The Last of Us Season 2 Was A Drastic Departure From The Video Game. The TV show couldn't possibly adapt the second game into a single season, so Mazin had to make some bold decisions about when to reveal the twists, how much information to give the audience, and where to cut it off before season 3.
The Last of Us Season 2 Was A Drastic Departure From The Video Game. Back in the days of the Dwayne Johnson Doom movie and the Angelina Jolie Tomb Raider movies and the Bob Hoskins Mario movie, video game adaptation s had a reputation for being terrible.
But in the last couple of years, that reputation has been improving. The Chris Pratt Mario movies and the Sonic movies and the Detective Pikachu movie and the Minecraft movie have all been beloved crowd-pleasers; Amazon's Fallout show has expanded and deepened the retrofuturistic social commentary of the games; and Arcane has transcended the League of Legends universe to become one of the most acclaimed TV shows of the 21st century.
One of the biggest success stories of this video game adaptation resurgence has been HBO's The Last of Us. Naughty Dog's Last of Us games already feel more like a prestige TV drama than a straightforward action-adventure video game, so it didn't take much tweaking to adapt them into a prestige TV drama - some of the games' cutscenes even made it into the show verbatim.
All it needed was a writer who would preserve what made the games great during that adaptation process, and it had that in Craig Mazin (at least for the first season). Mazin was an avid player of The Last of Us games, so when he was offered the chance to adapt a PlayStation property, the stars aligned.
Mazin teamed up with the game franchise's own creator, Neil Druckmann, to ensure that the core emotions of the story would remain intact as it transitioned into this new medium. In season 1, Mazin and Druckmann had about a 50/50 split of creative input, and that resulted in about a 50/50 split of faithfully adapting the first game and exploring new ideas in this new medium.
That winning formula made The Last of Us one of the best video game adaptations ever made. But season 2 was a different story. As work got underway on Druckmann's next big video game project, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Mazin took the reins in season 2, and took a lot more liberties with the source material.
The Last of Us Part II is a much bigger, much more complicated game, with two separate perspectives of the same narrative events and a sprawling nonlinear structure jumping all over the timeline. The TV show couldn't possibly adapt the second game into a single season, so Mazin had to make some bold decisions about when to reveal the twists, how much information to give the audience, and where to cut it off before season 3.
Mazin arguably made a lot of wrong choices in this adaptation process. Almost every change he made to the source material was for the worse. Wedging Joel's death into the middle of an epic Game of Thrones-style battle just lessened the impact of his loss, because he was just one of dozens of casualties that day. Giving away Abby's motivation upfront ruined the greatest twist from the game (and maybe the greatest twist in all of gaming).
Mazin is afraid of subtext, spelling out all his characters' emotions in painfully on-the-nose dialogue, and he's afraid of letting Ellie be unlikable. He goes out of his way to avoid making her a full-blown murderer, but she needs to take that dark turn for her story to have the right effect.
The Last of Us' second season was a huge let-down, but season 1 was so great that I'm willing to forgive season 2, much like Ellie was willing to at least try to forgive Joel. Season 1 was so great, I'm still optimistic about season 3, despite how season 2 turned out
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