As the first season of The Last of Us show from HBO is about to air next month, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss and theorize how the production team will approach the highly controversial hot topic of the beloved game's more divisive sequel, The Last of Us Part II. The game caused quite the stir back in 2020 upon its release, as a large portion of the fan base felt disappointed and even insulted by some aspects of Part II's story. And while there are those of us who defend the game and liked the bold choices the writers took with the sequel, I'm not going to pretend I don't see why the story did not connect with every player.
However, as a soon-to-be Bachelor of Arts with a degree in Film and Television, graduating tomorrow on the 19th, and as an aspiring screenwriter who just so happened to write their thesis on adapting video games into television, I felt like pitching how I would personally adapt the story of The Last of Us Part II. In fact, I think I have a fairly simple idea how the story could be restructured into a television format without really changing any key plot points but still making the story more digestible for a broader audience and even for those who did not originally enjoy Part II.
My relationship with the games
First, I feel it might be necessary to quickly touch upon my relationship with the source material, as I've found that it is important to know such things in order to understand why and how people adapt stories.
I've been a fan of Naughty Dog's games from a very young age, since I first played Uncharted 2 on the PlayStation 3. I preordered the Collector's Edition of Uncharted 3 back in 2011 as one of the very few games I've ever preordered, and also played The Last of Us on its release in 2013. It had been one of my most anticipated games, and I can still recall the absolute overwhelming excitement my teenage self had felt when I had first seen the initial reveal trailer.
And the game did not disappoint. It quickly became my favorite game ever and one I played through multiple times, even on the hardest settings. (First on Survivor and then Grounded, an even harder difficulty option added later into the game as DLC.) Even though I'm someone who rarely has the patience to complete the same game more than once, and definitely not five times. I even went and bought the remastered Part I edition released this year for the PS5.
So, the sequel was obviously also a game I was very much looking forward to back in 2020. Before the release I saw some reviews come out that were not entirely positive, especially when it came to the story, such as SkillUp's video. I had also unfortunately seen a few of the leaks, which managed to spoil some scenes for me. Still, I wanted to see how the story would unfold, and played the game from beginning to end in about a week.
While some of the turns the story took did make me feel conflicted at first, I ultimately found that I still truly connected with the game and understood what the developers were going for. Even though I can see why a lot of people reacted negatively to a lot of things in the game, I personally thought that it was successful in telling its story in a way that made me feel everything the writers probably intended. Many of those emotions weren't necessarily positive ones, but just as a movie like the infamous Soviet war film Come And See can be engrossing and impactful while being unpleasant to watch, I do think video games can and should experiment more with directly challenging their players emotionally. Otherwise, can we truly claim that games can be art, if we aren't willing to be confronted by them?
Regardless, let's just say that Part II did not kill my interest in the series. When it was announced that HBO was officially starting production for a TV adaptation of the games, with the creator of Chernobyl Craig Mazin as the showrunner and with the lead writer and director of both games Neil Druckmann writing for the show, I was immediately intrigued. In fact, once I decided back in 2021 that I would write my thesis about video game adaptations, I was hoping the series would come out early enough that I could use it as an example. Unfortunately for me we have to wait until January 15th next year for the show to air, which at this point feels soon, but is also late enough that I could not write my thesis about it. Instead I used the Paramount+ Halo show as an example, although I was not nearly as invested in it or the source material for that matter. (Which is also why I eventually kind of just rushed finishing and editing the thesis, simply looking to get it done in order to graduate while also working at a TV production company. The final outcome was not as good I would have wanted but thankfully neither is it that relevant to my career.)
Now that we've established a bit what my relationship to the games is, we can actually get into how I would adapt Part II in a television show.
Needless to say, the rest of this post will include major spoilers for both The Last of Us Part I and II, and potentially for the show. You have been warned.
Understanding the challenges
As mentioned before, The Last of Us Part II is a divisive subject that has split the fanbase in two. Some people absolutely hate the game while others love it, and as is often the case in online discourse, both sides think they're in the right and often view the others as idiots. Some might say that the people who hate the game are misogynistic bigots or entitled crybabies while others might claim that the defenders of the sequel are blind followers of a "woke" agenda or pretentious fans licking Neil CUCKmann's boots. Of course not everyone views the topic in such a black and white way, but on a surface level that is the image one might get.
