The Last Of Us
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Season two of The Last of Us just ended, and to say the story has gone in some new directions is an understatement. From key character deaths to new conflicts and a new focus on revenge, it continues to push forward with its complex story while still and always putting the ick in post-apocalyptic. I'm Linda Holmes, and today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about season two of The Last of Us.

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This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the Name Your Price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Joining me today is NPR's TV critic, Eric Deggans. Welcome back, Eric. Always good to see you. Yeah, I join you traumatized, beaten down, fungicided. Seriously, seriously.

So the first season of The Last of Us premiered in 2023. HBO's adaptation of the video game succeeded, where many similar adaptations have failed. Audiences embraced it and critics lauded it. I should say, as you receive this, the finale has just aired.

This is going to be full of spoilers. It's going to be full of talk about this season and last season and the video games and everything. So this is your warning. If you prefer to dip out, go ahead and do that and watch it and come back. You know, do it that way. Less trauma for everyone anyway.

The Last of Us has followed the journey of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, and Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, a grizzled smuggler and the young girl he was responsible for protecting. Protecting against what? Well, against a landscape of violence and misery that stems from a fungal menace that turns people into mushroom-headed murderous zombies, basically. And so, the last of us has followed the journey of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, and Ellie,

At the end of that first season, Joel made a horrifying choice to save Ellie's life at the expense of many others. And in the second season, the aftermath of that decision continues to haunt them five years after it happened. Now 19, Ellie has been suspicious for a long time about exactly what Joel did that day. And it turns out that a lot of other people have been thinking about it too. First among them is Abby, played by new cast member Caitlin Deaver, who has been obsessed with vengeance against Joel for killing her father to save Ellie.

In the second episode of this second season, Abby kills Joel, which of course leads Ellie to become obsessed with vengeance against Abby. Ellie may not have Joel anymore, but she does have a new relationship with Dina, played by Isabella Merced.

Dina, it turns out, is pregnant as a result of her previous relationship with Ellie's friend, Jesse. Much of this season, of course, ends up being spent on the show and Ellie figuring out how to go on without Joel. And it ends on a cliffhanger where it seems like Abby may or may not have shot Ellie their

There's at least one more season coming. There's still more story to tell from the sequel, Game, The Last of Us Part II. So plenty of questions remain. Eric, with all of that said. And that is a lot. And that is a lot, man. What can you do? How did you do with this season? Well, you know, I try to resist folks who were sort of knee-jerk.

critical of it. And, you know, this is so much worse, you know. I wanted to give the storytellers time to figure out what kind of story they wanted to tell. I will say in the end, I enjoyed this less than the first season. And I think part of it is because, first of all, the whole season feels like a prologue to me. It feels like it's working up to a second stage of the story where they basically shifted the protagonist's

from Joel and Ellie to Ellie and Abby. To do that, they had to spend a whole season on this really dark journey where Ellie is pursuing vengeance. Joel is paying the ultimate price for the lies that he told and, you know, the really brutal actions that he took at the end of the first season. And it's all about lies and wounds and the price of vengeance. And by the time we get to the end of the season, it's,

Abby's paid the price because all her friends are dead. And Ellie's paid the price because some of her friends are dead. She might be shot. Who knows what happened? When I was watching the original screeners, you know, originally they gave us access to all of them. I thought there was another episode coming. Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

and not made this feel so much like, hey, we're going to spend a whole season working up to a completely different story. Yeah, if I can make this comparison, it felt to me in part like not a season, but half a season, much like the most recent season of The Bear did. I had the same reaction to that season of The Bear. It didn't feel...

You know, a season to me should have some resolutions and some things continuing. I think in both of these cases, kind of you don't get much of any resolution to anything. You really get only things continuing, which to me means you're not done with your season yet.

So I tend to share that feeling as well. And I will freely admit, I have not played the second game, but I did play all the way through the first game, which for me is very unusual. It had reached me that Joel died early in the second one, as he does in this season. I lost interest in the game because my interest was the relationship between Joel and Ellie. And that kind of

and bond and their effort to survive. And in all likelihood, if I hadn't been doing it for work, I don't think I would have watched this season of the show either for the same reason. To me, it's

The effectiveness of the first season was partly based on the fact that they seemed to recognize that a game and a TV show have different narrative needs. You can't just translate the game into a TV show. It needs different things. It needs certain things to be stressed in a way that will give people something to watch.

And I felt a little bit like coming into the second season, that relationship that I keyed into so much and that Pedro Pascal performance, as much as I understand the whole like, well, things change and now we're going to move on and there's a whole other thing. And isn't Bella Ramsey also a gifted performer? Of course, of course, of course, of course, of course.

However, that relationship was my emotional hook into the show. You know, as you know, they came in in that sixth episode and brought flashbacks in so that you spent a bunch more time with Joel and Ellie, which to me just made me feel even more like...

