The Last of Us is back on our screens with a bang. Once again, we’re back in the world of Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal), two survivors in a world where a mutated fungus has reduced most of the population to zombies.
Surprisingly, though, most of the threat comes from other humans. As the show moves on from that gut-punch episode two finale, the future for Ellie, and the other survivors, seems rocky. Where will they go next, and what will Ellie do?
Well, there is a roadmap in the form of the video games. The Last of Us 2 was an award-winning game before it was a TV show, and while a lot of the original source material has been carried over (that fight Ellie has in the supermarket, for instance), the showrunners have made some tweaks to the world we all know and love.
Here are the biggest differences so far.
The pipe
The first episode shows us that a broken old pipe that runs underneath the town of Jackson is actually full of Cordyceps fungus.
Why are we bothered? Well, while the fungus doesn’t infect anybody, it does seem to work as some kind of radar or scouting system for the hordes of infected, who then converge on Jackson for an epic battle.
The showrunners — Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann — have spoken about how they chose to swap the game’s fungus spreading via spores for a mycelium network, in part so that the cast don’t have to act inside gas masks.
Tragically, if Jackson hadn’t been working to expand to take in more refugees and dug up that pipe, they might never have alerted the horde.
The therapy
Joel goes to therapy? Well, not in the video games, but in the show, absolutely. It does kind of make sense — after all, the man is severely traumatised — but the opening episodes use Joel’s chats with Gail (Catherine O’Hara) to examine why there might be a rift in the relationship between him and Ellie.
It’s also a good chance to underline that Joel’s a killer: we find out that Gail resents Joel for coldly exterminating her husband Eugene, who bit the dust off-screen. In the games, it seems like he died of natural causes; here, it looks like he might have gotten infected.
The attack on Jackson
Even though it’s not the main focus of the episode, watching masses of infected zombies attack Jackson is still a pretty epic sight.
This didn’t happen at all in the games — the confrontation entirely took place in the mountains around the town — but it plays a vital role in getting Joel to lower his guard enough to trust the strangers that he’s run into.
Desperate to get back to town to help his friends, he ends up telling Abby’s friends his real name, and trusting them more than he should. As a result, he ends up dead. With Jackson now in crisis, who will be free to take revenge?
Joel’s fate
Sorry to be the bearers of bad news — but Joel does still bite the dust at the end of episode two, courtesy of Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). However, the circumstances of his death are slightly different. In the games, Abby is saved from a rampaging zombie horde by Joel and his brother Tommy, who are both out on patrol together.
In the show, Dina has gone out with Joel on patrol instead, and it’s Dina who accidentally gives away Joel’s real name, thereby alerting Abby to the fact that her intended target is right in front of her.
When the pair make it to the snowy hideout of Abby’s gang, the final confrontation between Joel and Abby is different, too. In the games, Abby essentially beats Joel to death with a golf club, smashing his head in after a few hours of torture. And while Tommy is shot in the leg during this confrontation, Dina is knocked out with an anaesthetic.
Rooting for Abby
In the game, Abby is introduced as a stone-cold killer. We see her trying to hunt down Joel, but she doesn’t really explain her motivations all that much. As a result, we’re naturally going to root for Joel and Ellie, and his death is a shock twist from the jump.
In the show, the writers seem to have made an effort to make her character a lot more nuanced from the beginning. Rather than simply beating and torturing Joel and Tommy, Abby tells Joel the reason she’s doing it — because Joel brutally killed her Firefly father in his attempts to save Ellie’s life at the end of season one.
After a bit of back and forth, Joel tells her to “Just shut the f**k up and do it already.” She does — driving the point of a broken golf club through Joel’s head and killing him. A clean death, unlike in the games. Small mercies.
Plus, if you were wondering why Dever wasn’t as hench as the Abby of the games — that’s intentional.
“Abby was meant to play more like Joel in that she's almost like a brute in the way she can physically manhandle certain things,” Neil Druckmann told Entertainment Weekly about the character’s in-game appearance.
“That doesn't play as big of a role in this version of the story because there's not as much violent action moment to moment. It's more about the drama.”
The Last of Us Season 2 is streaming now on Sky Atlantic and NOW
