The Last Of Us Credit: HBO Ahead of this Sunday’s Season 2 premiere, HBO has announced that its hit video game adaptation, The Last Of Us, will be back for a third season. The renewal comes just days before Season 2 drops on Sunday, April 13th. The renewal answers some questions about what to expect from the second season, and raises some big questions. We’ve known for awhile now that showrunners Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (creator and director of The Last Of Us games) were planning to split up the second game into multiple seasons. The renewal confirms that this is the case. The Last Of Us Part II was a much longer game than the first, with a bigger cast and more moving pieces. It’s also a lot darker and more depressing. I’ve written about the difficulty the show’s creators face adapting this to screen, though mostly due to its content rather than scope. ForbesHBO’s ‘The Last Of Us’ Review: A Faithful Adaptation That Expands The Game’s WorldBy Erik Kain This brings us to our first big question: How will the game’s narrative be reorganized for a television series and what events will unfold over the 7-episode season? I’m going to get into some game spoilers at this point, so read on at your own risk. MORE FOR YOU Google Confirms Gmail Update Choice—3 Billion Users Must Now Decide Google’s Android Update—Bad News For Samsung And Pixel Users ‘NYT Mini’ Clues And Answers For Thursday, April 10 For those of you who have played the Naughty Dog video games, or who have read spoilers already, the biggest and most controversial moment in the sequel is when Joel is killed, very early on in the game, by Abby, a character introduced in the sequel. Joel is played by Pedro Pascal in the HBO show, and Abby is played by Kaitlyn Dever (who, oddly enough, looks uncannily like Ellie from the video games). Abby does this out of revenge. Her father, we learn, was one of the doctors at the Firefly facility. He was going to operate on Ellie in a brash attempt to extract a cure for the Cordyceps pandemic. When Joel learns that this procedure will result in Ellie’s death, he goes full Rambo, slaughtering his way through the Fireflies and killing the doctor when he tries to intervene. Joel does this to save Ellie, and I have always been a firm believer that he acted on sound moral footing. The Fireflies were desperate, but they had little chance at actually coming up with a cure, and Ellie’s life would have been forfeit. Regardless of that gamble, I do not believe that sacrificing an innocent human being, even on the chance of saving the world, is ethical or right. I believe that Joel had every reason to save his adoptive daughter. But neither Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey in the series) or Abby agrees. Joel lies to Ellie at the end of the first game / first season and tells her that the cure simply wasn’t possible. He doesn’t tell her what he did or that there was a chance it could have worked, or that he saved her life. At the start of the second game, these truths are out and Joel and Ellie’s relationship is in tatters over the deception. When Joel and Tommy stumble across Abby and her friends, they save them from a horde of cordyceps. Everything seems to be going fine until Joel reveals who he is (a mistake that many gamers found out-of-character) and Abby, realizing she’s found the man she’s been looking for all this time, beats him to death with a golf club. It’s a gruesome scene, and it happens before the main game even gets going. These events are followed by Ellie on her quest to avenge Joel’s death, and the game is split between Ellie chapters and Abby chapters, where you play as the very person who killed Joel. It’s a bitter pill to swallow as a player, but a bold move on Naughty Dog’s part. Bold, but not necessarily great. I had a hard time with the second game for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it was how much I ended up disliking everyone. Not just Abby, either, but Ellie also. Both young women were pretty awful for a lot of reasons I won’t get into here, but it was a major departure from the first game, where both Joel and Ellie were likable, even if especially Joel operated in murky moral waters. So how does this play out in the show? My working theory is that Joel dies at the end of Season 2. They’ll restructure the story so that we get more time with Joel and Ellie in Wyoming and more time with Abby before she does the deed. This will give us more empathy for her character early on, and leave us feeling torn and terrible when she kills Joel in the Season 2 finale. That leads us to our next big question: How will Season 3 play out? And Season 4, if they decide to split the rest of the game up into a total of three seasons? Joel will be gone, which means Pedro Pascal will be gone (or only in flashbacks) and that leaves the weight of the series on Bella Ramsey and dKaitlyn Devers’ shoulders. I have some concern, some perhaps premature misgivings, as to how this will play with audiences. Losing Joel did not make the second game better, though it provided impetus for everything that followed. It’s hard to get character deaths right. A few shows did it well. Game Of Thrones with Ned Stark. Breaking Bad with Hank. The latter created the perfect storm for all the other characters, lifting the narrative anchor so that all the other stories could set sail. Hank’s death was the tragic turning point that finally crystalized just how destructive Walter White’s ambitions truly were. But I’m not sure losing one of two main characters in a story that is about those two characters was a great direction for The Last Of Us. The whole point of the first game was the bonding of these two people, thrust together by tragedy and circumstance. It’s like, imagine if Romeo and Juliet ended with just Romeo dying. Juliet stops before she kills herself. Then Shakespeare writes Romeo & Juliet Part II and it’s all about Juliet taking revenge on everyone, Hamlet style. The first Romeo & Juliet is about love, the second about hate. That’s how Druckmann described his two games. Granted, Romeo & Juliet is a romance and The Last Of Us is more of a father-daughter story, but you get the point. The fundamental nature of the story is thrown out for the sequel. So I’m very curious how this is all structured and how audiences react to the inevitable golf club scene and how the show can stay afloat without its biggest lead and draw, and whether Ramsey can actually pull of Part II’s version of Ellie, who is older and stronger and more deadly, when Ramsey still looks like a fifteen-year-old. We shall see. I’m also curious to see what they add. Sure, the second game is long but a lot of that is action and exploration. Storywise, I suspect we’ll get more time with Joel and Ellie before the murder, and more time with Abby and her backstory. Will we get more of Joel and Tommy’s backstory as well? There’s lots of room to add and juggle without really altering the main thrust of the story. What do you think about all of this? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades