Author: dannystewart99

The Last of Us Season 2 Butchered the Lesson the Game Taught Us

Video games still remain the best way to experience TLOU

The Last of Us Part II is an amazing video game. Though its story choices still remain controversial to this day, the lessons the story teaches are grounded and spectacularly human in a post-apocalyptic wasteland of the United States.

Five years after the game’s initial release, I’ve played through The Last of Us Part II exactly twice. The initial playthrough in 2020 where I experienced the twist and everything that came after for the first gut-wrenching time. The first time I played through it, I respected the game for its choices, liked it but didn’t love it, and didn’t know when the next time I would play it again.

The second time I played through this story was just a few months ago in preparation for HBO’s television adaptation The Last Of Us which was set to tell the first part of the second game.

This second playthrough, knowing what happens to the characters and being able to accept it, made me love the second game and appreciate the story that was being told through it even more.

Ellie’s journey for revenge turning into Abby’s story of redemption and survival teaches us that while the more animalistic qualities of humans can surface, our ability to forgive and love are still what we’re greatest at.

I got caught up on the season finale of The Last of Us Season 2 the other day. After watching seven episodes (which is too short of a season, but I digress), it’s safe to say that the way this story is experienced is still best told on gaming consoles rather than on television.

This blog will get into spoiler territory for both the show and the game, so if you want to stay fresh on those, this is your time to escape. You’ve been warned.

One of the biggest issues I had with the show version of The Last of Us Part II was when and how Abby is introduced.

Abby, portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever in the television show, is introduced in the very first episode of the season. While game Abby is also introduced early on, you don’t know who she is, what she’s doing, or how she’s involved in the plot at all.

If you have subtitles on for the early game of TLOU2, Abby and her crew are listed as “Woman” or “Man.”

Despite disagreeing with when Abby was introduced, I wanted to let the season play out to see how they’d balance the two stories the game features: Ellie and Abby.

However, the show continues to follow Ellie’s perspective from the game. Abby gets her moments in the first two episodes, making even players of the game surprised at how the story was experienced differently between game and show:

The above tweet was my reaction to the big moment from both game and show that has divided the fan base for five years: Abby killing Joel less than an hour into the video game and less than two episodes into the second season.

I would argue that the battle in Jackson is cooler than the basic patrols that lead to the brutal moment in the game, however, the death scene itself is still supreme in the game.

Not just because it’s surprisingly less gratuitous with its violence, but also because we had no idea who Abby was or what was going to happen.

Yes, players of the game and the curious folks who couldn’t help themselves knew what was going to happen before the season even started. However, those that didn’t know what was going to happen knew from Episode 1 of this season who Abby was and what she wants to do because, she just says it:

“When we kill him, we will kill him, slowly.”

While this doesn’t take the stakes out of Joel’s death, Joel’s death works much better when you have no idea who the hell Abby is.

You don’t find out that Abby is the daughter of the doctor in the hospital until halfway through the game, when you finally take over Abby’s perspective after making it to the end of Ellie’s Three-Day Seattle journey.

To that point, which was mirrored almost identically in the show, that’s the first time you see Abby since Joel’s death scene. As Ellie hunts her, she becomes much more of a goal rather than a character until you experience her story yourself.

But let’s break down the game and show versions of the final scene:

They occur almost identically, which I applaud the show for doing. The problem is, since we know who Abby is and who her dad was in the show, there’s even more reason to hate her completely than even be at all interested in what happens next.

In the game, when the perspective changes after this moment and you play as Abby, I’ll never forget my reaction the first time I played.

After that scene cuts to black and you continue again moments later as a young Abby, I threw my controller at my desk and said “Fuck this bitch, I don’t want to get to know her!”

What starts off feeling like just a segment of gameplay that will have you back to Ellie shortly, turns into a full adventure through the same 3-day journey in Seattle from Abby’s perspective.

You’re forced to learn her story, who she is, and what the war between the WLFs and the Seraphites actually looks like from the ground level. When Abby meets Lev and Yara, two Seraphite children, her perspective on “Scars” changes and thus, our perspective on Scars changes as well.

This is all how you grow to actually care about Abby and her story. She protects two of her enemy’s children and risks her reputation and life with the WLFs to save them. You learn that she is a redeemable character as well and that once again, despite the animalistic qualities of revenge, these characters grow, change, love, and forgive.

Because the show told us immediately who Abby was and what her goals were, I fear the audience will not be there for Season 3 of the show. Part of what makes Abby’s story great is the mystery of her from Ellie’s perspective before experiencing Abby’s story for yourself.

The show revealed all the wrong things too quickly and it will affect how Abby’s story is told.

