Wasn’t last night’s The Last of Us just devastating?” That’s the sort of question HBO’s hit post-apocalyptic series seems intent on courting, week in and week out. The latest episode – the fifth of its misery-packed second season – continued its headlong plummet into grimness and depravity, as Ellie (Bella Ramsey) hunts for Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in a mission of bloody vengeance. This week, that mission takes her to a Seattle hospital, where she finds and tortures Abby’s acquaintance Nora (Tati Gabrielle). Devastating? Perhaps. But I suspect many viewers will finish the episode with a different question: “Who?”
To be clear, this is no discredit to Gabrielle, who has done nothing wrong in the small snatches of screen time she’s had thus far. But episode five places a whole lot of narrative significance on her, all of a sudden. As Ellie takes a rusty pipe to her foe-of-the-moment, it is Nora we are invited to sympathise with, whose raw, scared humanity fills the screen. Looked at in isolation, it seems like a strange decision to pull focus from Ellie at this point. It’s hard to really give a damn about this new character, so little have we seen of her.
Now, as anyone familiar with the series’ source material – the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II – will know, there’s method behind the madness. It is a case of delayed-release storytelling: only later down the line will the true impact of Nora’s character, and her seemingly imminent death, be felt.
In the game, this works a treat. The Last of Us Part II has a two-act structure: the first follows Ellie (Ashley Johnson in the game) over the course of three days in dilapidated Seattle, then the second doubles back on itself and re-examines the same three days from the perspective of Abby (Laura Bailey). This is the meat of the game, bookended by an introduction and lengthy coda. And it works very effectively: characters we meet in the first half as villains or victims of Ellie’s campaign of violence are fleshed out and recontextualised in the back half. (Nora being one such character.) It’s a successful exercise in changing perspective and the subversion of sympathies.
While it’s impossible to say exactly what will happen in the Last of Us TV show going forward, we are by now deep into “educated guess” territory. With just two instalments remaining of season two (one of which will be a standalone side-story focusing on a character played by Joe “Joey Pants” Pantoliano), it’s all but confirmed that the season will climax with the end of the “Ellie” section, saving the “Abby” go-around for season three. The problem, for the TV show’s creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, boils down to the logistics of contemporary TV production.
The Last of Us Part II was released in one single chunk – a story that could be experienced front to back as quickly as desired. If you played the game for an hour each day, you would finish the whole thing within a month. With the TV version, however, there will be a yawning chasm between the two sections. Two years passed between the first and second seasons of The Last of Us; it’s reasonable to expect that viewers will have to wait roughly as long – at least – between the second and third. (Inter-season gaps of a year or more are now commonplace in TV; that the series is such an effects-laden “blockbuster” undertaking will only compound matters.)
There’s nothing wrong with waiting, of course, but it leaves The Last of Us season two as a bit of a curious object in the meantime. We’ve got the set-up but no punchline, the Pledge but not the Turn. The ambition of its structure actively works against the fundamentals of clear and compelling storytelling. Today we’ll show you what happened; come back in 2027 to find out why you should care. Maybe there’s an admirable long-sightedness to this – TV created with one eye fixed on the bigger picture. But for those of us living in the now? You can’t help but feel something’s missing.
‘The Last of Us’ streams on Sky and NOW in the UK, with new episodes every Monday
