So the creators, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman, after dropping that bombshell or finale, came forth with some new details on The Last Of Us Season 2. They’ve already explained what’s happening with the season. They’re changing it dramatically from the plot of the Last of Us 2 game. So we’ll explain why they’re changing it, how they’re changing it.
They said that they’re working on the story with, of course, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckman, but they are working on the story with Bella Ramsey herself. Because she is the main character of the game Last Of Us Part 2, and the story is about her.
It moves from Joel to Ellie. So it is important for her to be involved in the decisions related to Season 2 and where her story will go. Of course, we don’t know how we can tackle it or how storytelling of Abby is going to come into play. Careful for spoilers for the Season one episodes if you haven’t seen the finale yet.
Here is ‘The Last Of Us Season 2 Everything We Know So Far:
What Will Happen In The Last Of Us Season 2?
So the big news is that Neil Druckmann and the showrunner, HBO, just in general, have said that they do plan on doing a completely different storyline than the Last of Us 2 game, or at least at the beginning.
Originally, they’d also said that they were going to split the story of the second game into multiple future seasons. So in the way that they changed some of the storylines for the first game for season one, they’ll do that even more during The Last Of Us Season 2.
That is part of the reason why they’re splitting the story into multiple seasons. They didn’t do that during season one because the story of the first game is so much shorter than the story of the second game. People who hated the second game will be really happy to know that they are changing the plot dramatically for a couple of different reasons.
One of the big things about the second game is also that it was very divisive with the fan base. So people either loved it or absolutely hated it. So have you seen a lot of talks online like, “oh, people love season one, but they’re going to hate season 2”? Because they’ve been expecting season two to directly adapt the exact same plot as the second video game.
That’s why it was so much blowback in the fandom for the second game. And largely, it’s because the game takes a dramatic left turn and really only follows the Ellie character. So it just feels like a completely different vibe, like a totally different type of game, a different story than what people were expecting after the events of the first game.
Like, “wait a minute, this is a story about Joe and Ellie having adventures.” It is very likely that HBO just does not want to completely turn the show on Bella Ramsey. She did a great job as Ellie during The Last Of Us Season 1, but I don’t think that she could hold up an entire show for another 3 to 4 seasons by herself. Pedro Pascal is on fire right now.
If you haven’t been watching Mandalorian Season three episodes, he is fantastic in pretty much everything that he does. We are full Pedro Pascal into the Pascal verse right now, with him just blowing it up all over the place.
The funny thing about that, too, is that the plot of The Mandalorian is very similar to the plot of The Last of Us, with him protecting Grogu on The Mandalorian and protecting Ellie in The Last of Us. He’s like a protective dad in both series, protecting children.
Missing Five-Year Time Jump
So when they say that they are dramatically changing the plot of the second game for The Last Of Us Season 2, what they might be doing is using a lot of the flashbacks in the missing period during a time jump between season one and season 2, that the game just skips completely over.
The events of the second game pick up after a five-year time jump after the end of season one. The end of season one ends pretty much where you saw the end of the finale, with them looking out over time, the settlement, the promise, and the lie that Joe tells to Ellie again.
If they still plan on adapting most of the characters from the second game, they can use that five-year time jump to tell more story, more development of Ellie, and develop Abby’s character, who winds up being the main antagonist of the second game. There was actually a brief reference to Abby in the finale, but not the kind of Easter egg that you would expect to see.
Like she is a character that did not appear in the finale, but Laura Bailey, the voice actor who played Abby in the games, did a cameo as one of the nurses in the finale. In the games, Abby is meant to be the daughter of the Firefly’s lead surgeon that Joel killed, setting up this revenge arc for her character, where she becomes the main antagonist in the second game.
But this character that Laura Bailey was playing, which is meant to be a regular nurse, it was just a bit of an Easter egg behind the scenes that she herself was the voice actor who played Abby. I don’t expect her to play Abby in the Season 2 of The Last Of Us.
