Joel and Ellie’s journey is just beginning. HBO’s The Last of Us is returning for a second season of post-apocalyptic adventures.
Based on the 2013 video game of the same name, the series follows Pedro Pascal as Joel, a grizzled survivor tasked with transporting Bella Ramsey’s Ellie across the country, 20 years after a zombie-like fungus, cordyceps, wiped out much of civilization. On their journey to deliver Ellie — who is immune to the disease — to those planning to use her to create a cure, the two form a surrogate father-daughter bond while facing numerous threats, human and non-human.
Upon the show’s premiere in January 2023, the series — cocreated by Craig Mazin and the game’s writer and creative director, Neil Druckmann — was renewed for season 2 after only two of the season’s nine episodes had aired.
“I’m humbled, honored, and frankly overwhelmed that so many people have tuned in and connected with our retelling of Joel and Ellie’s journey,” Druckman — who is also co-president of the video game company Naughty Dog — said in a statement to Variety at the time. “The collaboration with Craig Mazin, our incredible cast & crew, and HBO exceeded my already high expectations. Now we have the absolute pleasure of being able to do so again with season two! On behalf of everyone at Naughty Dog & PlayStation, thank you!”
A sequel to The Last of Us video game was released in 2020, which picks up with the story’s main duo a few years after the original’s events. Not to mention, it features a major twist that is still divisive among fans. While talks of a third game have been rumored, Druckmann revealed that he and Mazin are sticking to the material they have, for now.
“We won’t run into the same issue as Game of Thrones since Part II doesn’t end on a cliffhanger,” he shared in a January 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, referring to how their fellow hit HBO series surpassed the plot of its source material book series by author George R.R. Martin.
Mazin — who created the HBO miniseries Chernobyl — added to his partner’s statement, telling THR, “I don’t have any interest in spinning-plates-go-on-forever. When it becomes a perpetual motion machine, it just can’t help but get kind of … stupid. Endings mean everything to me.”
The Last of Us Part II packs in a lot more story than its predecessor. Luckily for fans dying for more of the show, Mazin teased that the series’ team may need more than one more season to properly portray Part II’s events.
“The story that remains, that continues forth in the work that Naughty Dog’s done on the second game, it a lot,” Mazin said in a January 2023 interview with Collider. “Probably the amount of remaining story would take us more than a season to tell. But definitely, I don’t see this as something that runs on and on and on. We don’t have that ambition. Our ambition is to tell the story that exists, as best as we can, in a different medium.”
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