When The Last of Us premiered in 2023, it was a Game of Thrones-sized blockbuster hit for HBO, it reinvigorated the post-apocalyptic genre, and it launched Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey to superstardom. The Last of Us season 1 was universally acclaimed by critics, but it was universally beloved by audiences, too, with an 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is even trickier to pull off.

When you’re adapting a property that’s as near and dear to people’s hearts as The Last of Us, it’s a miracle if you can please 86% of those fans. Video game fanatics and newcomers alike got swept up in season 1’s retelling of the first game’s story, following Joel and Ellie across a zombie-infested wasteland on their way to create a cure for humanity.

HBO wasted no time renewing The Last of Us for a second season, and creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann got to work adapting the second game in Druckmann’s video game series for television. But turning The Last of Us Part II into a TV series proved to be a much bigger challenge than Part I. The first game tells a linear, straightforward narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end — it even follows an episodic structure, which made it easy to chop it up into TV episodes — but Part II is a much more complicated story, with a nonlinear structure and two separate perspectives of the same events.

When The Last of Us season 2 premiered, it received the same rave reviews from critics as season 1, but its audience reception was another story. After season 1 had debuted with an impressive 86% approval rating from fans, season 2 has a dismal 39% score.

Why The Last Of Us Season 2’s Audience Score Was So Low On Rotten Tomatoes

The polarized reception to The Last of Us season 2 mirrors the reception to the game it’s based on. The first Last of Us game was unanimously lauded as a masterpiece, but the second one provoked unprecedented levels of hate from the loudest corners of the internet. Critics and open-minded gamers fell in love with The Last of Us Part II’s challenging, morally complex narrative, and the groundbreaking device of making us play as our own worst enemy, effectively forcing us to empathize with Joel’s killer, Abby.

But some players refused to let the game manipulate their emotions, and remained stubbornly anti-Abby (which led to a social media hate campaign against real-life human being Laura Bailey). Some players didn’t even make it past Joel’s death. Once he was killed off so early in the game, and so gruesomely and unceremoniously (which is the point!), a lot of players turned off the game and refused to keep playing. Others made it through Ellie’s campaign, but quit when they realized they’d have to replay her three days in Seattle from Joel’s killer’s perspective.

The same thing happened with the TV show. Audiences had gotten so attached to Joel that they felt personally slighted when they had to watch him get beaten to death with a golf club. Kaitlyn Dever gave an incredible, nuanced, deeply sympathetic performance as Abby, just like Bailey had done in the game, but some audiences just couldn’t overlook the brutality of Joel’s death, and resented The Last of Us itself as a result.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made of both The Last of Us Part II (uneven pacing) and The Last of Us season 2 (a brazen lack of subtlety), but you also can’t ignore the fact that they were both targeted by review-bombing campaigns. The “go woke, go broke” crowd had a field day with Abby’s muscular physique in the game and Ellie’s “I’m gonna be a dad” line in the TV show, so the audience scores were dragged down by the same petty campaigning that tanked Captain Marvel and The Last Jedi’s audience ratings.

As someone who absolutely loves the game, I thought season 2 was a pretty bad adaptation. Mazin removed the game’s biggest surprise and put it right upfront, which effectively ruined the impact of the story. In the game, we don’t know why Abby killed Joel until we’ve already murdered all her friends. But in the TV show, we find out why Abby wants to kill Joel before she even kills him. That might be the greatest twist in gaming history — it ties the entire saga together in an endless cycle of eye-for-an-eye punishment — and the TV show gave it away right from the jump. From then on, the story couldn’t possibly have the same impact on TV viewers that it did on gamers.

Despite The Reception, The Last Of Us Season 3 Needs To Focus On Abby’s Story

After the audience reception took a nosedive in season 2, HBO executives might be getting nervous going into season 3, second-guessing their approach to the show, but the only way out is forward. In the game, you don’t fully understand the story until you’ve seen both sides of it — you need to see Abby’s storyline to appreciate the depth and complexity of Ellie’s storyline, and vice versa — so it would be very unwise for HBO to change course before completing that arc.

Based on all the set leaks we’ve seen, it looks as though The Last of Us season 3 is going full steam ahead with Abby’s story. That means we’ll see Lev and Yara, the symbolic sailboat, and maybe even the dreaded Rat King, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

How Abby’s Story Can Change The Perception Around The Last Of Us Season 2

The genius of the game is that playing as Abby completely recontextualizes the first half of the story. When you go back and replay Ellie’s three days in Seattle after playing Abby’s, it’s a totally different experience. So, there’s a chance that a great season 3 could lead to The Last of Us season 2 being reappraised.

Maybe all the divisive changes that Mazin made in season 2 are setting up some incredible payoffs in season 3. Having seen The Last of Us season 2, and heard the themes spelled out in countless lines of dialogue, I highly doubt Mazin is playing 4D chess. But I love Abby’s story, and I love her relationship with Lev, and I can’t wait to see The Last of Us season 3 bring it to life.

The Last of Us

8/10

Release Date

January 15, 2023

Network

HBO

Showrunner

Craig Mazin

Directors

Craig Mazin, Peter Hoar, Jeremy Webb, Ali Abbasi, Mark Mylod, Stephen Williams, Jasmila Žbanić, Liza Johnson, Nina Lopez-Corrado