This is what I wanted out of this show. And it doesn't really, to me, work without that relationship nearly as well. Also in the first season of The Last of Us, because of the structure of the story, you have these two people who are going across the country and they're dropped in different environments as they go. It was able to break the format

of your typical apocalyptic zombie drama, because they could just stick them in different environments with a different cast of characters, and all of a sudden you've got a whole 'nother cool story. Of course, the story with Nick Offerman was a perfect example. This was much more like the typical zombie dramas that we've already seen from The Walking Dead, et al., where they're stuck in one place,

They have the same cast of characters through the whole season. And so we're stuck narratively, which was also a problem. And then finally, to make all of this work,

Ellie has to become a very unsympathetic character. Not only is the story mostly falling on her through the season, but she has to be impulsive. She has to reject obvious overtures from Joel, who is a guy who does not show his emotions. So you know the fact that he built a guitar for her, the fact that he's trying to talk to her about his emotions. That's a huge thing for him.

And she's a teenager who's so wrapped up in her emotions, you can't really see what he's doing. And what was great about that sixth episode was it explained why Joel is the protector he is. There is a love that a parent has for a child, surrogate or not.

that kids never understand. Particularly when you've been a parent like I have, I was just like, oh man, that's one reason why that episode is so special too. It's not just that we get Joel again, we get some real insight into his character, into what it's saying about life, what it's saying about being a parent versus being a kid and how that's affected these two characters that we love so much.

And then we realize that Ellie might wind up being a parent herself because she's involved with a woman who's pregnant. So all of that was wonderful. But unfortunately, so much of the other stuff that surrounded it was just getting us there. Yeah. And man, there's too many episodes of getting us there and not enough of really impactful storytelling. Yeah. I will also say, like, it's no reflection, I think, on either one of the actors. But I think the story between Ellie and Dina is...

They clearly want Ellie's bond with Dina to play sort of the role that Ellie's bond with Joel did in that it gives her kind of the person that she's the most committed to and the most close to.

I think Dina is unfortunately not terribly developed beyond her relationship with Ellie. And then every story that involves women and girls as heroes does not ultimately have to come down to somebody being pregnant and somebody wanting a baby. And I felt like, particularly with Ellie, nothing about Ellie before this suggested to me that she was eager to become a 19-year-old parent. Right.

It feels a little easy to me to suddenly make everything. And then there's also this confrontation with this woman that Ellie kills who turns out to be pregnant. And it's like,

Right.

You know, you sort of have her working through all of this after his death. And obviously that's affecting for all the reasons that you mentioned about her kind of trying to understand what his parental love for her felt like. But I felt...

cheated out of them kind of working through that while he was alive. He could have done it a different way. And do you know how on Last of Us very often you'll start a new scene and it'll be like a kind of an over-the-shoulder shot of Ellie and somebody, usually Ellie and somebody, walking up to a new environment. It's a new building. It's a new alley. It's a new creepy house that is all falling down. Right.

Those are all essentially direct lifts from the game. Because the way the game works, you go into that new setting and it's like, okay, I got to survive this new environment. Right. And get to the other side of it. Yep. And I know that I can eventually, right? If I do it enough times, which sometimes with that game I played. Which sometimes it takes an awful lot. Oh, Eric, you would not believe how many times I died in that game. But...

If you're not playing and you're just watching, it needs a different approach to kind of storytelling mechanics. The idea that Joel has to die so that we can go into this thing of revenge, it's entirely possible that the other piece of this is like, I just don't have the fortitude right now for a story that is this bleak about humanity. Because the first...

season has that like tiny tiny ember of hope both from their relationship and from like maybe somehow there's a way to start down the path of getting a cure and maybe you know tiny tiny little bit of hope and

This season is just like, nope, no hope, just revenge. And it's like, all right. What I would say is, number one, that might be the drawback of having the person who designed the game be intimately involved in creating the TV show. Because Neil Druckmann, who famously developed the video game, is co-creator of the series.

And so, you know, you have somebody who's translating this story and maybe that's one reason why they stuck with it. I will also say, though, that if they hadn't, then people would have been speculating about when are they going to kill Joel. Of course, that is true. And it might have been better for them to just do it when it happens in the game so that they avoid all of that. And I certainly understand that. But it seems to me what they were also trying to do was make Ellie...

experience shades of Joel. Sure, yes. When we see her try to step up and protect this kid that the soldiers in Seattle kind of capture, that's a Joel flash. Right, sure. And, you know, they're able to, for example, in Catherine O'Hara's character, Gail. Yes.

Those are some real important notes that she hits where we meet her at the beginning of the second season. She hates Joel. We have a sense of why she hates him, but we don't really find out why she hates him until the sixth episode. And it's amazing. It's revelatory. It makes sense for her character. It accomplishes all those things, but she feels like a character. Yeah. Dina doesn't feel like a character. Dina feels like an excuse for Joel to talk about his efforts as a parent. Right.

And then an excuse for Ellie to act as a protector. I love that Catherine O'Hara performance. And I was so delighted to see her getting to play more drama and not just more drama, but also drier comedy. Because so often what she's so good at is comedy that is so broad you can't believe she's getting away with it. Right? The Schitt's Creek thing and some of that. Right.

