What comes after the end of the world? That was the central question of The Last of Us, a breathtaking 2013 video game set in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic that leaves the United States a cutthroat wasteland (so different from the America we see today...). It was adapted, in 2023, for the small screen and showed a pathway – a walkthrough, as gamers say – for the tricky act of converting a beloved game into a thrilling, poignant TV show. What, then, comes next? How do you follow up what followed the end of the world? That’s the task for the second season of Sky’s The Last of Us.
Five years have passed since Joel (Pedro Pascal) saved Ellie (Bella Ramsey), the only person known to be immune to the hellish cordyceps virus, from the clutches of militants who wanted to cut out her brain and turn it into a vaccine. Since then, they’ve made a life for themselves in the utopian outpost of Jackson, Wyoming, where Joel is the de facto leader of a community flourishing while the world ends. But not everything is as rosy as it looks. The mushroom folk are evolving, and waves of migrants still wash up at Jackson’s overstretched walls. “If our lifeboat is swamped,” Joel tells his lieutenants, “we leave them out there.” Governing this community isn’t Joel’s only, or hardest, responsibility. That honour falls to the act of playing daddy to an increasingly surly teenage Ellie.
