The challenges of translating The Last of Us to the television audience | The DeanBeat

There are many times when I’ve fantasized about being the game director for The Last of Us, the great video game from Naughty Dog, and the executive product of The Last of Us television series on HBO, which just wrapped up its second season.

I would have made better use of Joel in both the second game and the second season of the show. I would have cast different actors in the lead roles — focusing more on those who look more like the characters in the games. But the first season of the show was so good that I made my peace with the decisions of Neil Druckmann, game director, and Craig Mazin, the co-creator and showrunner. I was a frustrated fan at first, and now I’m a defender of the show, as my attitudes have changed.

After all, in converting the game to a show, they gave due respect to the game series which is my favorite of all time. The first season was riveting and it veered into more than the game with the third episode, in the love story of Bill and Frank, which was just a tiny bit of the game. Hollywood has not always had such respect for game properties, and this respect was a nod to gaming’s growth into a mass culture.

As a game, the original game of 2014 caught my attention because it was a survivalist zombie narrative where every fight was a struggle to the death — with hand-to-hand fighting so intense that it wasn’t about mowing down hordes of zombies like so many other games. It was about sneaking up on zombies in an almost cowardly way and slitting their throats with a knife — up close and personal. And while I was hooked by the gritty action, I stayed for the characters and the bookend beginning and ending, where the beginning of the game resonates so perfectly with the end of the game.

I watched these creators take this favorite game and make it into one of my favorite TV shows. I am, alas, merely a fan, where I can only receive the result of their entertainment labor. The second game severely tested my loyalty as a fan, as it killed off characters I loved without mercy or ceremony just to make the point that it was a dangerous world where life hung by threads.

And so I expected the tragedy of the second episode where we were all robbed of a character too soon, seemingly with no chance to say goodbye. I was presently surprised at the big budget of that episode where the town of Jackson, Wyoming, defended it against a giant attack from the infected. There were nods to the game’s hard bosses, like when Tommy takes on the Bloater in that fight (but of course that fight was out of place in the narrative). It was a panoramic battle of the sort we hadn’t expected at a time of shows with diminishing budgets.

There were divergences from the game, with the addition of a therapist, deletions of major fighting sequences, the shortening of stealth scenes of infiltration that took hours in the game, and other things that told me the show makers thought that the game’s repetitive action shouldn’t be translated to the TV screen.

In some ways, I dreaded the reaction of other fans to Season 2. Ellie comes out into the spotlight of the show as a lesbian, though if folks had played The Last of Us: Left Behind, this would not have been a surprise. The show and the game handled this topic with sensitivity, like any love story. And it made me proud to see the creators’ and actors’ attempt to hold off the criticisms that such things were too “woke.”

It took bravery to make these characters and this love story narrative, which ought to be considered normal, in our current climate. And while I hated parts of The Last of Us: Part 2 so much, I came to understand them and how they were a part of the simple idea that that all of our actions have consequences — and Part 2 of the game series is all about those consequences. As I finished the game, I understood this and my own hatred of parts of the game abated. It is interesting to see this kind of reaction play out with the presumably larger TV audience.

I also wondered how it was strategically important for the creators to decide exactly where to end the second season, as we can expect multiple seasons to continue for the show. In fact, just as happened with Game of Thrones, we can expect HBO to race ahead of the game series and go into fresh narrative territory that doesn’t come from any game.

I can now see that the structure looks like it has a logical break at the beginning of the fight at the theater in Seattle. This season had only seven episodes, yet it sped through the content of the second game at an alarming pace. It shortened long firefights and focused on the drama between characters like Joel and Ellie and Ellie and Dina and Ellie and Jesse. That made some people think it was too boring, with not enough action. But this game was never about the zombies. It was about interaction between people.

There were some unforgettable moments like the confrontation between Ellie and Nora, where we see that Ellie has changed in a way that there is no turning back. I was surprised at first they skipped the huge boss fight and kept Nora in as a dramatic moment. But the showrunner is showing his bias: show more humans, not more zombies. I thought the actor that played Jesse, a rare Asian American character who was like a Marlboro Man of the West, lived up to the game’s character.

The disappearance of beloved characters was meant to tell us that life is short in the dangerous world. And yet by ending it at episode seven in the theater scene, the creators reversed that message by making it the climax of the entire season. Indeed, in the second game, there wasn’t really a natural stopping point midway through the events.

I look forward to Abby’s story in the coming third season, and I could expect the final clash of characters to provide fodder for even a fourth season. But if there’s anything I fear most, it is that this show will be over before I know it. So my request to the showrunner is to slow it down, capture more of the events of the games, and give us more. Don’t rush through this and find that you have to invent a whole new story like the showrunners did in Game of Thrones. I guess this series of games and shows has taught me to fear endings.

Should you play the games? Should you watch both seasons. Of course. They had me at the beginning.