This coming Sunday, the first season of The Last of Us will conclude, and anyone that’s played the game will be preparing themselves for an emotionally fraught hour of television that’s guaranteed to launch a thousand debates. Season two is already confirmed, tackling 2020’s PlayStation 4 hit The Last of Us Part II.
We won’t get into what’s coming for Joel and Ellie, save to say there are many good reasons why we should be very excited for the show to return. If it sticks closely to that game’s story it’s going to generate controversy just as the game did three years ago.
Troy Baker, who played Joel in the game and appeared in last night’s episode, can’t wait. In an interview with Variety, Baker revealed whether he thinks season two is going to follow the same course that had gamers up in arms.
“Hopefully the same. Because it’ll show that we did the story justice. It’s very similar to the ending of Part I. Love it or hate it — if you have an opinion on it, then we did our job. Going forward, there will be more moments like that for you to wrestle with.”
The story of Part II split opinion in the gaming community, though a big part of that was because a slightly garbled leak of the story emerged a few months before the June 2020 release and infuriated fans. When the sequel came out, most agreed that its story surpassed the first game in scope and ambition, but even three years later there’s still a subset of gamers grinding an axe against it on the weirder corners of the internet.
We absolutely loved Part II, and can’t wait to see how Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann adapt it for television, even if there are nerves about how TV viewers are going to respond to it. We’re also curious whether HBO will soften some of the story’s rougher edges, but considering how faithful the first season has been, there’s confidence it’ll be done justice.
Before that comes the season one finale on Mar. 12, and you can expect social media to explode in the aftermath.