'Last of Us’ Is No Longer Just a Zombie Show
Grief and guilt take center stage in a new era of survival in HBO’s ‘Last of Us’ Season 2
Let’s be honest: the mushroom apocalypse was never really about mushrooms. From the moment Joel carried Ellie out of that Firefly hospital in Season 1, The Last of Us quietly shifted its thesis. Yes, the infected still lurch in the shadows, grotesque and ever-evolving, but the show’s most haunting monsters have always been the people—what we do to survive, what we justify, and what we’re willing to live with afterward.
With the Season 2 premiere, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann throw the gauntlet down: this isn’t a survival horror series anymore. It’s a psychological drama wrapped in apocalypse drag. The infected are still here—but they’re background noise to the real disease that’s set in: guilt. The kind that festers for five years until it warps every relationship, every glance, every unspoken word.
Welcome back to Jackson, Wyoming. Everything looks fine. That's how you know it’s not.
The Apocalypse Is Quiet Now—That’s Scarier
Season 2 opens with a one-two punch of grief and reckoning. First, we meet Abby—played with simmering menace by Kaitlyn Dever—mourning the fallout of Joel’s Season 1 bloodbath. Her vengeance isn’t loud, not yet. It’s quiet, coiled, inevitable. Then we rewind to Ellie’s final question to Joel five years ago: “Swear to me.” He does. She knows he’s lying. That lie, festering in silence, has become the central rot of Season 2.
When we return to the present, Joel and Ellie are still in Jackson, a town that feels like a Pinterest board of pre-apocalypse nostalgia: soft lighting, circuit breakers, church dances, functioning government. But the heart of the show is malfunctioning. Joel and Ellie barely speak. Their once-crackling chemistry is gone, replaced with a tension that neither will name. Ellie doesn’t trust Joel. Joel can’t confess. It’s a slow, suffocating silence—and it’s absolutely riveting.
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Joel Goes to Therapy, Ellie Goes to War
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the show’s biggest flex: Joel, grizzled apocalypse dad, in therapy. Not with a licensed professional, of course. This is Jackson—we barter weed, not insurance cards. But Catherine O’Hara’s Gail is a revelation: sardonic, wise, and deeply wounded. Her sessions with Joel crack him open in a way few scenes ever have. Not with melodrama, but restraint. Pascal plays Joel like a man holding back a tidal wave with a wall of dry wit and whiskey.
“I saved her,” he says, when pressed about the Fireflies. Not “I doomed humanity.” Not “I murdered everyone.” Just: I saved her. It's the thesis of the show in four words—and the psychological cornerstone that everything else will either crumble from or be built upon.
Meanwhile, Ellie goes on patrol with Dina (the magnetic Isabela Merced), and the show dips back into video-game territory. But even here, it’s not really about the action. It’s about how Ellie flirts, how she jokes, how she slices into an old bite mark to hide who she is. The infected are scarier now, sure—there’s a new variant that stalks, hesitates, thinks—but that’s not the focus. The real horror is Ellie’s isolation.
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Love, Actually (In the Apocalypse)
The New Year’s Eve dance sequence is where the episode shifts from great to excellent. Ellie and Dina, surrounded by fairy lights and fiddles, finally let themselves be teenagers. There’s longing. There’s a kiss. There’s a homophobic asshole, of course—because even in the apocalypse, people find time for bigotry. But mostly, there’s just feeling. The kind of raw, unresolved, hopeful emotion that most post-apocalyptic shows ignore in favour of another CGI explosion.
This is where The Last of Us separates itself from the pack. It’s not interested in action for action’s sake. It’s interested in what happens after the action—what lingers in the silence.
The Monster at the Gate Isn’t a Clicker
The episode ends with Abby and her crew looking down at Jackson. “We’re finding him,” she says. “When we kill him, we kill him slowly.” It’s the kind of line that would feel cliché in any other show. Here? It lands like a threat to the soul of The Last of Us. Because we know what’s coming. We know that vengeance will burn everything to the ground. And we know, too, that it’s earned.
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This season isn’t about a cure. It’s not about saving the world. It’s about what happens when you break it beyond repair—and then try to keep living in it. Season 1 ended with a lie. Season 2 begins with the cost of that lie. And if this first episode is any indication, the most devastating battles this season won’t be against the infected.
They’ll be inside the walls, and they’ll be very, very quiet.
The next episode of Last of Us airs every Monday at 6:30 am IST on Jio Hotstar.