Week-to-Week: How to Survive (not playing the second game set during) The Mushroom Apocalypse
Why spoiling yourself—with this very newsletter—might be the best way to prepare for The Last of Us' second season
HBO’s The Last of Us—which Zack Handlen just finished up covering here at Episodic Medium—is far from the first highly successful adaptation of an existing work with an established fanbase, and so this isn’t the first time we’ve faced this particular problem. Whether it was Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, newcomers to franchises have long been faced with the challenge of reaching the end of a first season and confronting both a huge trove of spoilers and a group of people who may struggle to keep those spoilers to themselves.
But there are a number of reasons why this feels harder with The Last of Us. Some of these are kind of spoilers for the game’s sequel—there are only two games, if you’ve been avoiding spoilers to the point of not even Googling—so I don’t want to get into them initially (although, spoiler: this post will eventually). But the core issue is that the online ecosystem is so different than it was back in 2010/2011. Not only is there a lot more content about shows that work their way into our social feeds once the algorithm knows we’re a person who is watching a show, but video games (compared to books and comic books) have a huge content ecosystem of their own, and the second game’s release in 2020 brought with it a deluge of walkthroughs, reactions, compilations, and debates. And that doesn’t even get into the fact that, objectively speaking, some dudes who play video games and have opinions about them on the internet are terrible people who are probably willing to spoil the games at will if they feel like it.
Which is why, ultimately, I think anyone who has never played the games but feels like they are too online to avoid potential spoilers has a decision to make, so I want to address this to you directly. First, obviously, this could be a gateway to becoming a gamer, picking yourself up a PS4 or PS5 (I’m presuming you don’t have a high end gaming PC handy), and diving in head first. And second, YouTube will happily serve you up complete playthroughs of the game, which will give you everything you need to know.
Or, conversely, you can just keep reading this post to learn some of the “biggest” spoilers, because while there are absolutely some parts of the story in the second game that are meant to be surprising, I would argue they are not necessarily going to ruin your experience as much as you might think they are. And that’s why I am personally advocating that if you are afraid of knowing too much information, you should choose to learn that information in the environment that works best for you, in order to set yourself up to enjoy the rest of the show in whichever terms you see fit.
And if that happens to be this newsletter, well, so be it.
WARNING:
From this point forward, I will be spoiling some details about The Last of Us Part II. This will come in two stages, one where I’ll reveal a plot spoiler without further detail, and another where I’ll dig a bit deeper into the specifics. You’ll get a second warning before the latter, I promise.
Okay, so the thing about video games is that they’re teased for a long time. The first teaser for The Last of Us Part II debuted in 2016, over three years before the game was released, and in addition to this brief teaser there were two key pieces of information: the game would take place 5 years in the future, and a 19-year-old Ellie would become “the star,” or in gaming terms the playable character.
A year and a half later, they revealed the first gameplay footage from the game, interspersing a cutscene of Ellie romancing a young woman (Dina) in Jackson, Wyoming with a brutal gameplay sequence as she cuts through a group of cultists.
And two months before the game’s debut, Sony released a final “story trailer,” offering players their clearest glimpse yet of what Ellie would be confronting in this world that was doomed by Joel’s decision to save her life.
I bring you all of this because gamers had over three years to explore a fundamental question of the choice to make Ellie the main character: where does that leave Joel? I finished playing the first game in early 2017, and remember going to the reveal trailer for the sequel and wondering if Joel was perhaps a figment of Ellie’s imagination, presuming that her quest for vengeance would be most legible if it was due to his death. And while that final story trailer definitely foregrounds Joel in a way that could make you think he’s a significant presence through the entire game, the simple reality of the game’s press cycle meant that a huge percentage of players likely had some expectation that Joel might not survive.
So, let’s just say the thing plainly: yes, Joel dies.
It happens early in the second game, in fact, driving Ellie’s entire quest as she departs the comforts of Jackson, Wyoming to get vengeance on the people responsible for his death. There is no question that there will be Extremely Offline people who survive until the show’s return next year and are shocked to see the show’s lead character go down like Ned Stark, but I think it’s important that if this is information you learn ahead of the show’s return, you should remember it was something gamers had more or less presumed going in. And it’s something that becomes the catalyst for the story and its themes, rather than a shocking twist that rearranges the show’s priorities.
I want to pause here to say that if you are actively spoiling yourself for the second season, I personally think you should stop reading now. Because while you can absolutely go read more details on how and why Joel dies, and its aftermath, I would argue those are the details that you’ll want to experience on the show’s terms. It’s fairly easy to avoid reading complete summaries, or clicking on and consuming the YouTube video whose thumbail/title might have spoiled you regarding Joel’s death. Moreover, the thing about the adaptation is that we have no idea if this story will remain the same, or when it will happen: while the first game was adapted into a single season, I would heavily suspect given the show’s success that we’ll see the second game expanded out into two seasons, for a variety of reasons. As such, while the fact of Joel’s death is worth spoiling, what I want to discuss next with the spoiled may be better left to be discovered sometime next year.
SECOND WARNING:
I’m going to outright discuss the story of the second game with spoilers, so this is your chance to bail if you don’t want to know the specifics surrounding Joel’s death and the plot of the game.
Okay, so the thing that The Last of Us Part II did hide from its audience was that it actually has two playable characters: at various points in the game, you switch perspectives to play as Abby, a former Firefly whose father was the surgeon Joel killed while removing Ellie from the hospital in Salt Lake City. This happens early in the game, without any context, but roughly two hours into the game their paths cross when Abby is the one to murder Joel in revenge for her father’s death. From that point on, your primary goal as Ellie is to hunt down and kill Abby, which the game uses against the player by having you switch to Abby’s perspective as soon as the characters meet again in Seattle, rewinding to show us her story over the same period. Suddenly, you’re bearing witness to the human cost of your actions as Ellie, a pattern that continues in the wake of the game’s final sequence where—after a time jump—the two characters' paths cross again. In addition, during each character’s gameplay segments, there are regular flashbacks to their pasts, including to Ellie and Joel’s time during the five-year gap between games and to Abby’s perspective on the events of the first game.
