‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 does a disservice to its main character
The show’s version of Ellie is a notably weaker character, guest contributor Rose Katz writes in a review
Welcome to Gen Z Translator. Today, it’s time for a review from guest contributor Rose Katz. If you’re new, you can subscribe here and follow Gen Z Translator on Instagram. Views are Rose’s own.
(This review does contain spoilers).
In 2013, Naughty Dog released The Last of Us, a video game set in a post-apocalyptic world where fungus has led to people effectively becoming zombies.
The game focused on the story of Joel Miller, a smuggler from Texas and Ellie Williams, a young girl who had the special power of being immune from being bit by these fungus zombies known as the “infected.”
The first game portrays Joel and Ellie going on a cross-country journey, surviving attacks from both humans and the infected while forming a father-daughter relationship. The game ends with Joel violently tearing through a hospital to save Ellie from being sacrificed to make a vaccine to save people from being bit by an infected.
Seven years later, Naughty Dog returned to make The Last of Us Part II. Part II made the bold decision of killing off Joel, and the even bolder decision of making gamers spend half of the story playing as his killer: Abby Anderson.
While some gamers disliked the idea of the protagonist of the first game being killed, the second game is still very positively regarded by critics for its bold swing of killing Joel and introducing Abby as a new main character.
In 2022, HBO turned the first game into their first season of the show and season two, which premiered this April, began adapting the second game.
The Last of Us reflects a larger trend in video game intellectual property being recycled for the screen. Games like Fallout and League of Legends have also been adapted into TV shows, while horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s and sandbox game Minecraft have been adapted into movies.
While the second season of the show did have some enjoyable moments thanks to things like new flashbacks, I believe it failed to capture the heart and soul of the game: Ellie’s anger, grief and violence.
The show’s version of Ellie is notably softer as a person and finds herself needing to use violence to escape situations far less often, creating a weaker version of the character.
The first sign that the TV show was opting for a softer portrayal of Ellie came when Dina revealed she was pregnant.
In the game, Ellie reacts to this sudden development with frustration and anger at Dina, which escalates to the point of calling her a burden. Ellie has such tunnel vision for her revenge mission that she sees her girlfriend’s pregnancy as nothing more than an obstacle towards finding and killing Abby.
Meanwhile, the show’s version of this reveal leads to Dina and Ellie instantly making out. After their makeout session is complete, the couple discuss the situation and Ellie is much more level-headed, at one point even saying “Holy shit, I’m gonna be a dad” in an excited tone. This line received pushback on the internet, ultimately becoming a meme.
The show’s depiction of this reveal is a very cute display of queer love, but the tone of Ellie’s reaction just simply doesn’t work for me. Dina’s pregnancy is 100% an obstacle to Ellie’s mission, and she barely seems to care.
The season finale also removed perhaps Ellie’s most brutal murder of someone associated with Abby: her dog, Alice.
During the game’s version of events, as Ellie infiltrates the aquarium in hopes of killing Abby, she’s attacked by Alice and fatally stabs the canine, muttering “stupid dog” to herself in the aftermath.
Ellie’s murder of Alice is brutal on its own merits, but it becomes even more devastating once the game switches to Abby’s point-of-view and you see the dog in several of Abby’s scenes. You even get to play fetch with her, fully aware of what fate awaits her.
In comparison, this scene simply doesn’t occur in the show. Ellie makes her way through the aquarium with zero animal encounters before killing two of Abby’s friends.
Showrunner Craig Mazin tried to justify his decision to cut the scene by explaining his concerns over how graphic it would look, but I find that to be a weak cop out. This is a Sunday night HBO show, the audience that saw the violence of shows like The Wire and Game of Thrones can handle a single scene of an animal dying.
The show’s version of Ellie also faces way less adversity before pivotal scenes than her game counterpart.
Some of this was to be expected, given the nature of a TV show compared to a video game. However, I still think the show greatly downplayed some of Ellie’s most important encounters with human or infected enemies.
The first major instance of this came when Ellie arrived at a hospital occupied by the Washington Liberation Front, a militia controlling Seattle whose members include Abby and her friends who killed Joel.
In the game, Ellie has to navigate multiple waves of WLF soldiers patrolling different parts of the hospital, as well as a dog trained to pick up the smell of any outsiders. Gamers using Ellie have to get through this section by either killing a whole bunch of people or sneaking their way through in a way that requires a lot of patience and practice.
Meanwhile, show Ellie is almost detected by a dog, but otherwise makes her way into the hospital without breaking a sweat. The scene doesn’t last very long and barely captures the tension and stress you feel from that location in the game.
The season finale also completely skips one of Ellie’s most notable encounters with an infected enemy, the arcade bloater.
Bloaters are one of the biggest and scariest types of infected in both versions of this story and game Ellie finds herself trapped in an arcade with one towards the end of her third day in Seattle.
The show replaces Ellie surviving a bloater with a brand new scene of her barely avoiding being lynched by the Seraphites, a violent religious cult found in Seattle. While I do think the show did a great job demonstrating how scary the Seraphites are, the new scene was nothing more than an unnecessary parallel to what happens to Abby in the game. (I’d expect the show will keep that scene for Abby, too.)
The hospital and the arcade are both pivotal encounters on their own but also because of what happens shortly afterwards: Ellie finding Abby’s friends who helped kill Joel.
After game Ellie makes her way into the hospital, she finds Nora and violently interrogates her. Meanwhile, her reward for surviving a bloater is getting to kill Mel and Owen, the latter of whom gamers soon learn is Abby’s ex-boyfriend.
Ellie still finds all three of these people in the show, and her interrogation of Nora is one of the show’s best adaptions of the game, but both of these encounters lose some of their luster by weakening or simply skipping what game Ellie had to survive to get that point.
Ultimately I think the Last of Us Season Two featured great performances (Bella Ramsey’s resemblance to game Ellie is such a non-issue), excellent set design and added new several scenes to help build on the world created in the game...but it simply failed to properly capture the game’s version of Ellie. It does a good job at making a TV show, but a bad job at telling a story.
Season Three will shift the focus towards Abby. Let’s hope it does a much better job at capturing the heart of her story.
Rose’s roundup:
🎶 What Rose Is Listening To: “Man of the Year” by Lorde and “Leave Me Alone” by Reneé Rapp
🎞️ What Rose Is Watching: The Baltimore Orioles attempting to dig themselves out of a hole
🔎 What Rose Is Reading: Umpire Bible, an excellent resource if you’re a first-year baseball umpire
📱 What Rose Is Scrolling: Edits of The Pitt set to the Hamilton soundtrack that should have way more likes
Read the full Gen Z Dictionary here.
 |
|