The Last of Us Season 2 Premiere Review – There’s Something Off About Ellie

For a show that will focus on its second protagonist in its second season, HBO‘s The Last of Us is making her incredibly unlikeable so far. There’s something off about Ellie in this second season opener, and it’s been seriously bugging me. Unlike her game counterpart, the show’s Ellie is more mouthy, insolent, obnoxious, bratty, reckless, and frankly, foolish to an alarming degree.

Yes, I’m aware that the writing for her character is similar to the first season – it doesn’t mean I didn’t have my opinions about them. Rather, I thought they were rather appropriate for a 14-year-old who went through, let’s be honest, serious trauma.

But, after five years, I would have expected Ellie to have toned it down a little and gained some maturity. Yet, she has stagnated, which is not ideal for character development. In the Season 2 premiere of The Last of Us, she mouths off to multiple characters (all of whom are older and in positions of authority), insists on being sent out on patrol, ignores the safety rules and instructions of her captain, and enters an abandoned building inhabited by the Infected without really doing a proper recon of how infested the place is.

Well, I guess if we rely on Dina’s ‘super hearing’, she confirmed there were only two. Guess what, there was a lone Runner in the basement. Oops? Then, while alone and stuck with the Runner, she decided to confront it (“Come at me!” she screams) only to realise later that it had some level of intelligence. That’s two strikes for her.

It’s just so uncharacteristic of the Ellie we know from The Last of Us. While in both mediums, Ellie acts like an angry, rebellious teen because of an undisclosed conflict with Joel – which I shall avoid giving details on – the game’s Ellie would not have unilaterally put people at risk.

Immune as she might be to the most direct consequence of bull-rushing an Infected, the broader repercussions of her brash behaviour potentially harm the community as a whole – something I feel video-game Ellie didn’t stand for. Perhaps this is intentional, allowing us to see the stark contrast in her character after a pivotal moment that will likely occur in the next episode. One can hope.

Now that I’m done with the weakest link in the season 2 premiere, how about the episode as a whole? To kick things off, this is a high-quality episode of television. Let’s get this out of the way. The Last of Us, whether in terms of acting or production quality, is one of the best we have now

The casting is also quite spot-on for the new batch of characters, namely Abby’s crew, though I still have reservations about Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey as Joel and Ellie respectively. In terms of their looks, though, not their acting.

I applaud the decision to start the episode with the immediate aftermath of Joel’s slaughter in the Firefly headquarters. Apart from the key scene where he promised Ellie that he was telling the truth (in case you still don’t know what their falling out was about), we also see a new scene of Abby and her crew standing around the graves of their fallen comrades talking about how she’s going to hunt Joel and kill him slowly.

The latter felt like a response to the backlash to the video game, where fans were unceremoniously dropped into Abby’s perspective and forced to play her story to understand her motives for almost half the game. Structurally, it makes more sense and sets the groundwork for viewers while still preserving a mystery – who is she avenging?

The inclusion of Joel’s therapy scene was a nice touch, though I was hoping that this means we’ll get to see a different side to Joel in The Last of Us. Alas, Craig Mazin’s steadfast commitment to keeping the reason behind Joel and Ellie’s falling out a mystery (which I have no idea why when it’s so obvious) makes this scene weaker than its video game counterpart for Joel.

This scene seems to be replacing the opening scene of the game where Joel confesses to Tommy the truth behind Ellie’s rescue at the Fireflies headquarters. Both scenes ended with Joel saying firmly, “I saved her”, leaving viewers to ponder what they can honestly believe.

In the show, however, Joel evades the truth completely, despite the blatant nudging by his psychotherapist, Gail (played to perfection by Catherine O’Hara). The only interesting thing that this scene sets up is that Joel isn’t without his failings, thus setting expectations for viewers not to have this unwavering and fervent love for our aged anti-hero.

Gail openly admits to Joel that she hates him for killing her husband Eugene (a nice nod to a throwaway character in the game who grows weed – wink wink) even though she knows he had to do it. “And now, maybe there’s a chance I can make things right with you,” she tells Joel. This also appears to be a reflection of the conflicts that have surrounded Joel thus far. People aren’t talking about it, making it impossible to right the wrongs, which will eventually end in tragedy.

Joel and Ellie. Joel and Abby.

The video game’s flaw, in my opinion, was that it was too heavy-handed and indulgent in its delivery of the message that violence is bad and results in a vicious circle. Neil Druckmann, who co-created the video game franchise, and Mazin seem to be taking a different approach this time by showing, not telling.

Let’s just hope that the same fate doesn’t befall The Last of Us as a TV show.