The Last of Us 2, the review of the second season of the TV series

The first season of The Last of Uswho made his debut in 2023 with great success, gets appreciated at best if compared to something else. It is a gloomy and frightening drama on anApocalypse Zombiebut it is not The Walking Dead. Of the aggressive nihilism of that series, in fact, there is no trace in the first season of The Last of Usadaptation of Craig Mazin And Neil Druckmann of the popular video game. The darkness looms on everything, but through cracks they filter hope and humanity. The season performs long digressions to deepen the nature of the secondary characters, and is heated in the center with a deeper and deeper bond between Joel and Ellie, interpreted respectively by Pedro Pascal And Beautiful ramsey.

It is quality television, which rewards what was considered one of the video games more cultured and sophisticated from the narrative point of view of its time. The second game has been advertised in a slightly less sensationalistic way, so it is reasonable that the second season of the television series (which will debut April 13 on Prime Videos) should undergo the same fate. Alas, it’s like that. Suspense and intrigues abound, but the new series of episodes too like a simple dystopian survival adventure. Most of the grace, shades and consistency of the first cycle of The Last of Us It is absent.

However, there is no lack of efforts to repeat the first season formula. There are flashbacks and short digressions that investigate the new characters. We meet the brizzed head of a group of militiamen, played by Jeffrey Wrightand another leader, interpreted in a rather surprising way by Alanna Ubach. In the relative peace of the walled village of Jackson Hole, where Joel and Ellie settled five years after the events of the first season, Ellie has a love interest, Dina (Isabela Merced), While Catherine O’Hara He plays an analyst tired with a painful past (which I imagine does not say much, since everyone in this series have a painful past). There is also a new and complicated antagonist, interpreted with fascinating momentum from Kaitlyn Dever.

All these characters have their moments, and their presence actually contributes to partly recall the sense of epic of the first season. But the second season is largely focused on one missionwhich brings the series to a ruin Seattle, where one rages one war between a brutal militia and one religious sect which has returned to the old arc and arrow methods. There violence elaborate of these two groups definitely recalls the mind The Walking Deada series that has become increasingly exaggeratedly gathered as it proceeded. I hope this is not the fate of The Last of Useven if the second season gives us some reason for concern.

Of course we are talking about a series on zombies, so there is some violence to expect. It may be that my problem with the second season is only a general stiffening affair against post-apocalyptic stories: at a certain point, all the cities invaded by the vegetation and the lords of the war hardened by the trauma are confused. Maybe it is unfair to criticize The Last of Us Just because it does what is natural for the genre it belongs to. But the first season had managed to be something different and special. I miss the terrible shock of an Indonesian scientist who says “bomb”, or the adorable and painful Pas de deux Of Nick offetor And Murray Bartlett. In comparison, yet another group of murderers assassins (which, in the manner of The Walking Deadare perhaps more dangerous than zombies) seems terribly familiar.

There is some development in slow progression that could prove interesting in the third season: somehow terrible, the pandemic It seems to evolve. But at the end of the second season (a brusque black fading that is more frustrating than tantalizing) all this is still far away. What happened in the meantime has constituted good entertainment, but rarely proved to be exciting and compelling as the first season.

It may also be that to hinder these new episodes is something that I should not anticipate here, even if those who love the video game (or those who love to read the synopsis of the video game plot) will know exactly what I am referring to. In fact, when that series of events arrives, the season takes a heartbreaking form. It is an effective shock, indeed so effective that the series struggles to overcome it for the rest of the season. In the end, a moving-Flashback episode tries to close the circle (suspicious that it will be the most appreciated hour of the season), but it is the static and isolated attempt to revisit an irrecoverable point in the past of the series that does not bring us at all towards an exciting future.

Perhaps this will be the task of the third season, and these episodes are only a bridge between great narratives. But eight hours are a lot of time to devote to the interlude. Thus tempting is like wandering for years for Georgia, hoping that Rick and company finally take us to a new place.