Quickly on the Seraphites vs WLF war, I think the show butchered their introduction as well. Ellie’s encounter with the Seraphites happens like this in the game:

Ellie doesn’t get to know that they have children amongst them, she just sees them as nearly faceless enemies that want to live in the world their way, the no-tech Seraphite way. Anyone that uses firearms is the enemy.

As you play as Ellie, they’re horrifying. You hear them whistle, they barely need light to see, and you can get sniped by a crossbow bolt from anywhere in the dark woods.

You don’t learn more about who they are or that they have children in their ranks until Abby meets Lev and Yara. That’s what makes the Seraphites more interesting. It allows you to see the other side of the fear you experienced when you encountered them as Ellie. You grow to care for them as Abby. It’s a nice duality to the story.

In the show, you’re immediately sympathetic toward the Seraphites. The first scene they’re in shows the massacre of a group of them that includes a child. Ellie and Dina pretty much side with them against the WLFs very quickly because they know the WLF group is the one that kills Joel.

Rather than fear them, you sympathize for them through Ellie’s TV story. This makes Abby’s narrative already weaker heading into the show’s third season. The Seraphite/WLF war is much better through the eyes of Abby rather than Ellie.

So much so, they added in this scene where Ellie nearly gets killed on the Seraphite island right before Isaac’s attack. This moment doesn’t happen in the game. While the writers used it as a tool to show Ellie’s obsessive sense of revenge to get to the aquarium, we didn’t need it. There’s a reason it got cut from the game, it doesn’t really make sense.

I’m not the only one that feels this way.

The island attack is entirely covered in Abby’s side of the story because that’s the climactic conclusion of that storyline before the convergence moment happens and our two characters’ stories come to a head in the theater lobby.

I guess we’ll wait and see how they do Abby’s story in Season 3, but it’s already off to a disjointed and confusing start. While Abby is a controversial character, the strongest aspect to her story is getting to actually care for her.

Because they’ve changed how we view/interpret the WLF and Seraphite war, as well as how Abby is introduced, Abby is already playing from behind further than she already was from her game’s counterpart.

The last thing I’ll talk about is the Joel porch scene:

Game Version
TV Version

While the scene plays out perfectly and nearly identically across both mediums, the timing of it is completely and totally wrong. I guess I can understand from a writing standpoint why you wanted to have this closure moment with Joel before the end of this season because next season will primarily be Abby.

BUT: what makes it work is that this scene is the very last scene in the game. This scene tells us that Joel, even in death, was a figure for Ellie to understand forgiveness. She forgave Joel despite him doing what he did to save her. The third act of the game shows Ellie sacrifice everything, including her fingers and her relationship with Dina, to continue her pursuit of Abby.

This climactic fight between these two comes after playing through Abby’s story. This comes after realizing that Ellie is being extremely stupid in the face of revenge. While yes, we love Joel and part of us still wants Ellie to exact her revenge, Abby is a character we care for and it makes the final conversation with Joel following this fight stick that much more.

Ellie looks back upon this conversation after failing to play the guitar with her now mutilated hand and realizes that despite Joel being taken from her, she herself regrets pursuing Abby. Forgiveness and love outweigh revenge and hate, even in the world of The Last of Us.

Now that Joel’s conversation with Ellie is in the middle of the show, how is that final lesson going to be taught? Ellie is still the main character of TLOU. While we learn Abby’s back story and her reason for fighting, Ellie’s story is the core of the games and show.

Putting this moment where they did hurts the overall payoff of Ellie’s plot and Abby’s plot combined. The Santa Barbara part of the story alone doesn’t deserve a full season because by that point in the game, it goes by quickly because we get what the main lesson is.

However, the conclusion of the game is still strong because of that Joel scene.

Now? They’re going to have to land a potential 4 season show without one of the best scenes both the game and the TV series has offered so far in their arsenal as a final moral.

When Season 3 inevitably premieres on HBO, I will be there on Day 1.

I love the game series and the story too much even if I have to be disappointed with how the television show has allowed it to play out.

If Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are able to pull this out of a nosedive, I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong.

However, as of now after two seasons of the show, it’s clear now more than ever that video games are very much a theatrical medium for storytelling.

Even if you nailed season one of this show as an adaptation to the first game, the overall sentiment in my mind is that The Last of Us is better experienced played vs. watched.

~DS

P.S.

To close out this blog, always listen to Gustavo Santaolalla’s music from this series to calm your nerves:

The big move is coming…

For the first time ever, I won’t have a moving buddy.

I’m feeling a little existential lately.

Call it stress, call it anxiety, call it feeling overwhelmed. Call it whatever you’d like – it’s all the above.

