The Last of Us: MAX
I’m not much into zombie movies, but The Last of Us had enough going for it that I looked forward to each new episode, and even to the arrival of the second season.
Well, I can say that the second season was a great disappointment, not because the episodes were bad, they were not, but because the killing of the leading actor, which made the series what it was. But mostly, the most disappointing part was that a season consisted of two 40-minute episodes.
I get MAX as part of having high-speed internet with AT&T, so I’m not paying for it directly, but rather through AT&T, which they started providing for having them as an internet company. If I were paying, I would have canceled it some time ago, as the time when HBO was everyone’s preferred channel is long gone.
For me, a particular actor makes the series worth watching with NCIS. I used to think that it was Gibbs until they got rid of Abby. I found that when she was no longer there, the show no longer appealed to me. Before that, I believed that Gibbs was what kept me interested in the series. Since the series is still being shown, I assume not everyone is like me, dah.
So what is it with a two-episode season? Did the writer run out of ideas? Is MAX going belly up?
All I can say is that the second season, which could have been the last, was very disappointing to me.
The series is based on a video game, so what do people who play the game think? It is an example of the game and is worth reading for those of us who enjoyed The Last of Us.
When Joel and Tommy stumble across Abby and her friends, they save them from a horde of cordyceps. Everything seems to be going fine until Joel reveals who he is (a mistake that many gamers found out-of-character) and Abby, realizing she’s found the man she’s been looking for all this time, beats him to death with a golf club. It’s a gruesome scene, and it happens before the main game even gets going. These events are followed by Ellie on her quest to avenge Joel’s death, and the game is split between Ellie chapters and Abby chapters, where you play as the very person who killed Joel. It’s a bitter pill to swallow as a player, but a bold move on Naughty Dog’s part.
Bold, but not necessarily great. I had a hard time with the second game for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it was how much I ended up disliking everyone. Not just Abby, either, but Ellie also. Both young women were pretty awful for a lot of reasons I won’t get into here, but it was a major departure from the first game, where both Joel and Ellie were likable, even if especially Joel operated in murky moral waters.
So how does this play out in the show? My working theory is that Joel dies at the end of Season 2. They’ll restructure the story so that we get more time with Joel and Ellie in Wyoming and more time with Abby before she does the deed. This will give us more empathy for her character early on, and leave us feeling torn and terrible when she kills Joel in the Season 2 finale.
That leads us to our next big question: How will Season 3 play out? And Season 4, if they decide to split the rest of the game up into a total of three seasons? Joel will be gone, which means Pedro Pascal will be gone (or only in flashbacks) and that leaves the weight of the series on Bella Ramsey and dKaitlyn Devers’ shoulders. I have some concern, some perhaps premature misgivings, as to how this will play with audiences.
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Click on the image for a short video about the ending of Season 2.
