“The Last of Us,” Season 2: Who Said Hollywood Knew How to Adapt Video Games?

“There’s a moral to everything, if only we could find it.” This aphorism from Alice in Wonderland, painted on the wall of an abandoned bookstore, appears fleetingly in the final episode of season 2 of The Last of Us, released this Monday, May 26 on Max. Set in a United States ravaged by a zombie apocalypse, it is indeed “a series with a dark atmosphere and which addresses vast themes: the strength of hope, the futility of revenge, the terrible acts committed for the sake of survival,” underlines The New York Times . But could it be that the moral of the story is that a video game loses its extra soul when it becomes a series or a film, regardless of the quality of the adaptation?

The critically acclaimed first season followed the adventures of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who became an unlikely adopted father-daughter duo. It ended with the latter committing a massacre to save the former.

The second season parallels two revenge stories: Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) kills Joel, who is responsible for her father's murder , and Ellie then seeks revenge by chasing her from Wyoming to Seattle. There, Ellie's three-day hunt with her girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced) also turns tragic.

Thus, the last episode of the season ends with a face-off between Abby and Ellie, and a gunshot of which we will not know the author or if it caused a victim. A scene appearing in the middle of the second game, The Last of Us Part II , released in 2020, recalls Vulture .

And in the game, from this tipping point , the player no longer embodies Ellie but Abby, details the cultural site of New York Magazine . A change of perspective which completely disrupts the staging