Excitement for The Last of Us Season 2 is growing, with the latest trailer revealing new insight into how faithful the upcoming episodes will be to its source material.
After HBO's The Last of Us adapted Naughty Dog's popular video game to critical acclaim, it was only a matter of time before a second season was commissioned to tackle the sequel, The Last of Us Part II.
Production on Season 2 of The Last of Us recently wrapped in Canada, and fans are starting to speculate what story from the second game the new season will cover.
What Plot Points From The Last of Us Part 2 Will Season 2 Cover?
It's well-known amongst players of the game that The Last of Us Part 2 is a much larger story to tackle than its predecessor. Writer and executive producer Craig Mazin has said he expects it will take "multiple seasons" to cover everything in The Last of Us Part 2.
The second game also takes creative liberties with the timeline of its story. The Last of Us Part 2 takes place after a five-year time jump from the end of the first game, with the sequel mostly covering three days in Seattle, from the perspective of two different characters.
Judging by what has been shown so far in trailers for The Last of Us Season 2, it appears the new season will be sticking very closely to what has been laid out in the game, with some scenes looking to be one-for-one recreations of the source material.
Given what has been shown so far in trailers and on-set, here are some of the plot points The Last of Us Season 2 will likely cover:
Warning - The rest of this article contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2 (game) and HBO's The Last of Us.
Time in Jackson
The Last of Us Part 2 opens in the Jackson settlement, where Joel and Ellie have been living with Joel's brother, Tommy, for five years since the end of the first game.
It seems like Season 2 will open similarly, with the trailer including shots of an older Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) living in the Jackson settlement during winter.
Fans had previously gotten a peek at Kaitlyn Dever's Abby, but the trailer offered the first real full look at the character when she approaches the Jackson settlement to hunt down Joel and is attacked by a horde of infected on the way.
It is shortly after this scene that Joel's death occurs at the hands of Abby. While this specific scene is not included in the trailer for spoiler reasons, it is the major catalyst that sets up the second game and causes Ellie to travel to Seattle and seek revenge - so it will very likely be covered early on in Season 2.
Seattle
Following the controversial death of Joel, which is just one of the shocking scenes the show is sure to adapt, the game follows Ellie's quest for vengeance, which is split across three days in Seattle.
It seems, from the scenes in the trailer, that at least Day 1 of Ellie's time in Seattle will be covered in Season 2 of The Last of Us. Many of the events from this day, including Ellie's serenading of her girlfriend, Dina, and the attack from the infected in the subway tunnel, seem to have been filmed.
The latest trailer also includes a first look at the Seraphites, aka Scars, who are a new and dangerous religious group in Seattle, identifiable by scars on their faces. Ellie doesn't encounter Scars until Day 2 in Seattle, but their inclusion could hint that Season 2 will cover Abby's side of the story as well.
In The Last of Us Part 2, players cover Ellie's three days in Seattle, followed by Abby's, meaning the timeline jumps mid-way through the game. One of the big questions heading into The Last of Us Season 2 is whether the series will follow suit. However, some scenes in the trailer indicate the series will go in chronological order instead.
Scenes showing Abby kneeling by a grave, Scars hunting in the forest, and a look at Jeffrey Wright's Isaac torturing a prisoner, are all events that occur during Abby's Day 1 in Seattle. This suggests the TV series will swap back and forth between both Ellie and Abby's timelines.
Flashbacks
To make things even more cryptic, The Last of Us Part 2 jumps between multiple timelines, some in the present day with nineteen-year-old Ellie, and other times it will return to the five-year gap between the first and second games, to fill in what happened between Joel and Ellie.
Some of these scenes also appear to have been filmed for The Last of Us Season 2. In particular, a scene showing Joel teaching Ellie how to play an acoustic guitar, and then a scene between Joel and Ellie on the porch of his house, both occur as flashbacks throughout the game and were included in the teaser trailer.
What Will Be Changed in The Last of Us Season 2?
While The Last of Us Season 1 was a very close adaptation of the events of the video game it wasn't afraid to deviate and, when it did, this sometimes resulted in the best material of the season, such as the much-talked-about expansion of the queer romance between Bill and Frank.
Creators and co-showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin have both commented on the nature of the TV format allowing them to make changes.
Going into Season 2, Mazin said they "will be doing some things exactly the way they were in the game" and they will "do [some] differently" that will allow them to provide "interesting twists and turns" for new viewers and game fans alike.
The trailer for The Last of Us Season 2 has already previewed one of these changes.
In the opening scene of the game, Joel reveals to his brother Tommy, what he did at the Salt Lake City Hospital to save Ellie. In the TV series, it seems that Joel will instead have this conversation with Catherine O'Hara's mystery new character, who could be filling the role of some kind of therapist.
Druckmann also told Variety that Season 2 of The Last of Us will provide the backstory of characters that they were never able to explore in the game:
"There’s stuff in this season that I’m really excited about — stuff that we hinted at — one scene in particular comes to mind that I think fans of the game will eat up, because it really kind of tells you a lot of backstory of this important character that there wasn’t really a way for us to even do that in the game.”
Marketing material for the season hasn't hinted at who this could be just yet, but The Last of Us characters like the Seraphites' Prophet or Isaac, the leader of the Washington Liberation Front, were never explored fully in the game, so they could potentially get their due here.
Trailers for Season 2 of The Last of Us so far have shown that the series will be, once again, following the source material of the game closely. However, HBO may be leaving out a lot of important scenes from these marketing materials, which makes it hard to judge exactly how far into the plot of the game Season 2 will go.
The Last of Us Season 2 is expected to release in early 2025 on HBO.