In case you haven't played the game, here's a quick summary: The game takes place five years after the first game's main character Joel sabotaged an effort to develop a vaccine against the dangerous Cordyceps infection by killing the head surgeon and a bunch of other people from a rebel group called the Fireflies to save his surrogate daughter Ellie. Barely two hours into the game, he is brutally killed as a way of getting revenge by a former Firefly, Abby. In turn, Ellie, who is immune to the Cordyceps infection and was also the reason for Joel's killing spree against the Fireflies, decides to seek revenge and travels to Seattle, home to a paramilitary group called the WLF, who Abby is now also a part of. Over three days, Ellie hunts down people from Abby's group of friends who took part in killing Joel, taking them out one by one. From time to time there are flashbacks of Ellie and Joel from the five years between the two games, where Ellie slowly finds out the truth about what Joel did, leading to a falling out. Eventually, once all of Abby's former comrades are dead, she seeks out Ellie in an old theatre and shoots one of her friends, and is about to shoot Ellie as well, when the game suddenly cuts and jumps five years back in time.
The player then is given control of a young Abby on the day Joel kills her father, the head surgeon of the Fireflies. Jumping again forward in time, the player is made to play the same three days in Seattle from Abby's perspective, as she struggles to find peace after getting her vengeance. She is saved from a hanging by two kids from a hostile faction, the Seraphites, or "Scars" as the WLF call them, and eventually decides to take them in under her protection. All the while she begins to realize that Ellie is hunting down her friends, but Abby focuses her energy on helping the young Seraphites Lev and Yara and trying to escape Seattle to find more Fireflies. She saves Lev from getting killed in a large confrontation between the WLF and the Seraphites, but Yara is gunned down, and upon returning back to their home base in an old aquarium, they find Abby's ex-boyfriend and his pregnant wife dead, killed by Ellie. Together Abby and Lev track down Ellie to the theatre, where the story catches up and the player has to fight against Ellie as Abby in a bloody confrontation. Abby ultimately bests Ellie and threatens to kill her girlfriend Dina, but is swayed by Lev to spare them.
Finally the game jumps forward in time once more, with Ellie and Dina living a fairly peaceful life on a farm. However, Ellie is still haunted by Joel's death and leaves to get her vengeance after learning about Abby's potential location from Joel's brother Tommy, despite Dina urging her to let the matter go. She eventually finds Abby and Lev imprisoned and tortured by a sadistic slaver gang and frees them, only to soon after demand that Abby fight her or she will kill Lev. Reluctantly, Abby fights Ellie on a beach, but in her malnourished state nearly gets drowned by her in the shallows. A memory of Joel makes Ellie change her mind at the last second, and she lets Abby and Lev live and leave on a boat.
One last flashback shows a scene from the night before Joel's death, where Ellie and Joel talk about what happened five years earlier and make the first steps towards healing their relationship. Back in present day, upon returning back to the farm, Ellie finds it empty, as Dina has left her, angered and disappointed by Ellie's choice to seek vengeance despite it hurting the people around her. Ellie tries to play her guitar, which was gifted to her by Joel years earlier and a now remains as a constant reminder of him, but struggles as she has lost two fingers during her fight against Abby. The last we see of Ellie is her leaving the guitar and the farm behind, towards an uncertain future.
After playing the game myself, consuming a good number of reviews (both positive and negative), following the online discourse and watching many looong video essays on the subject (my personal favorites being from Hello Future Me, Sophie from Mars and especially Ladyknightthebrave), I think it's fair to say that I can sum up two major points of contention and possible issues for an adaptation of the story. These being 1. character building and 2. pacing.
When I say character building, I don't mean increasing levels and stats like in a roleplaying game, but instead I'm talking about how the characters are portrayed in the story and how we learn about them when playing. As the game introduces a new secondary protagonist, Abby, it is obviously important for the writers to get us to care about her, but for many players the story failed in getting to empathize with her for a number of reasons.
That first being obviously the fact that she kills the main character of the first game in the beginning of the second one by brutally beating him with a golf club, as his surrogate daughter Ellie can only hopelessly watch and plead for mercy.
It is truly gruesome and heartbreaking scene that unsurprisingly turned a lot of fans of the first game off from the sequel. To some, it felt like the writers spitting in their face by killing off a beloved character in such a cold way, even the trailers had mislead people to believe Joel would be a bigger part of Ellie's journey. The developers even went so far with their misdirection, that for one trailer they swapped another character's model for Joel's and had the voice actor Troy Baker record a piece of dialogue for the trailer, while the line is actually spoken by a different character in the game.
