REVIEW: ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 Episode 1 — “Future Days”

Created by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, The Last of Us Season 1 was a triumph for HBO (and MAX). Touted as one of the best of the video game adaptation crop, it relied heavily on near-shot-for-shot recreations of the original Naughty Dog game of the same name. With The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1, “Future Days,” the second season of the hit show doesn’t have nearly as much steam.

In The Last of Us Season 2, Joel and Ellie are drawn into a conflict with each other and a more dangerous world as they handle the fallout from their choices both with each other and around them. The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 time jumps the series to five years in the future. Ellie is now 19 years old, angrier, and more resentful.

But the real intrigue is set to come from how this episode opens, with Abby at a grave and vowing revenge. Only this isn’t the Abby that people are familiar with. She isn’t intimidating in size or speech. Vowing to make Joel’s death slow and painful does nothing while tears come down her face, and a man twice her size promises to help her. A setup that makes me question if Abby’s vengeance will even be hers to take.

The choice to make Abby a thin waif to reinforce existing standards of femininity is frustrating when matched with a whiny and weak demeanor. Be moved by emotion, yes, but to look so incredibly frail removes any of the intimidating vengeance that anyone with an understanding of the source material (even through osmosis) comes into both series expecting.

Abby Anderson’s casting in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 remains the series’ biggest mistake. 

Abby is now the perfect vision of white femininity. This does more to showcase how the series is trying to sidestep the importance of her anger and forgets how, originally, Abby bucked expectations for female villains or women seeking revenge in general. Here, Abby is no different from any number of women we saw throughout The Walking Dead‘s tenure, which is a shame given her revenge, while divisive, was a bold swing to push narrative expectations.

Even when you engage with the television series on its own merit, Abby finds herself lost among other characters we’ve seen seek vengeance in a genre. Where the game allowed Abby’s hunt for vengeance to shock its players, The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 feels the need to tell its audience in no uncertain terms that Joel has done bad things. It doesn’t trust its audience to see this unfold, to see his choices come to roost. The series tries to cut the aggression the game received for its choices by creating Abby as a sympathetic woman grieving in front of a grave.

The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 is at its strongest when Joel is in therapy. Pedro Pascal plays opposite Catherine O’Hara as Gail. She’s his therapist, but she’s also Joel’s victim when you look at what he’s taken from her. It’s a compelling sequence that leans on its actors to build tension through their chemistry and, with tight shots of their faces, doesn’t allow them space to hide. The cycle of violence begins here, and O’Hara’s performance brings it to the forefront.

“You can’t heal something unless you’re brave enough to say it out loud,” Gail says, and the scene cascades into a confrontation of grief and illogical anger. But that’s necessary and strikes at the core of what TLOU Season 2 is aiming to tackle. What do we do when we’re angry? How does it rot? How does it change us? Gail’s explanation of anger and pain to Joel is fantastic in a unique way. It’s an admission of rage but also the guilt that comes from the simple act of feeling it when you know you shouldn’t.

Pedro Pascal’s Joe is teary-eyed and loving in his vulnerability, too afraid to talk about his guilt, which is that he saved Ellie. It’s a deep wound that seems only to be getting deeper as Ellie continues to stew in her anger. It all hits emotionally and stands as the only real emotion I felt in this episode. This early set-up choice is even stronger than the back third’s action sequences. Joel is the epitome of struggle, and for audiences, the five years have not been kind to the duo.

One small scene stands above the rest in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1. 

With a clicker kill, The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 looks to combat the critiques from others last season: not enough mutants. This episode brings audiences more Clickers and also puts us up close with them. If there is one true compliment to pay the crafts team of The Last of Us, it is on the Clickers. They’re uncanny in the right way, with their bloomed heads gorgeously grotesque when you see them up close.

It also establishes Ellie on her own, away from Joel. She’s strong and capable. Her confidence is a weapon and also a weakness, and as far as we can tell, it will fuel everything she feels. Ellie remains a force of fury from her opening sparring session to her yelling, “I’m immune,” with Tommy (Gabriel Luna) in the wilderness. Her spite and resiliency are on display, and you can see her coming-of-age story arc begin to close.

As she takes on a Clicker one-on-one, her confidence is clear. She taunts it and moves toward it, but ultimately, Bella Ramsey’s Ellie plays with enough innocence still behind her eyes that coming face to face with a Clicker that still has a human face throws her off-kilter. This scene does heavy lifting to establish just how much of a child Ellie still is, even at 19. And as much as she’s pushing away Joel, she doesn’t want to be alone. She wants to love, and we see that in her evolving relationship with Dina (Isabela Merced).

Bella Ramsey’s Ellie remains a force propelling TLOU Season 2.

When Joel protects her from a homophobic Seth (Robert John Burke), Ellie can’t do anything other than get angry at his intervention. Ellie wants a life without him, but as the season comes to tackle the fallout from their choices, it’s sure to harm her more than make her stronger.

That said, the advent of a new infection raises the stakes for the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us. Smart infected means that the leg up that humans originally possessed has been pulled to the ground. The community now has a new threat, and as the clock approaches the New Year, there is still more to come. With something growing in a pipe near the commune, the infection is one hazard. But as we see Abby and her crew close out the episode from atop a hill, so is revenge.

Despite my dislike of the game’s creator and series co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, particularly his inspirations for the second game that Season 2 is based on, I expected more. When it comes to storytelling, we all just want something good. The opening episode of a new season doesn’t need to be thrilling; they’re almost always about tying ends from the previous season and setting the stage for the future. However, they need to capture you and pull you to their center.

While the series starts to do that by not taking time to detail the events of the last five years, it doesn’t give audiences enough to chew on. I’m left asking if the success is due to the care for the actors and not necessarily the events. From cinematography to framing and camera positioning, The Last of Season 2 Episode 1 feels derivative at worst and at best a look at actors in different roles than we’ve seen them before.

Pedro Pascal brings vulnerability to Joel as his vulnerability comes into focus.

There isn’t much to be excited about. While players will see Abby’s arrival near the commune as something to cause dread, Season 2 leaves television-only audiences in a sea of trauma and reflection without something to hold onto as they’re pulled through it. We’re supposed to feel like “bad” is just based on the perspective we see it from, but here, the series is closer to the tail end of a coming-of-age YA story and far from the perspective-pushing commentary on violence people expect. And every decision around Abby facilitates that.

There is an undeniable emotional core that The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 is scratching at, and with the power of its cast, I’m sure it will be a success like the season, but for someone seasoned in the genre, this feels much less like something novel and instead, something building on genre staples. However, the slower pace of the game’s events may stand to change things up just enough to draw in an even larger crowd.

There is nothing special about The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1, and Abby’s drastic change remains the series’ worst choice. With a large landscape of apocalyptic “zombie” stories, I find myself searching for a modicum of difference between this series and what we saw for over a decade on AMC. This episode is carried by its actors, both in terms of performance and name alone.

The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 1 is streaming now with new episodes every Sunday. 

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