In Season 2, ‘The Last of Us’ chooses human drama over fungal zombies

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This story contains the destroyers of the first season of “The Last of Us”.

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This proves that the unusual terrain “Our Last” has shed light on its first season to be the exact opposite of the cliff boom. Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is the arrogant teenager, Pedro Pascal (Pedro Pascal) charged with sending to the Firefly Lab in Salt Lake City at the beginning of the series, asking Joel to swear his story about their escape is true. He swears is. She said it was okay, but she looked troublesome. Rolling credits.

For video game-based series, the Cordyceps epidemic turns humans into fungal zombies, with the final beat (usually set on TV this season, which is surprisingly quiet and fungal-free. The bet is greater than the existence of interpersonal relationships. Tensions like this come from the fact that both protagonists are lying.

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It’s a fun small-scale button for the season that covers the world crash as we know it. This suggests that the new season will focus on whether Ellie believes Joel’s lies and the consequences if not. At least at first, this seems a bit weird or myopic. The bond Ellie developed with Joel in her first season was undoubtedly important, but their dynamics seemed odd – whatever each other meant to each other, could outperform questions about the survival of the species.

The analysis between personal feelings and the more general problem is more or less the content of Season 2, which covers a part of “The Last Part of Us,” a co-creation of the game Neil Druckmann and Halley Druckmann and Halley Gross as a sequel to “The Last Part of Us.”

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The new installment premiered on HBO on Sunday, five years after a freight conversation between Ellie and Joel. The couple is now safely ingrained in Jackson, Wyoming — Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) host a functional and democratic community. Stabilization brings the two protagonists together through trauma and disaster, enough space and calmness to make Joel’s lies annoy. Ellie, 19, has moved out of their house and entered the garage. She and Joel (now in their 60s) both spent time patrolling the “infected” perimeter, but rarely together. Ellie’s immunity remains a secret, hanging out (and hunting) with people closer to his age, including her coach Jesse (Young Mazino), one of the town’s promising future leaders, and his live/departure/departure girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced).

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Joel’s suffering in increasing distances between them makes him even try to see a therapist played by an unparalleled Catherine O’Hara. She despises Joel – barter consultation for drugs – next to this point (although it’s fun to watch O’Hara shrugging casually). Introspection is a luxury, and “Our Last” reopens a slightly desperate world where there is shrinking and violence is an option rather than a necessity.

That fragile peace feels precious, but it’s in trouble. Jackson is functionally a border settlement. Druckman’s experience of growing up in Israel, the paradox of Season 2 is broad. (Druckmann co-created the series with Craig Mazin.) While discussing his inspiration for Tlou II Part II (game), he describes watching two Israeli soldiers who were lynched in 2000 who wanted to destroy those responsible and later – for a while – for a while – for a while – for a while to cover up the idea of ​​murder “Gross and Guilty”. “I got on the idea of ​​this emotional, and during the game we can make you feel this intense hatred, like unconditional love is universal?” Drucker said. “This kind of annoying person feels the same universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in a way that makes the person you love suffer.”

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It’s hard to say whether the series will achieve this (I haven’t played the game). Mazin and Druckmann split the second part in multiple seasons, and this season feels incomplete compared to the last season. It has a part of the dysplasia feeling. While we briefly encounter some of the roles that will be important, including Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and Mel (Ariela Barer), their roles (and the functions and ideologies of various other groups) remain hazy.

Jackson knows it well, by contrast. The same goes for Ellie’s role in it. She is training hard, trying to seek more responsibility, and having a lot more fun than being a member of the community. If you are upset about her filming and obsessed with the joy of distant infections, it is the performance, designed to enhance the discomfort that most of us feel in the Season 1 finale.

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“Our Last” has been invested in resensitizing the audience to make it a number of Apocalypse (and zombie) stories. Joel’s massacre at the hospital at the end of the first season could have been shot as a great action clip. no. But, lengthy, ugly and full of direct, irrefutable evidence that the moral grey hero you have always been rooted in is a very effective mass shooter. His decision to save a child he learned to care about is reshaped into horrible selfishness and love. In saving a man whom he values, he also deprived all mankind of the latest hope for healing.

The questions Joel chose to raise were mainly philosophical in the first season. In this, they are practical. The sequel to the first game famously refuses to consider video game casualties as non-player characters because he insists that (some) people who kill people casually (some of them) have their own network and love their own stories and may want to take revenge. Joel’s rampage in Salt Lake City may theoretically be justified, as he adores Ellie, and Fireflies killed her without her consent. The show adopts that logic, and the audience may undoubtedly accept it and prove that it works just as well on the other side. Throughout the game and throughout the series, enter Ellie’s main opponent, Kaitlyn Dever.

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I wouldn’t say Abby is afraid to ruin certain plot points, but also because her presence this season is rather trivial (and disappointingly). The season has fulfilled its promise of a Season 1 finale, which is carried out by troubled interpersonal dynamics. Much of this story revolves around Ellie’s growing relationship with Dina and Jesse (Mazino), who you might know from “Beef” that her anger at Joel was to rescue her. By saving her life, he deprived her of the sense of purpose she desperately needed.

The way “Our Last” gently unravels the target needs becomes a problem, but it’s not a perfect season. It really doesn’t feel like a season. So much shadow, unexplored or unresponsive, that the ending feels more than the end (though I’ve read the game’s story where it finally arrives makes sense. Even fungus, despite some spectacular battles, feels a little alongside this point. But if it’s a 14-episode season, then these seven might be really good tables for the legendary ambitious narrative experiment of the second game, most of which are still going on.

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Our last Sunday night premiered on HBO and Max and then aired weekly.

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