To add insult to injury, after ten hours of playing as Ellie on her quest for revenge, just as she's about to confront Joel's killer, the game suddenly jumps back in time and makes you play another ten hours as Abby before getting back to the scene where the two storylines meet. This again was another big sticking point for many, as it was difficult for a lot of players to suddenly care about someone that had killed their favorite character earlier in the story and had been portrayed as a villain for the first half of the game. While I ultimately did really like Abby, her story and relationship with the boy Lev, I do honestly understand why many others would struggle with her section of the game.
Switching characters halfway through the game also relates to the second big issue: pacing. As anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of storytelling can tell you, usually stories are structured in a way where after the beginning introductions we have rising tension towards the climax of the story until the narrative question (e.g. "will Ellie get her revenge or find empathy?") is resolved and the tension is relieved as things wrap up. Obviously that is a massive simplification and all stories have momentary peaks and lulls in action, but what The Last of Us Part II does is like resetting the whole pace of the story back to Act One right before the climax. It's not hard to see why that hurts the pacing, when players feel like they need to slog through another ten hours in the shoes of a character they've been conditioned to hate, only to get back to the climax where they already were before.
Another issue with pacing comes right at the end, where the game kind of has two different climaxes that are in many ways quite similar. First at the theatre, where you fight Ellie as Abby, who wins and lets the other live. Then we get what at first feels like an epilogue but then leads into another fairly lengthy gameplay section full of combat against a completely new faction, ending with another climactic fight. The second time you fight Abby as Ellie, who wins and lets the other live.
In a way, the biggest issue with the story of Part II that leaves a lot of people with a sour taste in their mouth is the structure of the narrative. Even the problems with people not liking Abby and her friends are largely due to the structuring of their story, but it is also why the HBO show could do their story justice being simply shuffling things around, and I'm going to outline exactly how.
Outlining future seasons
I think based on the trailers and common sense it is fairly easy to assume, that the first season of the The Last of Us show is going to adapt the story of the first game. Not only is the first game the right length, only around 10 hours, but its story is also fairly simple and concise enough to be told within nine roughly hour long episodes of television. The game is not a big +30 hour RPG with tons of side quests, a large cast of characters and and mountains of lore that could make adapting difficult, and honestly as the game is already very cinematic, it is a good fit for a TV adaptation. From what I can tell, they will hopefully stay fairly true to the source material when it comes to major plot beats while fleshing out the characters, especially supporting ones, with additional flashbacks or other dramatic scenes, and filling in blanks between the time skips.
However, any future seasons are a big question mark. Will season 2 be The Last of Us Part II, or something completely different to try and steer away from the backlash? Will they split the two halves of Part II into two seasons, or try to tell the whole story in one season? Obviously it is impossible to say for certain as we have no confirmed amount of seasons and don't even know if the first one will be successful enough to warrant a second one (although I would be surprised if we didn't get at least a second season.)
While we don't yet know what direction the series will take, this is how I think it could be done: Instead of doing Part II in the second season, have the second season instead cover the years between the games, leading up to Joel's death in the final episode. We have a whole season to get more of Joel and Ellie, while their relationship starts to slowly crack as Ellie's doubts about Joel grow and she ultimately finds out the truth. Meanwhile introduce Abby in the first episode of Season 2 to let the viewers get to know her and empathize with her before she kills Joel all the while building her as this potential looming threat to him throughout the season. Imagine being someone who has not played the games, watching the show and getting to know Abby for the first time, understanding her motivation while also hoping that maybe, just maybe she will be able to let go and forgive, maybe even join forces with Ellie and Joel against a common enemy. Only to then have that taken away from you as she kills him at the end of the season.
You would probably need to add some additional drama for the second season, like maybe there's a massive raider group or a horde of infected that's coming for Tommy's town, and the viewer is led to think that is the true threat and antagonist of the season, even when all the while the real threat is Abby. Maybe Abby could even infiltrate the town and work together with Joel for a longer period of time while trying to find an opportunity to get her revenge, similarly to what happens at the beginning of Part II but only for multiple days instead of one short meeting. Abby could get to know Joel a bit, maybe even have her doubt herself until something pushes her over the edge and she kills Joel in a fit of rage.