There are a few ingredients in this cacophonous crisis cocktail, but one stands out above the rest. The granddaddy of independence is upon me as I take a gigantic leap into life’s next great adventure: I’m moving out on my own.

For the first time ever, I won’t have a moving buddy. For the first time ever, I will be living by myself.

It’s taken 28 years, but I’m finally out on my own.

For the first 17 years of my life, I shared a bedroom with my older brother. As things go in large Irish Catholic families, all spaces were shared. Bathrooms and bedrooms didn’t belong to anyone individually, you were just thankful to have it.

Coming from a big family, it’s always hard to move away from them, though. When I packed up and moved to college, or across the country, or to my first apartment after college to the next apartment after that – each felt like a big step but I was never going to be alone in any of those moves.

Here’s a rundown of all my moves to this point:

Kennebunkport, ME to Chicago, IL

This was the easiest move of them all, but I’m sure chaotic for my parents. I was a little less than 2-years-old when it happened so I had no control over the situation. No heavy lifting, no removing doors to fit desks through them, no worrying if a trailer was going to unhook from the car and nearly cause a highway pileup accident. I just sat back and ate mush while everybody else did the work.

When I was 5, we moved to a new suburb and that’s where we are to this day. I didn’t have to do much lifting there either, but I had my Woody moving buddy with me at all times:

Suburban Chicago, IL to Columbia, MO

I lived with my best friend from home in college for all four years. Freshman year, we had bunkbeds and shared a bathroom with 10 other guys as well as a janitor who only used our floor’s bathroom out of 8 total floors to take care of his business.

Here’s one of many pictures of the janitor’s feet from under the stall because he was never not using our floor’s bathroom and we all made sure to document the times.

Sophomore year of college, I moved into an apartment for the first time and finally got my own bedroom with a door as well as my own bathroom for the very first time. It took 19 years for that milestone to occur, however, I still had the shared living space to keep me company with my friends. Junior and senior year were the same.

I also brought my Sheriff Woody toy (not the big one pictured above, but a regular-sized Woody) with me to college and to every move since because it never felt right to me that Andy didn’t bring Woody to college with him in Toy Story 3, but I digress.

Columbia, MO/Suburban Chicago, IL to Boston, MA and Providence, RI

I lived and worked in Boston and Rhode Island for two summers to intern for the Pawtucket Red Sox. In Boston, I lived with my aunt and uncle and when I moved to Rhode Island, I lived in a bachelor pad apartment above the garage of an old friend of my dad’s. I became friends with their family and I spent loads of time with them, so I never felt alone. I actually really miss them, they were an awesome hang.

Providence, RI to Suburban Chicago, IL

From there, I moved back into the basement of my parents’ home in suburban Chicago as I looked for full-time work, found a job, looked for apartments, stopped looking for apartments due to a global pandemic, didn’t leave the house because of the global pandemic, and then found a new job over the course of a year and a half.

Suburban Chicago, IL to Chicago, IL

Six months into that job, I bought my first car and considered the idea of an apartment again. Now that lockdowns were lifted and I could spend more time with my friends in the city limits of Chicago, I wanted to be closer to the action. My brother started coaching football at Saint Xavier University and attended classes there too. So we moved in together nearby the university.

Me, my younger brother, one bathroom, and a third-floor 2BR apartment with no central air. We couldn’t get packages delivered to this apartment due to frequent theft. Did I also mention both of our cars were vandalized while living here too? But hey, it was my first apartment after college, my brother’s first apartment ever, and we stayed there for two years. Not as shabby as I made it sound.

Chicago, IL to Chicago, IL

From there, I moved even closer to the action into a 3BR apartment with one of my best friends. This apartment I wrote about in a blog from that summer about finding the perfect apartment. It was his first apartment after college and my first time having a sizeable space to spread out an office and a bedroom to two separate rooms since I work a hybrid schedule. It was a quick L-train ride to my in-office space and it had free street parking. It was also just a great time.

As things go though, I only lived in that apartment for 11 months. My friend moved in with his girlfriend and I had also racked up a not-so-pretty amount of credit card debt.

My options were limited: find a not-so-cheap studio to bide time in and make my debt worse or move back in with my parents to tackle my debt and help my mom as she prepared to have her hip replaced.

There really was only one option.

So here I am, nine months later. My mom’s hip is metal, I’m debt free, I got a raise at work, and I’m finally in a place where I can comfortably move out on my own. But that wasn’t the plan from the get-go when I moved back home.

