The Last of Us simply wrapped up its second season, and the finale ends in a means that units up a serious change for the present. It’s one which displays an analogous shift in perspective that followers of the sport it’s adapting will keep in mind effectively: one designed to make viewers see the story in a complete new means.
This story incorporates spoilers for the primary two seasons of The Last of Us, in addition to each video games.
After the relative peace and respite of season 2’s penultimate episode, which tracked Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) shifting relationship over the course of a number of years, the finale will get again to the darkish stuff. Namely, Ellie’s quest to search out and kill Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), who murdered Joel as revenge for killing her personal father.
Despite being caught in a literal warzone in Seattle, and having a pregnant girlfriend who simply suffered a grievous damage, and listening to a speech from Jesse (Young Mazino) in regards to the significance of enthusiastic about the nice of their neighborhood as a complete, it appears nothing can cease Ellie in her personal quest for revenge. So when she learns Abby is perhaps in a close-by aquarium, she abandons every thing to go there, solely to by accident kill two of Abby’s buddies, one in every of whom is pregnant herself.
This second is pivotal in that it actually drives residence simply how decided Ellie is, and the way a lot violence she’s keen to create and endure in pursuit of revenge. But it’s additionally not the top of the episode. The final two minutes immediately shift to Abby in an enormous settlement within a baseball stadium. After following Ellie’s three-day-long quest, we see Abby alongside the phrases “Seattle: Day One.”
Image: HBO
For those that have performed The Last of Us Part II, this mirrors the construction of the sport. In the primary half of the sport, Abby is a villain to be chased, earlier than gamers take management of her to see the identical time period by means of her eyes, turning her into a personality which you can each hate and sympathize with, a lot as Ellie steadily turns into. According to co-showrunner Craig Mazin, one of many challenges of re-creating this second got here right down to the variations between video games and tv. The crew needed to get an analogous feeling throughout, even realizing that it wouldn’t hit fairly as laborious.
“We can’t reproduce the shock of changing into an individual,” Mazin stated throughout a press Q&A forward of the finale. “In the video games you’re Joel, you’re Ellie, you’re Abby. When that shift occurs it’s jarring as a result of you could have been somebody. But right here we’re watching all people equally on a display.” He added, “What we’re doing is honoring the notion that there’s a time interval the place one individual experiences it a method, and one other is experiencing it so wildly totally different, and but they converge.”
The suggestion is that season 3 will largely comply with Abby’s aspect of the story, one thing that Neil Druckmann, co-showrunner and likewise inventive director of the video games, alluded to. “Had we ended this season elsewhere, like a number of moments earlier than, I feel we wouldn’t be making the fitting promise of what that is about,” Druckmann stated. “We’re telling you that subsequent season, one, there may be simply an epic nature to what’s about to occur, and two, this different story goes to be actually necessary.”
This doesn’t imply there received’t be Ellie in season 3 — or Joel, for that matter — because the TV present has been pretty liberal with shifting moments round to raised go well with its personal fashion of storytelling. So it’s most unlikely that season 3 might be solely, and even primarily, from Abby’s perspective. But studying her aspect of the story might be necessary, significantly for the way it each mirrors and differs from Ellie’s perspective and makes viewers root for or towards each events.
“We perceive that each Ellie and Abby are transferring ahead in hassle,” defined Mazin. “They are in ethical hassle, as a result of their certainty is starting to fail them, and we are able to see it right here with Ellie for positive. Because confronted with the results of the factor she’s achieved, and the people who didn’t should die dying, she’s beginning to really feel perhaps a swing of the pendulum.”
Even nonetheless, including in a 3rd main character to sympathize with will mark a serious shift for the present going ahead, a lot as killing off Joel was for season 2. And Mazin believes it is a core a part of the construction of the sequence. “This present goes to be a special present each season,” he stated.