The reason the game does not want to reveal Abby's side of the story too early is because you're meant to empathize with Ellie for the first half. The developers want you to feel the same grief, rage and drive for vengeance as Ellie does, to treat Abby and her friends as "the other", the enemy. That way the game can then confront those feelings later and try to earn some empathy for Abby, until she is no longer just some strange new character but a rounded, flawed person. It is also why you need to spend such a long time with Abby, because if her section was only an hour or two, there is a very slim chance many people would truly begin to care about her like they do about Ellie. Which is already an unfair situation, since people had the whole first game to grow to love Joel and Ellie. However, because the game makes you truly live life in Abby's shoes for a good long time, for those whom the story worked, they hopefully felt conflicted about Ellie trying to kill Abby and vice versa when the two finally meet. For example, at the end, I did not want to kill Abby, but neither did I want Ellie to die. (Which is also why I don't agree with people saying that the game tries to make you feel bad or ashamed about things you had no choice to do, as there is a distinction between the character and the player. I am not Ellie, or Abby, and they are characters with their own agency in the story.)
Yet as TV and video games are two different mediums, their needs are also different. While the game wants you to be in the shoes of the character you are controlling (again, this does not mean you are the character, but you are experiencing the world through their eyes), a viewer's relationship to a character in a TV show is different as they are not directly involved in the story. There often is a larger separation to a character in a non-interactive format like TV or film, which can work in it the mediums favor. For example, we don't have to agree with someone like Tony Soprano doing reprehensible things in a show to still enjoy watching, as we as the audience are only innocent bystanders instead of active participants. Which is why in the Last of Us TV show you could have those conflicting emotions and storylines of following both Abby and Ellie on their quests for revenge while having a more complete understanding of the situation than the characters and therefore not necessarily fully being behind their actions. There would not really be a need to hide Abby's side of the story in the same way the game does, and instead the viewer could always grasp the full tragedy of the events as they unfold.
Switching between different storylines and points of view is also easier in a medium like TV, where you can easily jump back and forth between two characters from scene to scene. In a game, especially one with any progression systems like weapon updates or skill points, jumping from character to character like that needs to be done with more care, so the player does not feel a sense of whiplash and they can get accustomed to playing with their character. Although even in screenwriting for television you do have to be mindful of not jumping around too much, especially if it interrupts a story arc's flow too much or there is an important climax happening, but it is still usually easier to do than in a video game. That's why I think the third season could be most of Part II's story, only instead of splitting it into two separate halves, you could tell both sides of the story simultaneously. You could once again have those similarly conflicting emotions of both sympathizing with Ellie's thirst for revenge, while at the same time being able to witness how Abby does not get a sense of satisfaction even after avenging her own father. The two storylines could inform and affect each other dynamically throughout the season, until the two meet up, and hopefully the story has given the audience that tragic sense of not wanting either character to die.
However, there is perhaps one slight change I might make to the ending. I understand why the game has two climactic fights between the same characters, as both Abby and Ellie need to have their moment of giving up their vengeance for something else. Abby is given meaning in her life by Lev, who influences her decision not to kill Ellie and Dina. Whereas Ellie was robbed of that choice in their first fight, so she needs have that moment where she also lets go, while also establishing the stakes of what she has to lose with Dina and her baby on the farm.
But, I do think there might be a way to have those similar beats without it feeling too much like repetition. Perhaps after the first fight where Abby beats Ellie but lets her live, instead of having a massive time skip, Dina is hurt, and Ellie needs to decide whether she stays to help her or goes after Abby. Even though Ellie's in a ton of pain after being pummeled to submission by Abby, she chooses to go after her, and has a similar moment where she threatens to kill Lev if Abby does not fight her. However, just like in the game, at the last second she changes her mind, lets Abby and Lev go and then rushes back to Dina, who is understandably furious at Ellie for abandoning her and has left the theatre with Tommy.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but that is something that just now I came up with. However they would choose to end that storyline, I think my other suggestions of restructuring the plot could work well in television adaptation of The Last of Us.
Regardless, I am now very interested to see what the first seasons is like and I might even do episode by episode breakdowns and reviews on this blog once they start coming out next month. In the meantime, I might write a similar piece about how I would adapt God of War into a television series, now that are the news of Amazon starting production of a show for that.
Image source: All images in this post are from morphinapg from Reddit.
