering: why do I care so much? I care because I refuse to accept that the media we consume is mere entertainment. It is the food for our imagination, the medium for our thoughts to explore worlds that are not our own, but that can help us understand ours better. What we see and think about, what we spend our hard-earned leisure time on, what we discuss with our friends – all of this matters. And even if it is only mindless entertainment to you, think about it: why is it that the television and film industry has gotten so expensive and so well-resourced over time? Why are the biggest celebrities of our time all media personalities? Why is the mindless entertainment of the masses such a big business?

The stories we are told define to a considerable extent our worldview, and have a profound impact on the development of our personalities and morality. They can inspire us to be better people, to deal more effectively with life’s challenges, and to find purpose and meaning in things that we may otherwise take for granted. I care about the Last of Us Season 2 being terrible because Season 1 was one of the few big-budget shows of quality and authenticity I have got to watch over the previous two decades, especially after the world become all self-aware and ironic. In the character of Joel Miller, I saw a masculinity worthy of emulation, a world-weariness deserving to be heard, a back-to-the-basics approach so desperately needed in our increasingly superficial world. In Ellie, I saw an innocence, idealism, fearlessness, and optimism in the face of impossible circumstances that could be an inspiration for so many children and adults who find themselves dazed and confused by the vacuousness of their lives. Season 2 robs its characters of these worthy qualities and reframes them as superficial props in a paint-by-numbers revenge plot.

Season 2 is a betrayal of my attention, my care, and my investment in this world and characters, and it is furthermore, another addition to the mass of cynical entertainment that masquerades as deep and meaningful content in our artistically bankrupt times. It taints the achievements of the first season by seeding doubt in me as to its artistic merits in the first place; I can’t help but ask: was Season 1 really so good if this is what was to come after? It casts doubt on any future such attempts at storytelling by setting another precedent of planned obsolescence at the very peak of big-budget entertainment. The Last of Us becomes the latest in a long line of television shows and movies that began with such promise but spun off into forgettable mediocrity just when their fans got the most invested in them.

I care that the Last of Us Season 2 is terrible because I desperately wanted some form of modern media to point to as an example that authentic, meaningful art could still somehow emerge from the bowels of the corporate art industry. That someone out there still considered their audiences worthy of respect and care. That when I switch on the television in my weaker moments of boredom, I wouldn’t just be latching on to the latest grimdark morally ambiguous detective/zombie/superhero story to be churned out for the umpteenth time by a giant corporation to hypocritically teach us the value of humanity and moral courage. But it wasn’t to be. As much as I hate to admit it, this genre has long been dead, and all we have is its corpse reanimated as a mindless zombie by the Cordyceps that is the modern media corporation.

*This is a plot hole because the Fireflies, a resistance group formed to oppose the fascistic state rule of FEDRA, a law enforcement agency, are well aware of Joel’s nature and capabilities, and yet not only tell him this but also leave him alive afterwards, to be escorted out of the hospital by a couple of armed guards. With the stakes this high, this is not a likely moral stance the Fireflies would take, especially for someone like Joel who was never officially associated with them and in their eyes is no more than a mercenary. This is a world where people kill their loved ones as soon as they know they are infected to save them the horror of becoming a zombie (and to stop the creation of another threat).

Perhaps the Fireflies didn’t realize the extent of Joel’s attachment to Ellie and were going by their impression of him as a mercenary who, in his own words, saw Ellie as cargo to be delivered to the required destination. It still seems an unnecessary piece of information to share with him, especially since he has been shown to be skeptical of “miracle cures” and not at all interested in the Fireflies’ mission to save the world.

**On the other hand, we never see the professional therapist do anything other than conducting therapy sessions and watching kids’ baseball sat on a lawn chair. Is her role in ensuring the town’s mental wellbeing important enough to spare her from what I assume would be regular citizen duties?

***In another moment of character assassination, Joel argues with his sister-in-law, leader of the town council, that he didn’t have enough time and resources to build housing for an increasing number of refugees, who he believes should not be taken in beyond a reasonable limit. He is promptly reminded that he himself was a refugee once, to which the chastised man has no response. This is the same Joel who twice in the first season actively ignored strangers to help his family without hesitation, being a person who valued his loved ones over the abstract concept of humanitarianism. Moreover, we are expected to assume that in this post-apocalyptic world with scarce resources and perilous circumstances, every refugee has the same status as Joel, famed zombie killer, survivalist, and brother to the town’s council leader. We are also expected to forget that when Joel and Ellie first arrived at Jackson Hole in Season 1, they were subject to a harrowing safety check to ensure they were not infected and did not belong to a raider or opposing militia faction before being allowed in.