Whereas there's also some really good, just dry, dry humor in her line deliveries here. And I was delighted by that. That was one of the things I liked the best about the season, I think. Let's just take a second and give flowers to somebody whose career included Beetlejuice. Home Alone. Yeah.

Schitt's Creek, The Last of Us, and the studio. Come on. Yes. That's amazing. Yes. Yes. I mean, she is on fire at the moment, so good for her. I also think that that last episode suggests, and I've heard some speculation about this, that the next season is going to shift again and actually be all about Abby and the Abby story. Yeah.

Yeah.

But on a TV show, I don't want to get to the end of a season and have them just kind of throw the characters that I've been watching out the window in favor of following new ones unless I really feel like that character has had all the possible opportunities to finish their whole story. At least, you know, I can say in favor of the loss of Joel, which I didn't respond to creatively. Right.

but in favor of that choice I can at least say they did continue with the exception of the flashback episode that I thought was very effective they did continue to follow the story forward I think it's another entire thing to say well this person's eventually going to cross paths with Ellie again so we have Abby let's go back and see what Abby was doing I don't

I don't care what everyone... Well, it raises the stakes for the storytellers. Those stories have to be kind of amazing to make us care about that. And Jeffrey Wright is a part of that story. So it's possible. Yes. Bring in Jeffrey Wright and I will give your story that I don't care about the best possible choice.

That's right. I'll keep an open mind and I'll watch at least the first two episodes. Yeah. So is there anything else that we should talk about? One thing that I did think was kind of interesting, and maybe I'm overreading this.

But, you know, we're going through what we're going through as a country right now. There are a lot of TV shows out there that are making some really bold statements against authoritarianism. The Handmaid's Tale and Andor. I also think The Last of Us is doing that in a more subtle way where the collective that runs Jackson is sort of shown to be kind of the most idyllic setup you can have.

And they are contrasted by this brutal militia that's run by Jeffrey Wright's character. So it is kind of interesting to see that.

I get that. I get that.

Everyone having a voice and deciding what's best to do. She gets together with the community and they have a vote about whether to essentially go on this vengeance trip and chase Abby and try to kill Abby in really just outright revenge for killing Joel. There's not really any sense that that's necessary for the safety of the community. It's just revenge.

The community says no, and Ellie does it anyway. So I think part of what you're saying may also be related to the fact that

Ellie's real turn to darkness partly involves deciding that she's going to do whatever she wants for her own desire for blood, as opposed to listening to what everyone in her community wants and being willing to be part of something larger than herself, even if it means sometimes subverting what you personally want to do with your anger. And in a weird way, that's how she mirrors Joel, too, because Joel has to be reminded

that the collective is about taking care of people who need their help, even when it might not seem like the wisest thing to do in the moment. And he resists that too. Right. There are a couple of conversations where Ellie suggests that she feels that

Joel's decision to kill everybody and therefore prevent them from killing her to make a cure has deprived her life of meaning. And there's also something sort of very dark about this very young person deciding that

The only way her life can have meaning is if she sort of is sacrificed in some way. So I think there is definitely some very interesting stuff under here, exactly as you're saying, about the relationship between individuals and communities and the good of yourself versus the good of the group and the way that the good of yourself can be either, I want to save someone like it was for Joel or

or I want to kill someone because I'm so very angry, as it is for Ellie. Her being angry at Joel for saving her is another way of being selfish.

Because she thinks, I finally have a chance to matter. And you took that away from me, not understanding that not only Joel loves her, but now she's in a community where a bunch of people love her. And they all would have been deprived of that. So I do like the way the show makes complex decisions.

Questions and answers out of these notions. It's not simple that, you know, certain kinds of violence bring negative consequences and other kinds of violence don't like we see in so many of the shows. They have stuck to the idea that no matter when you you're violent,

you're racking up a tab and eventually you got to pay. I think that's right. As I've talked to you about this, I'm very glad I did because as I have talked to you about this, I feel like I'm coming much more around to what you're saying, which is there is enough in this season that I potentially can care about. I just think it's padded out with too much stuff that I don't care about. Well, I don't really appreciate you making me feel like I do probably want to watch another season of this.

even though it makes me feel so incredibly bleak. But as always, I appreciate your insight. Thank you. That's what geeks do.

All right. We want to know what you think about The Last of Us Season 2. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH. That brings us to the end of our show. Eric Deggans, thank you so much for being here. It's always good to see you, bud. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And now you've inspired me to try and play the game again. Yeah. Listen, take a shot. Take a shot. Like I said, not usually my thing. I'm feeling I'm going to die a couple times and that'll be it. But anyway. Oh, you're going to die hundreds of times. It'll be great.

One last thing before we go. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Toy Story, which is Pixar's first feature. So we are going to be doing a power ranking of the best Pixar films and we need your help. What do you think are the best Pixar movies? We'll have a link to a poll in our episode notes. So vote now.

This episode is produced by Mike Katziff and Hafsa Fathima and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time. This message comes from Thrive Market. The food industry is a multibillion-dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind.

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