If you so solely by “game length,” Part II is roughly twice as long as the first game. But the disjointed timeline gives them lots of options of how to tell this story. In addition to “Bill and Frank” candidates that could be fleshed out into standalone stories that flesh out the worldbuilding of the series (I really want an episode about the ferry Abby explores, but Lev and Yara are probably more likely), you could choose to start the season’s narrative earlier, beginning with some of the flashback material that the game doled out over time in order to break up potentially repetitive gameplay sequences (since the flashbacks are typically more focused on character interaction than on action). And there’s probably room to add additional story to the period between Abby and Ellie’s first encounter and their eventual reunion in the Santa Barbara segment, and to flesh out the dynamics of that period of the story (compared to the game, where it functions as an epilogue of sorts).
It all depends on how the show wants to position the viewer relative to how the game positioned its player. I don’t foresee a scenario where they repeat the game’s format and “double back” on the narrative, splitting the first season between Ellie and Abby (whose story intersects with the aforementioned Lev and Yara from the Seraphites cult). But when do you decide to bring in Abby’s perspective, knowing that the TV audience is just as likely to hate her for killing Joel (even if the show put its thumb on the scale with regards to the horror of his actions in the hospital)? Whereas the first game mapped onto a season of television in a very clean way, the same is not true of the second game’s structure—it may still be cinematic, but in a way that really depends on shifts in who the player is controlling and the perspective it creates on the world and those who inhabit it. And while TV can absolutely emulate parts of that to an extent, the demand for additional seasons and the need to break it into episodic chunks gives Mazin and Druckmann a lot of options to mull over as they map out the journey ahead.
If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you’ve already played the game, but if you’re choosing to spoil yourself I hope you understand why I’m not convinced the seasons ahead can be spoiled by basic plot details. While Joel’s decision at the end of The Last of Us redefined the entire game, by comparison the second game is defined by Joel’s death and how characters choose to react to it, and that theme never really wavers as the story progresses. I’m excited to see how Mazin and Druckmann choose to approach telling that story, and believe that whether it’s spoiled or not doesn’t impact how effective it can be as a character study set in a world that will continue to be fleshed out in what’s to come.
Episodic Observations
If I’m breaking the second season, I’m starting with Joel and Ellie at the museum, to give us a glimpse of the last days where she allowed herself to believe Joel’s lie. Then, at the end of the premiere, she travels to Salt Lake City to investigate the hospital, and while there we start cross-cutting with Abby’s perspective on the massacre, and then at the end of the episode we cut to Abby, revealing we’ll also be following her perspective as well. Then the second episode tracks Abby’s journey to Wyoming, before the third episode drops us into the dynamics of Joel and Ellie’s estrangement and their effort to reconcile, before the two paths cross in the fourth episode, ending in Joel’s death. Then the back half of the season tells roughly the first half of Abby and Ellie’s stories in Seattle, ending on the convergence of the Rat King and Ellie’s confrontation with Nora at the hospital. But, as I say, there are almost infinite options.
As noted, If there’s a clear candidate for a “standalone” episode in the season, it’s Lev and Yara’s backstory amidst the Seraphites, but I’m curious how you work that into a season that’s already splitting attention between the two different characters. It only really applies to Abby’s story, too, and so I’m curious how they decide to “center” the story.
I suppose the larger question here is whether the show’s success pushes Naughty Dog deeper into development of a third game that could release in time for additional seasons beyond the scope of the two games. They’ve said they don’t intend to move past the games, understandably, but if the second game becomes two seasons to release in 2024 and 2025, an early 2026 release for a third game isn’t outside the realm of possibility (and would somewhat match up with the 7-year gap between the first and second games).
I haven’t been listening to the show’s official podcast, which I know Mazin did for Chernobyl as well, but I did listen to their interview on The Ringer’s Prestige TV podcast with Friend of the Newsletter Joanna Robinson, where they consciously revealed no details from the second game given neither she nor co-host Mallory Rubin has played it. I’m curious what comments they do end up making on this front, given the concerns around spoilers, but we might see more of those come Emmy season.
I think your proposed way of breaking it is one of the best I've seen so far. The power of that flip in perspective is that you already hate Abby (and her friends but it was hard to remember any of their names from the first half) because of what she did to Joel and then you gradually come to realise that actually maybe she has as much of a case as Ellie and, personally, by the end I thought she was a more sympathetic character.
But I agree, doing that structure in a season of TV is a huge risk because you need their buy-in week-to-week rather than taking advantage of the fact that you've already got them to drop $70 for the complete story.
The other option I thought of was maybe you start the first episode with Abby's story and the end of episode 1 twist is when hurricane Joel storms through her life. Then you do Abby and Ellie's stories in parallel from then on and preserve sympathy for both characters and also that tension of wanting the two characters not to meet.
Thanks for doing this. While I managed to stay relatively unspoiled for season 1, somehow the damn YouTube algorithm began showing Last of Us game videos... Including the 'Joel dies'. Considering the next season is not due until 2025 this was probably unavoidable. It is somewhat reassuring to read that it was kind of foreseen while waiting for the second game to come out.
To be clear I have not read beyond the second warning, but would like to ask if you feel that the second game provides more opportunities to go beyond the somewhat disjointed road trip narrative of season 1? While I liked season 1, at times it felt a bit incoherent (as noted by Zack).