There'll Come A Time

I preface this as someone who thought The Last of Us Part II was brilliant, but I really did not enjoy this second season of the tv show. I always thought that this would be a hard adaptation because the impact of the game is in its interactivity. It’s a relatively simple story - let’s explore the cycle of vengeance and what it means to break out of it, so it’s really the experience of being forced to play as your perceived antagonist and coming around to the other side that makes that game.

While I know the tv adaptation would need to cut a lot of gameplay mechanics like combat and traversal sequences, post-episode 2 (when *that* event happens) the show slogs into a lot of walking and talking. So much so that I had non-gamer friends asking if the game was just a ton a walking because they were bored to tears. Fundamentally, these seven episodes have major pacing issues, so no wonder non-gamers felt whiplash at the coda of this season’s finale.

I also find the show, while clearly produced at the highest levels with a wonderful cast, just way over-explanatory. Maybe this is exacerbated for me because I was also watching Andor concurrently, and that show definitely works on the edges of subtlety and doesn’t handhold its audience. I think there’s this fear of letting characters and their motivations be murky and having the audience sit in that ambiguity. I understand there’s a concern with having an audience sit with things for two/three years before the next season (that’s another rant on the timeline of “tv” production for another time), but I kind of think that’s better than just point blank feeding them information.

Here’s ultimately the thing: The Last of Us is super cinematic to begin with, it’s lauded because it’s a strong narrative. Season one of the show gave some hope with the Bill and Frank episode that there was room around that narrative to tell other stories within the same world. TLOU2 is all about playing with narrative structure; flashbacks are deployed strategically for impact at specific parts of the game…it doesn’t really work to shuffle around the same pieces in a different order, while also being fastidiously attached to some things being one-to-one recreations. Also, tv Ellie is quite different from game Ellie in ways I don’t think any other character in this adaptation appears different to their game counterpart…to the point where I kind of wonder why the essence of this character seems so misinterpreted or intentionally changed.