The Last of Us Season 2 is an excellent follow-up that makes some smart changes

The first season of The Last of Us was pleasantly surprising.

Besides most live-action video game adaptations being poor, Chernobyl‘s Craig Mazin and The Last of Us co-creator Neil Druckmann offered a faithful take on that classic post-apocalyptic zombie tale while also making some meaningful changes. While adaptations that tell wholly original stories like Arcane and Fallout still appeal to me more, I came out of HBO’s The Last of Us pretty impressed.

Now, two years later, the second season of the hit drama series is here, and I’ve been able to watch all seven episodes. On the whole, it’s just as well-made as the first season thanks to more strong writing, fantastic performances, impeccable production design and more smart source material deviations, although some parts of the narrative structure prove a bit frustrating this time around.

*Note: This is a spoiler-free review of both The Last of Us Season 2 and The Last of Us Part II video game.*

Before I get any further, though, I should mention that it’s rather difficult to talk about this season in any great detail without major spoilers. Those who have played the divisive The Last of Us Part II PlayStation game upon which Season 2 is based will know what I’m talking about.

In spoiler-free terms, though, it picks up five years after the events of Season 1, with Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Bella Ramsey (Ellie) living in Jackson, the town of survivors run by Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna). Joel and Ellie have a strained relationship at this point, the reasons for which are explored throughout the season, and it makes for a particular narrative highlight. However, their relatively peaceful life in Jackson is upended after a traumatic event that sets Ellie on a dangerous journey to Seattle.

That last part is important to highlight because part of why The Last of Us Season 2 is so controversial is that it’s real dark — more so, even, than the first season. In fact, some people even criticized The Last of Us Part II for being “misery porn” — an often excessively bleak story about the cycles of violence in which every character suffers immensely. It’s here, though, that The Last of Us Season 2 really shows its strengths as an adaptation. While the spirit and general plot beats of the game’s story are preserved, there are many smaller but meaningful tweaks that refine these themes to be more impactful.

Isabela Merced (left) as Dina and Bella Ramsey (right) as Ellie.

Nowhere is that more evident than Ellie herself. In the game, she becomes a rather unlikeable character as she’s consumed with rage, and it can make it difficult to invest in her story. This is another reason why the casting of Ramsey — who has sadly been the source of criticism online for not resembling Ellie in the game — really works well.

Ramsey’s inherent youthful innocence brings out Ellie’s innate humanity and, therefore, makes her descent into darkness this season more impactful. Her endearing ebullience is still there at her core, but it’s constantly threatened to be extinguished by her pain, and it makes for a compelling character arc that Ramsey plays wonderfully. Ellie also spends a lot of time with her love interest, Dina (Isabela Merced), and the chemistry between Ramsey and Merced is infectious.

It also helps that the show significantly tones down the often gratuitous violence of the game. The Last of Us Part II, by virtue of being an action experience, had countless sequences in which Ellie, through astounding gameplay mechanics, would have to stab and shoot her way through tons of enemies, including even dogs. Naturally, this only created a disconnect between Ellie and some players. The Last of Us Season 2, however, avoids much of this barbarity to ensure that the moments of intense violence that do come feel more poignant and in service of the characters and themes.

Pedro Pascal as Joel.

On the whole, there’s no single Season 2 episode that deviates quite as heavily as last season’s standout Bill and Frank offshoot, but instead, the changes are more evenly spread throughout this time around. A special shoutout in this regard should be given to a brand-new character named Gail, a cynical therapist played by Toronto’s own Catherine O’Hara. Her addition to the story is a brilliant one, giving the more pensive Joel an outlet for his feelings and allowing Pascal to continue to show his dazzling range as he conveys the steely stoicism betraying underlying tender vulnerability.

That said, the story of The Last of Us Season 2 does suffer in comparison to the game due to some key structural differences. For the sake of anyone who hasn’t played The Last of Us Part II, I’ll just say that it was split into two decidedly distinct main acts, followed by a prolonged epilogue, of sorts, to bring them together. On top of that, this was a nearly 25-hour narrative that played around with non-linearity and multiple character perspectives, versus the pretty straightforward roughly 15-hour original game that was fully covered in the first season.

I won’t spoil how The Last of Us Season 2 draws from all of that material, but suffice it to say that it was always going to be an ambitious undertaking — so much so that Mazin has suggested that as many as three seasons could be required to fully adapt it. Therefore, this second season ostensibly only tells half — or, based on Mazin’s comments, perhaps even less — of a story, and it ends with a particularly big cliffhanger that the video game simply never had to deal with.

Kaitlyn Dever as Abby.

As a result, some characters don’t get as much screen time here.. The biggest example of this is Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), a young woman whose past is tied to Joel and Ellie. On the one hand, the show makes the wise choice of revealing this connection early on, knowing that a more 1:1 adaptation of the lengthy game would have meant saving this discovery for a later season. But on the other, we don’t see too much of her for now.

If nothing else, though, Dever — a magnificent actress who’s turned in memorable and ranged performances in the likes of Short Term 12, Booksmart and Unbelievable — is a mesmerizing presence even in her relatively limited role. I’m especially excited to see more of her Abby down the line.

But something that the game unequivocally did better is its handling of chronology. In the show, some otherwise directly translated scenes have been either truncated or combined to squeeze them into this season, and it feels like a disservice to them in these instances. In the game, there was a brilliant cadence to how pivotal revelations would be doled out sporadically so you could really absorb and feel the weight of them over the course of the prolonged narrative. There, we’d get key scenes that serve as payoffs to others from much earlier, but in Season 2, that might all just transpire in a single conversation, robbing the characters of the dramatic weight of lengthy and ultimately rewarding introspection.

The visuals of The Last of Us continue to impress.

What does continue to translate beautifully from the game, however, is the visuals. Picking up from John Paino’s work in Season 1, production designer Don Macaulay has done a masterful job of recreating the alluring and vivid imagery of the games, wherein nature has overtaken a ravaged society. This season, which was filmed in and around Vancouver instead of Alberta, mixes everything from the breathtaking snowy vistas of Jackson to the dank and dreary streets of a storm-ridden Seattle.

Throughout all of that, we’re taken through Macaulay’s work, which includes meticulously hand-crafted, tactile and lived-in sets. As with the first season, many of the locations are impressively recreated straight from the game, from a winter chalet in Jackson to a downtown Seattle cinema (which was actually Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre).

In a sense, the production design itself is a great summary of The Last of Us Season 2 as a whole. Like the sets themselves, this season is full of both immense beauty and utter darkness, the latter of which is especially pronounced this time around. And like how Paino originally approached the series’ production design, The Last of Us Season 2 both faithfully adapts its source material while making its own twists. Not all of those twists work, and the cliffhanger ending will no doubt lead to some more dissatisfaction, but on the whole, this is another excellent adaptation and a must-watch HBO series for both gamers and non-gamers alike.

The first episode of The Last of Us Season 2 premieres exclusively on Crave on April 13 at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET, with one new episode dropping every subsequent Sunday.

The Last of Us Part I and Part II Remastered are available on PS5 and PC.

Image credit: HBO

Update: 08/04/2025 at 2:50 p.m. ET — This review previously mentioned that John Paino, the production designer on Season 1, returned for the second season. However, Don Macaulay is actually the Season 2 production designer. We’ve updated this piece accordingly.