There's also spores, stalkers, and Joey Pants.
Ready to get cold and bleak and sad? That’s the vibe in The Last of Us Season 2 trailer, which jumps us ahead a few years after Season 1 into a future that doesn’t look all that rosy.
Sad dad Joel and tough teen Ellie have apparently grown apart while living in Wyoming, but it’s not just their relationship that’s under strain: the funky fungal infection has reached full freakout. Here’s the trailer:
Fans of the game will be excited to see a stalker in the trailer: a fast and deadly variety of infected that only appeared a few times in the original game but more heavily in the sequel, and wasn’t part of Season 1 of the show. Also making an appearance in Season 2: spores, which were also missing in the first season.
In the game, people could become infected by exposure to spores released from dead bodies, but that was changed for the show in favor of “a more realistic approach,” co-creator Neal Druckmann told Polygon in 2023. “If we wanted to treat it realistically, and there are spores near, characters would wear gas masks all the time,” Druckmann said. “Then we lose so much, which is maybe the most important part of the journey is what’s going on inside behind their eyes, in their soul, in their beings.”
In the trailer for Season 2, though, we see a corpse spewing spores like smoke from its mouth. I guess the mushrooms have evolved beyond physical transmission like biting or those gross little tentacles.
It’s not all bad news, though: Joey Pants is here
And of course there’s the repercussions of the ending of Season 1, which I guess I shouldn’t spoil since you may not have seen it, but it involved Joel doing a bit of pew-pew, bang-bang, kapow, blammo, and then not being entirely honest with Ellie about it. That lie, it would seem, comes undone in Season 2, hence the line from the trailer: “Don’t you know what he did?” Awkward.
It’s not all bad news, though: Joey Pants is here! Prolific character actor Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix, The Sopranos, and one million Other Things) is playing Eugene, a character mentioned in the game but never seen. Hopefully, his character will get the same sort of treatment Bill (Nick Offerman) did in Season 1: a minor character expanded into a much larger and more meaningful role. The Last of Us Season 2 starts streaming April 13 on Max.
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