There was a lot about moving home that was hard, despite my parents so easily allowing me to come back in. I moved into my sister’s old bedroom so I had a door to shut and a place to go to to be alone. I was moving back to our home that hadn’t looked like this since 1998: my parents, my older brother, and me. If only the Bulls were as good now as they were in 1998. At first, it was just the four of us and the adjustment began.

But as the nine months have progressed, all four of my siblings have since moved underneath the same roof again. I love my parents and my siblings to death and they know that, I make sure they know that, but I quickly found out that independence was a priceless commodity I had the last few years.

While not paying rent at my parents’ place, I sent a rent-sized payment to my credit card debt for a few months. I didn’t have to worry about buying my own groceries, but did spend money and sanity on my commutes to the city.

Every plan needed a plan of its own so I could logistically make it work. Going to a concert in the city on the weekend? Celebrating a friend’s birthday or engagement? Maybe just staying a little longer at the office to wait out traffic? Pack a bag with all the essentials, pay for overnight parking in a garage, and sleep on a couch. Again and again.

Every time I drove to the city to hang out and inevitably crash on my friends’ couches over the weekend, one song always ironically shuffled on as I approached the city on the Dan Ryan:

It’s this anthem about a suburban kid who just wants to break free; who feels like he has to escape his town to actually matter. It calls out the dullness of suburban life, while clinging to this dream of something better, somewhere else. I played all nine minutes of it every time, imagining the day I’d finally move back to the city to “get my life back on track.” But that was whenever away.

For the time being, I had to commute further for work and my friends. Like I said, the commute took a toll on me. Not only in having to pay about ~$20 per day to either take the train or drive and park, but in my mental and physical health as well.

To get to the office at the time that I like without traffic or a crowded train, my wake-up alarm is at 4:30 a.m. After 11 months of basically rising, showering, and training to work in under an hour when living in the city, my day started about three hours before work started just to get there. Not to mention the commute home where the rush hour traffic is never-ending on days I drove. On days I took the train, there’s added anxiety to make an express Metra train back to the burbs to ensure a smooth 50-minute commute compared to the 1 hour and 20-minute regular commute that makes all the stops.

This is the most accurate portrayal of each of these commutes:

But despite all of that, I paid off my debt in about 5 months back at home and I’ve started to actually stack up my paychecks since then. I started looking for apartments in February of this year and I continued to say things like “I need to get my life back on track.”

The same brother I lived with before was looking for places too for a while, but he wanted to sit on some cash after moving across the country and living paycheck to paycheck while coaching football in Boston.

I had checked out a few 1BR places before he and I made a plan to live together again, then once he decided he’d rather stay at home for a little longer, I was content with saving a bit more money myself until he was ready.

A couple weeks after that my youngest brother moved home from college and my sister started planning to move home as well. The week of St. Patrick’s Day, I toured then fired away an application at a 1BR that I really liked for a solid price in the city. I got the apartment and now all of a sudden, I’m two weeks away from moving in.

For the first time, the electric bill, the gas bill, the rent, the internet, the phone bill, and the parking pass are all my sole responsibility.

The crumbs on the floor, the hair in the drain, the dishes in the sink. They’re all going to be mine now.

I’m going to be alone. No moving buddy (besides Woody). Just me, my stuff that’s still mostly in boxes from 9 months ago, and an apartment.

Everybody’s said things like “oh, you’re going to love it!” or “The best time of my life was when I lived by myself!” and even “You can walk around naked!”

But none of that has really stuck with me. What I keep thinking about is this anxiety of when I said “I need to get my life back on track.”

When I first moved back home, I was angry with myself and at the world. I couldn’t believe I got myself into a situation where I had to move away from my friends and work because I couldn’t afford it. I felt like a bum.

But after nine months of living at home, I’ve realized my life was always on track.

As I wrap up, I’ll say this: everything happens for a reason and time spent with loved ones is always time well-spent.

In this time back at home, I’ve learned how to be better at my spending habits, budgeting, and what it will take to eventually own a home. I’ve also gotten the time to spend going to ballgames, concerts, bars, parties, and more with my family.

It’s been a decade since I first moved out for college. But after all these moves, my family and friends have been with me, guiding me on my track to this big move.

I was never off the track. Bent but not broken. Each moment has led me to moving out on my own after 28 years. I have my friends and family to thank for making sure I was in one piece by the time I got here.

This won’t be my last move. It might just be my last move out from home until I have a home of my own.

So, I am a little sad that I’m moving out on my own, but every experience has made me readier than ever.

To wrap up, I leave you with my favorite song by my favorite band with the lasting words of “I guess this is growing up.”

~DS

P.S.

There’s one other song I’d like to share that I found in my time home that helped calm me on my commutes, make me smile on sad days, and get through some low points. Enjoy, I hope it does the same for you!