Ready Your Golf Clubs—'The Last of Us' Season 2 Is Coming Back Swinging
New Set Photos from 'The Last of Us' Season 2 and an interview with Neil Druckmann and the 🐐 Craig Mazin
Neil Druckmann spoke exclusively with Entertainment Weekly about the widely anticipated second season of the Emmy-awarded HBO series. “We'd be talking about Game 2, and there's a lot of changes — sometimes small adjustments, sometimes bigger — that we're making in anticipation of adapting Game 2,” He told Entertainment Weekly. “So even before Game 2 was out, we were deep in conversations about where the characters are going and ultimately what we're trying, thematically, to say with this whole story.”
In the piece, Neil Druckmann chats about how the global pandemic forced his team at Naughty Dog to delay The Last of Us: Part II game. He goes on to reflect on how leaks emerged before the release of the game and spoiled massive plot points of the stories. “Some of that stuff was borderline traumatic,” Druckmann admits “…But our brand is that we pander to no one. We do what's best for the story and whatever happens, happens. There's a very particular story we wanted to tell and we stuck to our guns.”
The audience reaction to the second game were intense and notably split, and continues to spark controversy to this day. We can expect a similar response when season 2 premieres.
For those unfamiliar with the synopsis of the second season, Season 2 will pick up five years after the events of Season 1 of Ellie and Joel's trek across post-apocalyptic America. The pair are now settled in Jackson, Wyoming, a commune introduced in Season 1, which is run by Joel’s sister-in-law Maria (Rutina Wesley), who now has a child with Joel's brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna).
In this season, we’ll see Ellie living a typical teenage life— having a crush on a girl named Dina (Isabela Merced), who also happens to be the ex-girlfriend of her close friend Jesse (Young Mazino).
Despite the good of their newfound life, tension persists between Ellie and Joel, who is still struggling with the actions he took to save Ellie’s life at the Firefly hospital. Despite the overall sense of peace, the new-comer Abby arrives. As HBO describes her, she is “a skilled soldier whose black-and-white view of the world is challenged as she seeks vengeance for those she loved”
If you’ve played the games, you’re well aware of Abby’s killer physique, but the show has different priorities. In the game, Abby maneuvers in a manner much like Joel, engaging in physical and violent actions. However, the television adaption of Abby won’t emphasize this physicality as much. "There's not as much violent action moment to moment," Druckmman declares. "It's more about the drama. I'm not saying there's no action here. It's just, again, different priorities and how you approach it." More importantly, "Kaitlyn has the spirit of the game in her," he continues. "What I always loved about the idea was that you are going to continually be challenged as you were in season 1. When you try to pick a hero, it's tough because we're human beings, we're not heroes. For every heroic act, there's someone who suffers on the other side who may see you reasonably as a villain. When you look at Kaitlyn, there's just something in her eyes where, even no matter what she's experiencing, you connect. It was important that we found somebody that we could connect to the way we connect to Bella."
Craig Mazin joins in, “I personally think that there is an amazing opportunity here to delve into someone who is perhaps physically more vulnerable than the Abby in the game, but whose spirit is stronger. And then the question is, ‘Where does her formidable nature come from and how does it manifest?’ That's something that will be explored now and later.”
Mazin and Druckmman previously divulged their plans to adapt the events of Part II across multiple seasons. Though HBO hasn’t officially greenlit a third season—they most likely will—conversations have already been had. “I think it's pretty likely that our story will extend past a season 3,” Mazin voices. “How far past? I can't say. And that's not to say that there are not other stories that could be told, but this story is the one that Neil and I are telling.”
Druckkmann adds, “We know what we need to do going forward, but we couldn't tell you right now exactly how many episodes or how many seasons it would take to get there.”
"Each episode is like a meal. You can have a light dinner or you can go to a 12-course French restaurant,” Mazin states. “We have seven episodes. They are high-calorie, dense episodes. If you consider action and drama and scope to be the things that create an epic nature, each one of these episodes packs quite a wallop. You will not be bored.”
That includes deleted material once considered for the game—some of which you can play in the Part II Remastered addition.
Druckmann teases this particular material as, “pretty brutal, but I'm very excited for people to see it.” There are also characters we’ve never seen before, notably—Catherine O’Hara, who’s been featured in the teaser trailers.
But she’s not the only one. “There is a pretty prominent character that is talked a lot about in the game, similar to what we did with Frank (Murray Bartlett) in season 1, that is in this season," he reveals. "There's a very, very cool casting that I hope we can talk about soon."
Fans have been speculating about Season 2’s narrative since it was greenlit. Will the show follow the same method as the game, or will it take its own creative liberties and greatly differ from the source?
“A big part of the theme of the second game is about perspective, how someone's hero could be someone else's villain and vice versa. It's weird to talk about a story where its structure could be a spoiler,” Druckmann admits. “I don't even know if it's worth mentioning where we landed because I think that's part of the fun for people familiar with the game to see how we approached that challenge in the show. I will just say that we gave it a lot of thought and tried different things. There are some deviations of where we place things."
But he did say this, “At the very least, "We certainly are going to mess around with time the way it was in the source material, but as Neil said, we messed around in ways that we felt were appropriate for the show," Mazin says. "When I say 'messed around,' I mean scientifically determined in a narrative way what we thought would be most impactful."
Either way fans of the game and the show alike are interested to see this adaptation of Part:II!