If the first season of “The last of us” concerns survival, the second is fueled by revenge.
Or, if you want to get everything existential on this subject, the consequences.
For those who know anything Video games On which the series is based, it will not surprise. For those who do not do it, well, the first moments of the first of season 2 (Sunday on HBO) clearly show that the sins of the fathers will define, in one way or another, of the future of girls.
The show opens on a brief flashback on a scene from the final of season 1, in which Ellie (Bella Ramsey) asks Joel (Pedro Pascal) to swear that what he told him about their escape from the headquarters of Salt Lake City. We know that this is not the case. Season 1 has chronicle The perilous journey of Joel and Ellie through a country ravaged by a cordycepts pandemic to a hospital led by a militia group, where Ellie's unique immunity to infection could be used to create a remedy.
Once there, however, Joel learns that Ellie, that he learned to love as a girl, will be sacrificed in the process. By saving her from the operating table, he kills almost everyone in the place, including the doctor who claims to have designed said cure. When Ellie wakes up from anesthesia, they returned to the relative security of a booming colony in Jackson, Wyo. Joel tells her that she is not the only one to be sheltered, that the fireflies had tried and had not found a remedy and that a murderous attack of Raiders forced Joel to take Ellie and to flee.
The scene reminds us that Ellie has never really bought the story, but when Joel swears that it is true, she chooses to believe it and therefore they wear this little time bomb of a lie with them in Jackson.
Back in Salt Lake City, another check bomb. While the survivors of the firefly gather around the graves of their dead, the doctor's daughter, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) swears to find the man who murdered her father, for reasons that she pretends not to understand and kill him. Slowly.
Flash in front five years and Jackson has become a well loaded and well -fortified refuge supervised by Joel's younger brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and his wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley). Life has been standardized enough to include community dances and comfortable houses. Ellie even has a better best Dina (Isabela Merced) and a coach of martial arts – Jesse (Young Manzino), Dina de Dina, the chief emerging from Dina and Jackson.
Isabela Merced, who joined the second season of the show as Dina, with Pedro Pascal like Joel.
(Liane Hentscher / HBO)
At 19, Ellie is in young cannon mode, demanding the right to make her own choices and repel the figures of authority, in particular Joel; The two barely speak. “Why is she so angry with you?” Dina asks. “I think it's normal,” says Joel. “His being 19 years old and I being … what I am. No one loves their parents at this age. “
One, ok.
If Ellie has become more arrogant, Joel has become Careworn; He even sees a shrink, paying the local psychotherapist Gail (Catherine O'Hara, wonderful like never) in weeds. (“Shake and pull? What am I, in high school?”) While the literal timer of Gail Cigne, Joel Kvetches on the way Ellie treats it as a stranger until Gail rushes on his boring parental problems. She has her own beef with Joel and she knows he is lying about something: “Say the thing you are afraid of saying,” she asked.
But of course, he can't. It seems that one or the other cannot be won over. On patrol with Dina, for whom she has feelings which are clearly more than friendship, she behaves with a reckless boastful that youth and her still hidden immunity partly explain.
Ellie and Dina always share an energy for adolescents which establishes even more normality of return to Jackson than the therapy sessions or the plans of the animated streets and the chimneys smoking quietly.
But the tension flowing between Joel and Ellie does not recall the only reminder that the horrors of the past are always present. Jackson experiences growing pains while refugees continue to pour; The infected remain a constant threat, and it becomes clear that the passing time has done nothing to extinguish Abby's desire to take revenge.
The creator Craig Mazin has compared this season “The Empire is retreating.” This only works if we consider Joel's actions to Salt Lake City as heroic, which many do not do. (But why a random doctor was ready to kill the only known immune person because he theorized That he would need to cut his brain instead of trying to make a vaccine, for example, of blood or fabric samples, remains mystifying. Just like the decision to say the plan beforehand to Joel beforehand. What would they think he would do? Take a few snacks and be on the way?).
Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is another time bomb this season.
(Liane Hentscher / HBO)
However, logistics parallels – in a world assaulted by evil, peace exists to be broken – is quite well. “The Last of Us” is based, after all, on a game in which the characters are inevitably put into quests, and, without trying to spoil the way the series comes up against the narrative twists of the game, neither Ellie nor Abby are content to let their feelings go.
While Joel and Ellie have made their trip through many of these United States, viewers were treated to cities and cities almost empty by nature (the creator of Games Neil Druckmann based on his vision, Partly, on the book by Alan Weisman “The world without us.”) THE Terrible and hypnotic beauty Silent streets, the giraffes blurring in the middle of ruined skyscrapers and abandoned cars covered with foam and flower vines were highlighted not so much by the horrors of infected runners – runners, clicks and bloutants – but by the violent and painful factions of the survivors. No one is not infected with this particular plague; The monsters are also hidden in militias, cults and Fedra, the tyrannical government agency met at the start of the pandemic.
The second season adds the Washington Liberation Front, or the Wolves, a paramilitary group that fights both Fedra and a medieval cult called the Séaphites (called “scars”), all Ellie, Dina and other members of the Jackson community when they try to balance the needs of the community with the individual's more personal behavior.
Like any continuation of a fantastic / science fiction franchise, the second season cannot equal the revelations of construction of the world of the first. There is still a lot to see and learn in a landscape devoured by primary forces, and many battles to fight, whether with a stealthy assassin or an epic intensity in its own right. It is a strangely built television season – some questions are answered almost immediately, while others are allowed to linger for an unusual number of beats.
But as indicated previously, the real story of this season concerns the consequences and, by extension, the choices, which makes it much more focused on the interior level than the first. The terrible choice that Joel was confronted with Salt Lake City is echoing again and again while Ellie has trouble becoming the hero of her own trip.
Although two years older than the character she plays, Ramsey has a baby's face, and there was a complaint that they have not visibly aged enough to play the old Ellie. But in many ways, their appearance works to the advantage of the character. Despite her experiences, Ellie is always emotionally immature, seeing independence as her own authority. But as “The Last of Us” reminds us again and again, with authority comes power, which can be a corruptive force when exercised with too much self-justice.
In the hostile country of “The Last of Us”, survival is not only to stay alive, but to make choices on what this life will look like and ultimately means.
