The Last of Us Season 2 Gets a Chilly Response After Adapting a Controversial Plot Point

Television

Gamers who were disappointed (to understate it) with the direction in which The Last of Us Part II took the previous game’s story have been reassured that they’re not alone. After its success as a video game, The Last of Us has been turned into a TV show airing on HBO starring – as if there were any doubt nowadays – Pedro Pascal as Joel, a survivor in a post-zombie-apocalypse world who must protect a girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey) who may be immune to the fungal infection that created the nightmare they live in. Season 1 was based on the beloved first game, and it was a pretty big hit for HBO, which earned it a second season that just began airing. Naturally, season 2 follows the plot of The Last of Us Part II, something the game and show’s creator, Neil Druckmann, confirmed would be the case, and he also said they wouldn’t be changing the story, something many speculated could happen in an effort to recraft the IP’s legacy. Druckmann also said that The Last of Us Part II could be stretched across seasons 2 and 3 of the show, and maybe even 4, so they had time to keep the audience hooked before making their big move. But… they didn’t, and now they’re getting yet another passionate response from a different set of fans. I’ll get into spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 and The Last of Us Part II from here on:

***SPOILERS***

If you aren’t aware (and you probably are; I’ve never played either Last of Us game, and even I know what happened), The Last of Us Part II kills off Joel by having a character named Abby beat him to death with a golf club, for which, after a game spent seeking revenge, Ellie lets Abby go. Many fans were less than thrilled not only to see the hero of a game they loved killed off in the sequel but also to see his killer go free in service to some hippie-dippy “revenge is bad” message nobody likes. And this past weekend, The Last of Us the TV show recreated the scene – only with Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever, stabbing Joel with the golf club as the coup de grâce – which you can see in the comparison video above. I’m a bit surprised; while I expected the show to kill Joel as the game did, I figured since they were planning more seasons based on The Last of Us Part II, they’d put off Joel’s death till the end of season 2 to get more out of the character and Pedro Pascal. But they went for it right off the bat, and the audience response is the same as the one for the game: viewers are mad, and they’re giving HBO’s The Last of Us bad reviews, dropping its audience score significantly on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason would seem obvious: viewers didn’t like Joel being killed off because he was the hero of the show, and they enjoyed following him. But that’s not how it’s being spun; Collider, the people who never saw a piece of art they didn’t find “problematic,” put out an article blaming sexist gamers for review-bombing the Rotten Tomatoes page. They claim the bad reviews are due to the audience not liking Bella Ramsey’s casting, never once mentioning Joel’s death, which ignores that the show had a higher audience score until this episode. It’s just another smoke screen, blaming fans for not liking anything their benevolent entertainers throw at them.

Collider’s response, which will be echoed by the rest of the entertainment media, isn’t surprising, but it’s annoying and degrading to a whole new set of customers, and that’s what’s important about this story. The Last of Us has now moved to another medium, and while I’m sure part of the audience is made up of gamers, a lot of it isn’t. This is actually a good way of testing whether Joel’s death is as hated as it was made out to be, and it looks like it is; people don’t like it anywhere it happens. But instead of acknowledging that it’s unpopular, the backlash is immediately mischaracterized and delegitimized, a tactic so ubiquitous in entertainment today that most people enter a theater or start a new game expecting to be called some version of scum if they don’t adore it. It’s like a big group therapy session for millionaire narcissists, with the access media (to use Gary from Nerdrotic’s phrase) gently brushing the hair of the writers, producers, directors, and developers and telling them that they’re perfect and the rest of the world is always wrong. Nevertheless, the rest of us can see what’s going on, and if any gamers who criticized The Last of Us Part II doubted themselves, they now have proof that it isn’t just them; a whole new audience just rejected what they were called evil for disliking. It’ll be interesting to see what this does to the show’s ratings in the coming weeks and what it means for a potential season 3 or 4. Neil Druckmann may have just shot himself in the foot a second time with the same gun.

Let us know what you think of the audience’s response to The Last of Us Season 2 in the comments!

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