Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part II.
Whereas The Last of Us had a nice, neat, mostly linear storyline for Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin to faithfully adapt into the first season of their HBO TV series adaptation, the narrative of The Last of Us Part II presents more of a structural challenge. Mazin has said (via Deadline) that, while the first game was adapted into the first season, the second game has “quite a bit of story to tell” and will continue beyond the second season of the show. Not only is the scope of The Last of Us Part II much more vast and epic than its relatively contained predecessor; it tells its large-scale story in a uniquely nonlinear way. Figuring out how to turn that structure into one or more seasons of television will be the biggest challenge in adapting The Last of Us Part II.
There’s been some fan speculation that the HBO team will linearize the story of The Last of Us Part II and flesh out the Jackson years into one season and the Abby revenge storyline into the next season, but cutting back and forth between the two is what made the game so engaging. The opening scenes set up Ellie’s quest for revenge quickly, then the flashbacks provided new information about how her relationship with Joel had evolved during their years living with Tommy in Jackson. These flashbacks completely recontextualized Ellie’s crusade of vengeance, explaining that it was as much about her own regrets as it was about Abby. Telling that story in a straight line wouldn’t be as effective.
The Last of Us Part II picks up on the heels of the first game, with Joel and Ellie settling into their new lives in Jackson. Joel confesses the hospital massacre to Tommy and begins teaching Ellie how to play guitar, as he promised. Suddenly, there’s a four-year time jump and Joel and Ellie’s relationship is inexplicably strained. While Ellie and her girlfriend Dina go out on a patrol, Joel and Tommy rescue a stranger named Abby from a horde of infected. When Joel and Tommy return Abby to her group, they’re surprised to learn that Abby is the daughter of the Firefly surgeon that Joel killed to save Ellie, and she wants retribution. Ellie tracks down Joel just in time to witness Abby brutally murdering him with a golf club. While Abby spares Ellie’s life, Ellie swears to exact revenge.
What follows is a grueling three-day expedition into Seattle, where Ellie kills and tortures her way through Abby’s closest allies in her relentless pursuit of Abby. Just before the climactic horror of this three-day journey, the game flashes back to Ellie’s shocking discovery of what Joel did to protect her from the Fireflies, after which she refused to speak to him. This complicates her bid for revenge, because there was once a time when she hated Joel. Then, back in the present, Ellie’s hideout is ambushed by Abby. After this jaw-dropping twist, the game retells all three days in Seattle from the perspective of Abby. Taking Abby’s perspective forces the player to empathize with her as they learn about her friendships with all the people Ellie is about to kill, and Abby protects a young boy named Lev, a dynamic reminiscent of Joel and Ellie in the first game. By the time Abby’s ambush on Ellie’s group comes back around, the player understands where she’s coming from.
This is where structuring the TV show might get complicated. Viewers who aren’t directly engaged with the on-screen action, like video game players are, might not go along with three or four whole episodes with no sign of Ellie. Rather than following all three days with Ellie and then all three days with Abby, perhaps the show could build tension by cutting between the two. Nora can be seen helping Abby just before she’s tortured by Ellie for Abby’s location. Keeping Ellie and Abby’s Seattle days separate would make it easier to split the bulk of the game into two seasons. Abby’s attack at the theater would make a perfect season 2 cliffhanger, but then spending the majority of season 3 with Abby might rub some viewers the wrong way.
Picking the right moments for the flashbacks might be tricky if the Seattle narrative is getting jumbled up, but it’s important to feature those flashbacks, and it’s important to feature them as flashbacks in the midst of the grisly revenge story, because they serve to remind the audience of who Ellie was before her narrow-minded vendetta took over, and why she’s fighting so hard to avenge Joel. The flashback to Ellie’s birthday, when Joel brought his surrogate daughter to a science museum, took her to a replica of a space capsule, and played a cassette tape of a rocket launch so she could experience her dream of going to space, is a timely reminder of how much Joel loved Ellie, and the lengths he’d go to make her happy. Even the flashback level in which Tommy teaches Ellie how to use a sniper rifle is integral to the context of the story, because it foreshadows the infamous reveal that the sharpshooter tormenting Abby and Manny on the highway is Tommy all along. These flashback levels could make up entire episodes of the next couple of seasons of The Last of Us, much like the “Left Behind” episode functioned as its own standalone love story.
The most important flashback is the very last one that players see when Ellie returns from her futile rampage of revenge to find her home empty and tries and fails to play Joel’s guitar with her broken fingers. This flashback shows the night before Joel’s death, a dance at Jackson, an event that was heavily discussed throughout the game but not shown until the end. It reveals that after Joel and Ellie’s argument, Ellie went to visit Joel and told him that she hadn’t yet forgiven him, but that she was willing to forgive him. This is the final piece of the puzzle, explaining why Ellie was so determined to avenge Joel. She was as furious at herself as she was at Abby, because she began her journey towards forgiving Joel but she never got to actually forgive him.
The whole Santa Barbara epilogue, with Ellie reluctantly leaving Dina and her baby behind to pursue Abby and contending with the Rattlers, could be a season of its own, albeit with a reduced episode count of maybe five or six installments. Whatever Druckmann and Mazin have in store for their adaptation of The Last of Us Part II, after they stuck the landing with the first game in season 1, there’s reason to have faith in them. They’ve wisely assembled a writers’ room for season 2 after tackling all scripting duties for season 1 between the two of them, so they’ve got a few other creative minds to bounce ideas off. Bringing The Last of Us Part II to the screen as a serialized TV series will be a much larger undertaking than the first game, but the source material is so close to perfect that the more faithful they are to the game, the better.