Season two of The Last of Us sets itself apart from its interactive counterpart in one crucial way, which may come as a surprise to those who thought the first season was an act of redundancy, given how closely it hewed to the first game’s narrative. The Last of Us Part II—a more expansive, morally uglier, and controversial game than its predecessor—undercuts its larger themes about forgiveness and mercy by having Ellie Williams slaughter hundreds of people on her way to getting to the one person she actually wants dead. There’s a smaller body count, and each death—each human death, at least—feels monstrous by comparison.
The broad strokes of the story remain the same from the game, as do the core questions of how, or even why, to stop a cycle of death once it’s been kicked into motion. The show is nothing if not obsessed with the after-effects of people choosing violence as a default, especially as it concerns youth paying for the sins of older generations. “I hope you do it better than me” is practically a refrain during the latter portions of the season, spoken by parents to their children, but the pull of revenge proves to be so much stronger, and so much easier, than that of mercy, and those children pay a steep price every time for not doing things better.
That desire for revenge is what brings Kaitlyn Dever’s steely Abby to Jackson, Wyoming. It’s what a sharp-witted widow and town therapist played by Catherine O’Hara is just barely holding back with weed and alcohol. It’s what eventually leads Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her ride-or-die best friend, Dina (Isabela Merced), to leave the relative safety of Jackson to go looking for Abby in Seattle, a move subtly underlined as a bad decision when ex-cop turned local bartender Seth (Robert John Burke) is the only person who vocally supports it at a town council meeting.
The allure of vengeance is also what fuels the all-out warfare between the Washington Liberation Front army and a reclusive group of forest-dwelling religious zealots known as the Seraphites, the horror of which seems to at once shock and embolden Ellie. Like the games, the show’s second season is deeply attuned to the idea of hatred breeding more hatred, even as it positions its vision of reciprocal cycles of escalating fear and aggression in contrast with the moments of humanity that just might point the way forward for a better future.
Indeed, for as much as Joel and Ellie find themselves in cruel and poignant opposition to one another, they’re both very much fighting to restore love and kindness to the world. The biggest set piece of the second season—and one that’s all the more thrilling for not having a corollary in the two games—only goes the way it does as the result of a communal effort. And it comes early on in the season so that the makers of the show can hauntingly emphasize just how often Ellie is left alone, without purpose or true connection to the people around her.
Later in the season, Ellie herself points out that she truly only has a community of one: Joel. We’re well aware by this point of how imperfect that community is—an imperfection that becomes all the more conspicuous the more we learn about the five years in-universe since Joel and Ellie settled in Jackson. Throughout, Pascal is movingly alive to the contradictions of Joel’s unique path to parenthood, as the man goes out of this way to bring Ellie in contact with all that’s beautiful in the world, even if most of those things are vestiges of yesteryear, while teaching her that being a cold-blooded monster is the only way to survive the world as it is now.
For her part, Ramsey homes in on how learning to live with that duality eats away at Ellie, and how a straight line can be drawn between Joel’s teachings and all the good and bad that the girl does. And it’s that insight, coupled with the nuance breathed into even the season’s smallest characters, many of whom inspect their lives with the quiet hope that the better angels within them keep the roiling hatred creeping in at the margins from swallowing their world whole, that keeps The Last of Us from succumbing to wall-to-wall misanthropy.
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