I have been watching The Last Of Us' second season for five weeks now, and I think I've had quite enough.
Without wanting to re-enter the Thunderdome of TLOU2 criticism, I will just say that I thought the game, while having some good video game bits, is also a wider disaster and leave it at that. It was a bit much. The TV adaptation had a chance to change things though, so I went into this season--having not really dug the first--willing to give it a chance.
Mostly out of curiosity, because the stuff I hadn't liked about the first season--that it was just tracing over the lines of the first game, and I'd played that game already!--simply weren't going to work here. TLOU2's setting and storyline, split over two characters and dwelling in one location as long as it does, was going to need a different approach than the first's "post apocalyptic road trip" premise.
Maybe those changes would make a deeply unpalatable video game more palatable! Maybe the time and distance we've all put between the game's release in 2020 and now will have given the show’s creators a chance to survey TLOU2's messaging, read the room as it stands in 2025 and make a tweak here or there.
Nope! This show is bad television.
We are five episodes into this mess and I don't know if there's a single thing I like, whether that be changes they've made to the game or just the way this is working as a TV show. If I wasn't professionally invested in seeing where this all ends up I don't think I would have made it even this far without pulling the plug.
As an adaptation, I think it's bad. The casting, which was not great in S1 (I don't think either Joel or Ellie was the right choice!), has not improved, the lowlight being Kaitlyn Dever's Abby, who is playing an almost entirely different character (though I'll say here that a rare win was Catherine O'Hara's brief turn as the town therapist). Some of the changes made to the way certain events go down have done little but rob them of their impact. And the musical numbers, key to the game, have already outstayed their welcome in successive weeks on the show.
Worst of all is the fact, given room to breathe by splitting TLOU2's story across two seasons and to finally add something of its own to events, the show has been filling the space with empty calories. "To pretend that The Last of Us completely transcends its original medium would be to ignore the hole at the center of the show where insight and complexity and rich supporting characters should be", Judy Berman wrote for Time in her review of the season. "What fill out the episodes instead are extended zombie-battle scenes and long, silent sequences where people explore gorgeously decaying spaces. At those moments, you might as well be watching someone play a video game."
But just as a show, for those watching without any experience of the games, it's also bad. This is a prestige HBO series; why is the production so lavish in some areas (rotting record stores) yet so cheap in so many others? Why are so many people's clothes clean and pristine, why is their skin fresh, their hair always looking freshly-brushed? This is the apocalypse! Why is everything, even in this hellhole, lit like a daytime soap?
This show has looked at a big, spectacular but also deeply troubled video game and taken all the wrong stuff away from it. One of the few things TLOU2 did really well was make Seattle a place, a dark, psychotic wasteland; this show has turned it into a theme park. And the worst thing the game did was go needlessly overboard with its human misery, so of course the show has tried lifting that wholesale, and botched that too.
Key moments of extreme violence--the events that dominate the storyline of TLOU2--are still here in the TV series, but thanks to its casting, writing and production choices they don't feel like the culmination of a brooding revenge tale. They feel tacked on, gratuitous acts making cameos from the game while much of their context and impetus has been left behind, like a cordyceps-infested Kool-Aid man crashing through the wall for no reason whatsoever.
Like Kenneth said in his review at Kotaku, it's "a show that wants no part of the intentional disconnect between player and protagonist that Naughty Dog built into the game". We're just all along for the ride here, and the ride sucks.
