The Last of Us: Predicting Season 2

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This article contains full spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2. If you have not played the game and want to remain spoiler-free for HBO’s TV show stop reading now!

HBO’s The Last of Us has been an undeniably successful television adaptation of the beloved Naughty Dog game. Now the challenge for creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin will be how to tackle the emotionally complicated beast that is The Last of Us Part 2. So, I’ve (perhaps foolishly) had a go at planning out the show’s second season and sketching a rough outline of what could happen in each episode.

The video game sequel is over twice as long as its predecessor, so cramming it all into one more season of TV seems like a bit of a stretch to me, so let’s assume this is going to be a story told over two. Alongside issues of length, there’s also no doubt that Part 2 is in need of more of a tinkering with than the mostly straight adaptation that was Part 1. Despite being a masterpiece in my eyes, Part 2 relies more heavily on gameplay and the involuntary nature of your actions to get its point across, which is inherently not viable in a TV show. But through some minor restructuring of the story and a liberal use of flashbacks, I think there could be an effective way of telling the layered and divisive tale.

The key will undoubtedly be in how season two opens and deals with the story’s inciting incident, as well as keeping the viewer connected to the plot’s two leads - Ellie and Abby. My best idea on how to do this is to make Abby – a character largely unexplored until the game’s second half – more integral to the story during its Ellie-led first half by creating a pre-existing bond between them. Abby could infiltrate the Jackson community and befriend Joel in the