Speaking of video game actors’ cameos and big connections in other productions, some of you might remember Laura Bailey from Critical Role, which she also does was Ashley Johnson, who cameoed as Ellie’s mother in the episode.
And what they can do during season 2 is tell more of the story during that missing five-year time jump, develop Abby’s character, and delay the meeting between Abby, Joel, and Ellie until much later in the games.
And without getting into big spoilers, they can always say the big twist with Joel and Abby’s character to the very end of the series, like Season 4, or Season 5, if they want to. However many seasons they want to go. So that’s probably what they mean when they say they’re going to radically change the plot of the second game for The Last Of Us Season 2, season 3, and beyond.
More Infected In The Last Of Us Season 2
For those that complained about this, they also confirmed that season two would have way more infected in different kinds of Infected, which is meant to be a reference to the other stages of the Infected and types of infection that you run into in the games.
Stage one is meant to be the runners. Stage two, or the stalkers, after a little bit of time, has gone by. After more time goes by, they develop into Clickers. And then the most powerful stage that we saw was stage four, the Blotters, which we saw back in episode 5.
When they were teasing the other types of infected, they were talking mostly about Shamblers, which are stage 4, which become more powerful and harder to kill, and potentially stage 5, which is basically like the Rat King.
The Rat King is meant to be this amalgam of a bunch of different types of infected that kind of morph together and turn into a giant hybrid infected. Sort of like a transformer infected. He’s more like a boss-level character, so they will probably save him for much later in the series.
They said the main reason why there weren’t as many infected during season one as people were expecting is mostly that they said when they were writing the season, John and Ellie’s fight against the infected in the game, and those different parts felt ancillary or too extra for what was happening with the plot.
Well, they had a hard time justifying a lot of those fights during the episodes. So I think they heard a lot of fans’ complaints like, “wait a minute, they’re supposed to be infected, fungus all over the place. Why don’t we see more of that?” HBO is now taking that into consideration to include way more infected coming to season 2.
The Five-Year Time Jump
But during the five-year time jump, it’s meant to be a period of relative quiet safety in which Joel nurtures and raises Ellie. He pays off his reference earlier in the finale by teaching her how to play guitar. A lot of the songs that they play are cover songs featured in both games, which they also use during the Last of Us Season 1 episode.
During this time, Ellie keeps her immunity secret from everyone else in Tommy’s community. Tommy knows, but everybody else doesn’t know about it yet. She even winds up masking her bite mark with the tattoo. But it’s meant to be a good life over those next five years after the end of season one. She makes good friends like Dina and Jessie.
They add an Easter Egg quick cameo scene for Dina earlier, when they first visited Tommy’s settlement. Fans spotted this, and Neil Druckmann kind of confirmed it. He implied the girl peeking at Ellie, who she yells at because her social skills are non-existent at this point, is supposed to be Dina from later in the games.
Both Joel and Ellie spend a lot of time just working the regular odd jobs, helping protect the community from random Infected that show up in the area. There are Infected and fungi in the area, just not quite as many as you would expect in a large city.
Growing Distance Between Joel And Ellie
Joel continues to nurture his hobbies, like woodworking, wildlife, and guitar playing, trying to nurture Ellie’s interests, like outer space and dinosaurs. But slowly, more and more of a wedge grows between the two of them over Ellie’s perceived loss of her destiny, her grand purpose for existing in the Season one finale.
In an interview, while explaining about Ellie at the end of the Season, Bella Ramsay says that “Ellie knows deep down that Joel was not telling the truth to her, but she can’t let herself believe it. Ellie has a thot in mind that her only purpose in life hasn’t been fulfilled. And that destiny had been taken away from Ellie by Joel, the person that she very much loves and trusts the most. It’s too overwhelming for her.
