Anticipation is on the rise as we grow ever closer to 2025…and the second season of The Last of Us that comes with it.
While the exact release date, frustratingly, has yet to be revealed, HBO have at least abated us junkies with casting news and a brief but mouth-watering teaser released a little under two months ago. Then, just last week, we were treated to what HBO has also labelled a “teaser”, when really, it’s a fully-fledged two-minute trailer that offers a better look at newcoming character adapted from The Last of Part 2, while also hinting at where the narrative might go in season two of the acclaimed show.
There are plenty of easter eggs littered throughout the trailer, from the guitar that Joel (Pedro Pascal) gives Ellie (Bella Ramsey) – which she then uses to serenade her love interest Dina (Isabela Merced), just like the video game – to “FEEL HER LOVE” inscribed on a wall with what may be blood, which is a reference to the Seraphites, a religious cult whose members can be identified by bald heads and facial scars, as seen in the trailer. In fact, one member, who has clearly been tortured, is seen with Isaac (played Jeffrey Wright, who also voices the character in The Last of Us Part 2), the leader of the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), of which Abby (Caitlyn Dever) is a member.
Dever’s Abby is unquestionably the most important addition to the new cast, as she is not only a major playable character in The Last of Us Part 2, but as anyone who has played the game knows, she is the one who seeks out and brutally beats Joel to death. She does this as vengeance for him murdering her own father, who was the doctor Joel shot in the operating room when rescuing Ellie from the Fireflies. The trailer doesn’t shy away from this either, as one of the show’s wholly original newcoming characters, the unnamed therapist played by the legendary Canadian actress Catherine O’Hara, asks Joel, “What did you do?”, before cutting to an emotional Abby in front of what is, in all likelihood, her father’s grave.
The rest of the trailer is a set of varying shots with little context, from depicting the likes of Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) embracing one another in the midst of a dire situation, to the first look at Ellie’s close friend and the father of Dina’s child in the video game, Jesse (Young Mazino). However, none of this answer the burning question as to whether or not Abby will kill Joel this season. I will not retread this topic in detail as I have covered it before, but I do maintain that this will likely not happen until the end of the second season at the earliest. If anything, what this trailer suggests is that we might get Abby’s backstory right up until she kills Joel, rather than that being our first introduction to her character just as it is in the video game, which is certainly more narratively problematic for a TV show.
Meanwhile, although the second season is confirmed to take place five years after the events of season one, we see Joel sporting two different haircuts, one similar to that of the first season, and the other longer and slicked back, which hints that the narrative could also show flashbacks similar to The Last of Us Part 2.
Nonetheless, this is all speculative until the second season releases during its painfully ambiguous window of 2025, but take comfort in the idea that if this is only a “teaser”, then we may be in line for one more extensive trailer shortly before its release. Personally, I can wait…assuming there’s no cordyceps outbreak in the meantime!
