Entertainment of the second season of The Last of Us: The bad omen begins

This post contains spoilers from this week’s episode The Last of Uswhich is now available on Max.

When the second season of The Last of Us It starts, we return exactly to the point where Joel and Ellie They stopped, lying to her about what happened while she was unconscious. Ellie does not believe him, but also needs to believe, because he is the Joel And she is the Ellieand all they have is each other. So she forces herself to accept something that clearly knows it’s a lie. Then the action returns to Salt Lake City, where we see a group of survivors from Vagalons swearing Joel at any cost. As the leader of this small group says, Abby (Kaitlyn Duty): “When we kill him, it will be slow.”

When we enter the opening credits it seems that perhaps the plan is to keep the plot on this line of the approximate timeline. Although two years have passed in the real world, Bella Ramsey It doesn’t look much older (it helps the fact that they are already in the late adolescence while playing a 14 -year -old girl), so it would be possible to maintain. But it is not where the second game goes (**), and therefore is not the way that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann

chose for the second season. At least in the press copies, the opening sequence is the same as the previous season, which is disappointing. It is part of a recent plague in TV series openings (

The Lord of the Rings: the rings of power It is another great example), which consist only of long and slow CGI montages with dark music. It’s not interesting to see more than once (if so much), and says little about the series. Either create something engaging, or simply use a quick title card and leave the credits after the episode.(**) To remember: These summaries are being written by someone who has never played either game. I know this season is widely faithful to the first half of

The Last of Us Part II But I am approaching everything purely as a TV series, and not analyzing what is consistent with the game. Instead, we have advanced five years in time (which means the series now takes place in the future). Joel and Elliereturned to Jackson to stay with TommyMaria, their son, Benjy and a community that grows and apparently thrives every day. Joel seems to have left his days of action hero backwards, now using his contractor skills to help with the city’s infrastructure. (His hair is more gray, and he wears reading glasses to work.) Ellie He is 19 years old and is a constant presence on patrols, with a new partner in the killing of zombies: his best friend and evident Crush,Dina( Isabela Merced ). She is having a great time with this, and also receiving combat training withJesse( Young Mazino ), Dina’s boyfriend, with whom she lives a yo -yo relationship – but

Ellie He wants to have as little as possible to do with Joel, for reasons we can suppose, but we still don’t know for sure. For much of the debut, this is the main conflict – and mystery. We have some clues here and there, especially when Joel goes to a therapy session withGail( Catherine O’Hara excellent in a sober and dramatic paper, quite different from what you usually do). He regrets being closer to Dina than his own fake daughter, commenting that Dina It treats him like a nice guy, “and I am.” A type of self -delay needed to continue working after committing mass murder against people whose “crime” was to try to find a cure for the plague that devastated the world. Gail tries to encourage you to say aloud what you did and what hurts so much Ellie – and

Pedro Pascal It continues to show how much you can express with small facial changes, while we see Joel’s face squirming lightly under the interrogation – but all he admits is, “I didn’t hurt her. I saved her.” Even if she didn’t want to be saved that way – which, at some deep level, Joel knows, but can’t admit. He cannot admit that he condemned the world to feel better. The determination of Joel in being the unreserved protector of Ellie remains a lesser extent when, later in the episode, he catches a homophobic resident of the city,Seth( Robert John Burke ), rebuking Ellie and Dina for kissing a New Year’s ball and using a lesbophobic insult. Joelintervenes, as always, and drops Seth what only does

Ellie Being even more embarrassed and upset – both for what happened and, at some level, understand what it symbolizes about Salt Lake City. While Ellie and Tommy They kill infected with a precision rifle in a previous scene, he complains that she can’t stop talking loudly about her immunity to Cordyceps And jokes: “I swear, you and my brother are the same damn person.” But we don’t know how Joel was in adolescence. And, however stubborn than Elliethat is, she is still young and in emotional development, and her defenses fall completely when it comes to her uncontrollable attraction for Dina . It looks like TV vibrates whenever Ellie Look at her, and Ramsey rarely interpreted the character as vulnerable as when Ellie and Dina They are physically close. The most romantic behavior of Dina At the ball it happens when she already drank too much, and the moment is immediately ruined by Seth and Joel acting like idiots – which makes it even harder to

Ellie Understanding how real that kiss was. And even more worsens the fact that Joel got into this confusing moment for her.But despite the emotions on the flower of the skin of Ellie she and Dina They form an excellent – although easily distracted (and fun) – double when facing the infected ones. Things do not go as planned when the two enter an abandoned store, since

Ellie It falls through a rotten ground to a lower level and finds an infected… intelligent. Or at least, able to strategically hunt, rather than just pursuing anything you hear. And if this is not an isolated case, it represents a huge problem for the remains of humanity – most people survived with a mixture of luck and intelligence to overcome these unique mind creatures. More for the end of the episode, we see that the Cordyceps He infiltrated the pipes of the construction site that Joel was supervising, suggesting that even relatively safe places are not really safe. To emphasize this, the episode ends with the revelation that the group of

Abby Finally found his target and is very close to Jackson. During much of the debut, Jackson looks as close to the possible paradise in a post-apocalyptic world. But this is not a series – and Joel and

Ellie They are not people – made to paradise. Problems have always been coming after them. And they have arrived. Text originally published in