So Ellie forces herself to believe Joel”. Ellie had assumed that the whole time during season one, she’d helped the Fireflies save the entire human race. And even during their initial escape, she had started to suspect everything that Joel told her about what happened wasn’t totally true.
And slowly, over time, that feeling begins to fester in her as she grows complacent and directionless with no sense of real purpose anymore. Like, what is she supposed to be doing? What is life going to be now that she doesn’t have a grand purpose anymore? She starts to probe him for more details and answers until finally, he admits everything he told her was a lie and why he did it.
You find out the year before the second game picks up about year four into the time jump, she went back to the Salt Lake City Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital herself to get her own answers about what happened and discovers the truth.
Joel winds up telling her the whole truth, and it destroys their relationship. Ellie doesn’t want anything to do with them anymore. But Joel continues to watch over her, still caring about her like a daughter, and he still believes what he did was best for her. All the single dads out there, like, “I believe in Joel. He did the right thing.”
Abby And The Washington Liberation Front
It’s after this that you meet the Abby Anderson character and the Washington Liberation Front, or the WLF. They had traveled 800 miles from Seattle to find Joel so that Abby could get revenge for him killing her father. The fireflies lead surgeon that he killed in the finale.
During a random winter storm at Tommy’s settlement, a herd of infected attack. In the chaos, Joel and Tommy wind up helping Abby without realizing who she is. Putting the man that she was trying to find right where she wanted him. Ellie finds them too late in having to witness what goes down, and it winds up being this big revenge arc for Ellie against Abby and her group.
So it’s at this point that the WLF, the Washington Liberation Front, and the Abby character become the main villains of the second game. And it is basically here where the plot of the second game just completely takes a left turn direction where fans just were completely flabbergasted. Like, “wait a minute, we were not expecting the game to take this direction. What’s going on?”
It is basically right at the beginning of the second game, like very little time goes by, then boom. So this is why I’m saying that HBO wants to change the plot dramatically of the second game. Like we don’t want one episode and then the show to completely just follow Bella Ramsey by herself.
The Downward Spiral Of Revenge In Last Of Season 2
Thematically, though, the whole second game is meant to be about the trauma of what Ellie is forced to witness and how it consumes her for the rest of the events of the games. It will probably be the third game, too, if they make the Last of Us 3, putting her and Abby on parallel arcs.
It takes Ellie to a very dark place, in the way that Joel was a very dark person at the beginning of the first season. And they try to use the story of the second game to show you how revenge often winds up destroying the very people who are seeking it. Like if you’re seeking revenge, dig two graves, one for the other person and one for yourself.
But the leaders of this other group, the WLF, which will probably wind up becoming one of the main antagonists of future seasons, are Isaac Dixon, Marcus Wilson, Luis Sanchez, and Jason Emma Patterson. And Isaac’s story is actually very similar to Kathleen and The Hunters, and he winds up being kind of a tyrant that the WLF holds up as a really awesome person that was able to get rid of FEDRA.
Because the WLF in the Seattle quarantine zone was successful, kind of like the hunters were in getting rid of FEDRA. Agents implied that the Isaac character was every bit as stabby, every bit as much of a tyrant as Kathleen was.
Starting Early In The Timeline
So they might do a season 2 and future seasons. It’s just starting earlier in that five-year time gap between the first and the second game to show more development, show more of Ellie’s relationship with these other characters like Jessie and Dina so that when they become bigger characters later in the story, fans care about them way more.
And so when the Abby character shows up in the story, people care about her way more too. And also, when the plot starts turning more around, Ellie versus Abby, if they do go in that direction eventually, fans will just care about it more. It won’t feel like a knee-jerk left turn.
Now, Craig Mazin himself talked about Seraphites. Again, some of you might not know this, but one of the factions, one of the most intriguing factions in The Last of Us universe is Seraphites, for me personally, and he said that they would be explored big time. They have to. Spoilers alert, but the war between WLF and Seraphites was so interesting.
