This list contains spoilers for both seasons of the show, along with both games!
Summary
- Show took risks with new scenes and characters not in the games, giving viewers a fresh perspective.
- Significant changes in key plot points, such as Isaac's backstory and Dina finding out about Ellie's immunity.
- Episode structure has been altered, introducing new content like flashes of Joel's father and expanding on character relationships.
Season two of The Last of Us has now come to a close, with many questions left out in the open. Unlike the first season, which many fans thought was a more streamlined but faithful experience next to the Naughty Dog games, season two took a lot of chances. It added scenes and characters that weren't there before and rerouted many of the known characters to shift perspectives.
6 Biggest Changes In The Premiere Of The Last of Us Season 2 From The Games
Did Max make some good changes for The Last Of Us Season 2 premiere? These are some of the key differences fans will notice.
There's a lot to unpack in terms of the biggest changes in The Last of Us' Max adaptation. This rundown will focus on episodes four through seven, as the first three episodes have already been heavily covered.
6 Showing Isaac Early (Episode Four)
From FEDRA TO WLF
Isaac is a big character in The Last of Us Part 2 as he is in charge of the WLF branch in Seattle. He’s Abby’s commanding officer, who is in a few scenes within the game. A fun piece of trivia is that he is played by the same actor in the show as he is in the game: Jeffrey Wright.
In the game, he’s introduced during Abby’s campaign, but in the show, specifically episode four, he’s given more time. The start of the episode shows Isaac while he is still part of FEDRA, right before he betrays his soldiers to make a deal with a rebel alliance. Later in the episode, he can be seen torturing a member of the SCAR religious group, and both of these scenes are new to the greater universe that Naughty Dog built.
5 How Dina Finds Out About Ellie’s Immunity (Episode Four)
Spores Are Less Of A Problem In The Show
After escaping the TV station, Dina and Ellie head underground, where they are still being pursued by WLF agents. It’s down here that Ellie and Dina have to make their way past infected. During their escape, Ellie puts herself in harm's way to get bitten by an infected, which trips Dina out.
6 Biggest Changes In Episode 2 Of The Last of Us Season 2 From The Games
The Last of Us Season 2's second episode provides plenty of differences that fans of the video game might not have seen coming.
They make their way back to a theater where Ellie reveals she is immune while Dina nervously trains her gun on Ellie. In the morning, Dina finds out Ellie is telling the truth, and after a brief moment of relief, the two make love for the first time. This is the show, but in the game, they make love first in Eugene’s stash. Also, Dina never points her gun at Ellie, and instead of a bite, Ellie’s mask breaks, and she breathes in spores, which in turn leads Ellie to come clean to Dina.
4 The Rendezvous With Jesse (Episode Five)
Caged In Clickers
In the game, Ellie and Dina are permitted to leave Jackson because Tommy went out on his own to find Joel’s killers. They are alone in their pursuit until they get to the theater, where Dina tells Abby about the baby. She’s too weak to go on, so Ellie has to explore Seattle by herself.
While fighting through several WLF brigades, Jesse eventually finds Ellie, and together they escape the area in one of the more harrowing sequences of the game involving shooting at WLF soldiers and infected. In episode five of the show, Dina decides to accompany Ellie even with her pregnancy. As they explore, they wind up in an infected den where they almost die, and this is when Jesse comes instead, saying he split up with Tommy.
3 New Backstory With Joel And Ellie (Episode Six)
A Trip To The Moon
Almost the entirety of episode six is new content told through a series of flashbacks. There are two returning scenes from the games, though, which were slightly altered. Joel takes Ellie to the museum to see dinosaurs and the space exhibit, although the scene is brief, and they don’t go into the second building or swim. The last flashback scene deals with Ellie confronting Joel about the truth; he comes clean about it, which is different. In the game, this confrontation happens when Ellie goes back to the hospital in Seattle to investigate the truth about The Fireflies.
For the biggest piece of new content, Eugene finally appears in the flesh, who was just seen in pictures in The Last of Us Part 2. They teased Eugene as far back as episode one of the show, but now viewers finally got to see how he got infected. On patrol, Ellie and Joel find Eugene with a scratch mark, and he begs them to take him back to the city gates so that he can say goodbye to his wife. Joel promises to do this while Ellie goes back to get the horses, but Joel shoots Eugene anyway, which causes a big rift between them. In the game, Eugene just died of old age.
2 Joel’s Father (Episode Six)
Maybe You’ll Do Better
There’s another piece of flashback content in episode six that shines more of a light on Joel as a character separate from Ellie. In the games, Joel and Tommy are never shown as young boys, and their father makes no appearances either. In the show, there is a brief scene where it appears Joel and Tommy are teenagers who got caught drinking.
6 Biggest Changes From The Games In Episode 3 Of The Last Of Us Season 2
After the shocking events of last week, Episode 3 of The Last of Us Season 2 makes a few departures from the game as it shifts the story to Seattle.
Their dad, who is a cop, comes home, and Joel stands up for Tommy, which prompts his dad to tell a story about how his dad was abusive. Joel’s father admits to beating them and being too hard sometimes, but he also tells Joel he is better than his father, and he hopes Joel can be an even better dad to his kid than him. It’s a similar line Joel says to Ellie when they have their talk on the porch at the end of the episode. It’s the idea of living through the “sins of the father,” which wasn’t an explicit theme of the game, but it fits for the show.
1 The Finale (Episode Seven)
Giving Ellie A Big Abby Moment
Episode seven mostly follows the lore from the games. There is one big exception, which comes when Ellie gets a boat and is trying to get to the aquarium. In the game, a big wave capsizes her boat, and players have to swim beneath the waves and make it to the docks that way. In the show, this wave knocks Ellie to a different shoreline, where she sees a young boy in an outfit that looks like he is a member of SCARs. Sure enough, other members find them and they start to string up Ellie to hang.
This scene is reminiscent of a later one with Abby instead, who also almost gets gutted by the SCARs. The scene is so brief in the show that it seems virtually dreamlike as Ellie escapes quickly after, gets back on track to the aquarium, and then kills Owen and Mel. Mel’s death is a bit sadder in the show because Ellie hits her by accident, knowing full well she is pregnant. Unfortunately, like the game, Ellie cannot save the baby.
- Release Date
- January 15, 2023
- Network
- HBO
- Showrunner
- Craig Mazin
- Directors
- Craig Mazin, Peter Hoar, Jeremy Webb, Ali Abbasi, Mark Mylod, Stephen Williams, Jasmila Žbanić, Liza Johnson, Nina Lopez-Corrado
- Writers
- Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, Halley Wegryn Gross
- Franchise(s)
- The Last of Us
Cast
-
Pedro PascalJoel Miller -
Bella RamseyEllie Williams
WHERE TO WATCH
- Streaming Service(s)
- MAX
