“If the first game was really about… love, this story is about hate.” Neil Druckmann’s words in the run up to the release of The Last of Us Part II have stuck with me. But I don’t think they stuck with Craig Mazin, co-showrunner of the HBO adaptation. Of course, that quote is debatable in its truth, and a blunt soundbite, but it is true that the second game sees a storytelling shift compared to the first. Yet the second season of the series never changed gears as much as perhaps it needed to. Rage and hate, in response to love, fuels the story and yet I rarely felt those emotions on screen.
Adapting the second game was always a tougher prospect than the first, which itself was already structured and paced and told like a HBO miniseries to an extent. Player agency is a key component to the second game’s success. When to relate to the character we’re controlling, when to disagree and yet are forced to continue walking them down this dark journey regardless. I felt Ellie’s rage at Abby, a thirst for vengeance, before her and my opinions parted at key moments. That is impossible to recreate in the more passive medium of television. I wasn’t expecting to feel the same hate as Ellie. But it never felt like Ellie was feeling the hate either.
The game thrusts Ellie straight into revenge mode, wasting no time getting to Seattle and exploring her characterisation on the fly, through her actions. The show does not. The third episode of the second season, The Path, is a good hour of television by itself but I feel does untold damage to the rest of the season. Pushing the story months down the road dulls the sharp edges of Ellie’s grief. Her and the world have progressed through too many stages of grief already. I don’t buy or feel her anger by the time she leaves Jackson. The focus on the inner workings of the community trumping the loss of Joel.
The backgrounding of Joel’s loss unfortunately continues across the next couple of episodes. In moving the blossoming romance between Ellie and Dina from taking place before Joel’s death in Jackson to the first day in Seattle, the story becomes something else entirely. I never felt Joel’s absence once in the fourth episode. It became the Ellie and Dina love story, competently done as its own thing, when to make the season work it needed to be something else. The two of them might as well have been out on patrol, exploring a city for any reason, Joel’s death felt irrelevant. Ellie became too focused on Dina. Her song revealing her deep sadness for Joel became a serenade for Dina. It was all love, no hate.
I didn’t care for Ellie’s characterisation this season, finding it far weaker than the character in the game. The all consuming rage and anger and depression felt anything but. Ellie’s introduction in episode 5 is her walking up to Dina with a beaming smile, saying “ta-da!” because she’d turned the lights back on. I couldn’t believe it. The game managed to have Ellie feel three-dimensional, capable of different emotions and tones all while keeping a baseline, part of her forever unable to leave the room where Joel died. Yet in the show, any time she’s with Dina, Joel never feels like he’s in her thoughts. It become totally focused on the love story, with Ellie feeling too much like she did in season 1, with quippy dialogue not befitting the situation.
I want to make clear that my issues with Ellie this season are with the writing, not the performance. Bella Ramsey gets a lot of unwarranted shit and I think the problem lies in the writing of her character. I don’t think she’s proactive or clever enough. Mazin likes flawed, failing heroes but I think he pushes it too far. Ellie comes across as just plain dumb. There’s an overreliance on Dina to do everything, from working out where to go to their plan of attack. Game Ellie was always driving forward, desperate to find Abby, while show Ellie feels secondary to Dina, along for the ride, more so than she did even to Joel in season 1. It almost feels like Dina is the one out for revenge.
When Dina revealed her backstory about her mother’s death I thought, ‘perfect, this will help spur Ellie on in her revenge quest’ but instead she gently touched Dina’s face, thinking only of her and not Joel, while it fuelled Dina on her path of vengeance. I was half expecting Ellie to get shot with an arrow and Dina to continue on alone. Ellie is also too impotent a fighter. I don’t need to see her butcher as many people as she does in the game but someone, anyone, would have been appreciated. Again, she’s kinda useless. She grabs one WLF from behind but it’s Dina who eventually shoots him to save Ellie’s life, and then Jesse shows up to save them both from infected. Just once I wanted to see Ellie do something effectively, her anger pushing her on, informing all her brutal actions, but we get nothing other than the Nora scene. Mazin has a penchant for intimate scenes of two characters having a quiet discussion but so much of Ellie’s story this season needs to be told through her actions, so having her do very little is a big issue.
A big part of why Joel’s absence in the show is different to the game is because, well, he’s actually absent. The game peppered in the flashbacks more frequently, as if Ellie remembering, making it clear what has been taken from her. Clumping them all together made for one great episode but damaged the season overall. I never felt Ellie miss him across episodes 4 and 5. Keeping certain scenes back for later, to recontextualise what happened before, makes sense, particularly with the porch scene, but I didn’t like Joel playing the guitar being held back to the penultimate episode. Without that, any scene of Ellie playing guitar doesn’t immediately link to Joel for those who have not played the game. Her singing the first line of Future Days in the theatre means nothing because we don’t know of its connection to Joel yet, unlike the game.
And so the season reaches it finale, the big pay-off to Ellie’s rage, and yet it doesn’t work because I don’t feel its been set up effectively. We’ve seen the porch scene, the emotional culmination of the story, and now all that’s left is a revenge quest where I don’t feel the passion or drive. It’s such a shame because I like the more feral Ellie of the show, how she reacted like an animal to seeing Joel beat the guard in the very first episode, but when she performs violence herself, what little violence the show actually has her perform, I don’t feel it. I don’t buy it. In the game I was cheering her on until I was begging her to stop, a powerful journey, but in the show I struggled to care either way.
Even her wanting to rescue the Seraphite in the finale felt too much like moral justice than it did vengeance. Game Ellie would walk on past, ignoring it on her path to Abby. The greater theme of the cycle of violence is subtext happening around her, based on her actions, I don’t need her to be a mouthpiece for it. It’s remarkable that a video game has a more subtle and nuanced exploration of these ideas than a HBO series.
It’s as if Ellie’s rage was taken for granted. Such a key part of the story guaranteed to be there so Mazin and the other writers wanted to flesh her out, add a more detailed romance, play her as more vulnerable, and yet they missed the characterisation forest for the trees. The entire character became those sub-facets and the core, the dark, angry, bitter core, was left malnourished. Ellie could have said at any moment that she was done, that she was over Joel’s death and walked away and I would have believed her, and that’s a huge problem.
At one point I would have been wary about the idea of strictly following the game’s structure, of leaving Ellie behind to focus on Abby as a new protagonist for the bulk of season 3. Now, that’s the most exciting prospect. I’m excited for the focus to be elsewhere, to let Ellie rest and hopefully be engaging again when we return to her. I can’t help thinking the character is irrevocably hurt in the show. I don’t know how the ending of the second game is going to work now. How can I believe Ellie will pursue vengeance a second time when I barely believed it the first?