However, my vengeance and thirst for revenge blinded me from enjoying any other part of the game. Because if you go in unbiased, the war between the two factions is fantastic. So that’s gonna be explored, of course, The Wolves and Jacksons and all that nasty stuff.
More Joel Time
It will be kind of like on Game of Thrones. If you follow the Jon Snow character, and a lot of these are the main characters for the first five seasons, then he dies at the end of season five, and he doesn’t come back, and they follow the Little Bear character, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, Why is the story following the Little Bear now?: HBO’s like, “no, no, we’re not going to do that.” They want to keep Pedro Pascal’s Joel character on the show as long as possible.
The other path they might be taking is they do pick up after the five-year time jump because Bella Ramsay, in real life, is actually about as old as Ellie is in the second game. It’s just that she still looks like a little girl, physically.
They could follow the plot of the second game very closely as they did during season one in the first game, but they just don’t do the big Joel, Abby Twist, and they leave that for the very end of the series. So that during season 2, season 3, you spend all this time traveling around with Ellie, but Pedro Pascal is Joel is with her.
Or they could substitute someone else for that big Joel Twist-like Tommy character. And they could always do something completely different with Abby playing a totally different role in the narrative, and she’s not the main villain in Season 2.
They created the Kathleen character out of whole cloth, out of nothing for the show. She wasn’t part of the games. They could do the same thing in season two with the Washington Liberation Front. Or they could delay their group and bring back the Hunters as more revenge villains in season 2 and replace some of the Abby storylines with more Hunters’ revenge stuff.
The Last Of Us Season 2 Release Date
In an Interview, Pedro Pascal himself revealed that the Season 2 filming could start as early as later this year, 2023. See, personally. I was thinking, you know, they’re just gonna sit on it, and it’s not gonna start on it that.
But it actually makes sense if they start picking it up at the end of 2023. They have a lot of time to write the story so they can start filming in winter coming this year. So we can have an early release date of 2024, which I am really happy about. I know it’s unlikely.
But when they started filming, I mapped out a timeline. When they started filming whilst they were filming, it took them a year and a half. It took a little bit over a year and a half to start the filming and premiere the first episode. So a year and a half.
If they follow the same structure of eight to 10 episodes per season, I can see it being a 10-episode season. So I think The Last Of Us Season 2 will be released at the start of 2025.
Killing The Main Character In A Different Way
Before I leave you guys, there might be a glimmer of hope. If you watch the making of the Last of Us, a lot of things that they added into the show, they said that it was in the original script and all that nasty stuff. If you look at the original plot for the Last of Us Part 2, we get to know about a different part of what Abby did well and how Abby’s character was written.
Basically, Abby would learn about Tommy and Joel’s settlement, and she would find out Joel is living and all that. She wouldn’t go on a killing spree this quick. She would plan her infiltration. She would get close to Joel romantically. OK, maybe romantically was never, you know, said. But she would get close to the concept art. Abby and Joel are like ridiculously close like this ain’t no father-daughter relationship.
And then she would get him into seclusion, and then she would do the deed. Not the deed that you are thinking of, but the deed of actually starting to torture. That torture would be far more brutal because Joel would never see it coming. Infiltrating, earning the trust of the community, getting close to Joel specifically, getting to know him… imagine the show is literally begging for that approach specifically.
If you can make be human, this is the only way to do it. Make her feel like thousand emotions as she, you know, executes her plan to seclude Joel from everyone and then kill him. Or at least try to, then torture and then kill him. I feel like we can explore Joel’s other side. The side that we never got to see in the games. Joel’s wife, maybe we could get a flashback towards that.
Let me know, though, if HBO says they’re going to radically change the plot of the second game for The Last Of Us Season 2 and the future seasons. What do you think they’re going to change about the plot?
Also Read: Last Of Us Season 1 Review (Spoiler Free): Near-Perfect Video Game Adaptation Till Now
