Returning to The Last of Us

You can, for the moment, still listen to Waypoint's two-part spoilercast for The Last of Us: Part II. You'll need more than a minute—it's six hours.

On Sunday night, the second season of HBO's adaptation of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us continues, this time turning its attention to the deeply popular and deeply controversial sequel, Part II.

The reviews have been, so far, glowing.

However you feel about Part II, there are reasons to be pop culture curious about this adaptation. How long will it take until they reach The Moment? You know the one, if you've played the game. How will they handle the split narrative? Will the season really stay so damn bleak?

Much to consider, which is what got Patrick and Rob chatting.

Note: We do not spoil The Last of Us: Part II in this conversation.

Patrick: Hey Rob, I have no idea if you’re going to be watching the premiere of the second season of The Last of Us on HBO, which starts on Sunday. I genuinely can’t remember if you ended up watching the end of the first season or not? That season, all told, was a solid and occasionally spectacular adaptation of an excellent game that itself borrowed a lot from movies and TV. Did it feel a bit like a layup? Sure. But it was a kick ass layup, to extend the metaphor.

The Last of Us: Part II game came out at a weird time—for me, for everyone. It was the first COVID summer, my youngest was only a few months old, and my wife and I were back at work, swapping mornings and afternoons to try and squeeze in enough time to say we somehow accomplished something in-between poorly running an in-home daycare for two young children.

Yet, I found enough time to play 20+ hours of The Last of Us: Part II, a game that was both thrilling (the semi-open downtown Seattle area was/is tremendous and I wish the whole game had been structured like that) and distressing (two dozen hours of endless, brutal violence).

The moment I cannot stop chuckling at is finishing the game and hopping on a spoilercast with you, Polygon’s Maddy Myers, 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg, and breaking down our experience with the game. A proposed two-hour podcast became something like six hours, with both Emanuel and myself having to drop out of the call due to personal obligations. You and Maddy, however, kept going, and we later had to split the podcast, ironically, into two parts.

I have blacked out my experience playing that game. I was not in a good mental space for it at the time, and I’ve given what happened during those 20+ hours little thought in the years since.

With the new season, though, I’m tempted to go back. I’m not convinced I’ll have a “hey, actually” moment, but the feeling I’ve been left with since you and I played the PS5 update to the original game—which we both liked, and I nearly got around to playing through the entire game all over again—was “man, was it really possible for me to do such a 180 on that series?”

I’m fascinated by the choices the creatives might make with the TV show, too. If you just adapted the game, ignoring the inherent structural challenges, would anyone watch that?

Rob: I think people would watch it and think it’s profound for many of the reasons that a lot of people loved the second game and thought it was profound. One of the defining products of our culture in this era, maybe the defining product, is juvenile or adolescent cultural obsessions being treated with utmost seriousness, usually signified by sex and graphic violence. I’d like to think the tide has gone out on that a little bit, but I would not be surprised if we were soon awash in think pieces about how the second season of The Last of Us is raising trenchant questions about tribal or partisan thinking, or exploring real-world tragedies through the lens of a classic revenge western disguised as a zombie horror TV show. And I stand by thinking, that I think Emanuel and Maddy broadly shared, which is that mostly the things The Last of Us 2 had to say were insipid things, in response to shallow, unconsidered questions.