Bring back the mushroom zombies

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead.

As much as it pains me to write this, Season 2 of The Last of Us left me cold. Cold like a mushroom person in the basement of a building bombed out by pandemic apocalypse. So cold that I ended up rooting for the mushroom people in the basements of buildings bombed out by pandemic apocalypse.

That’s not a singular opinion. Casting about on the review sites, the consensus among players of the video game on which the HBO Max series is based is that Season 2 dramatically altered pretty much every storyline out of recognition with its source material. 

I didn’t even know it was a game when I tuned into Season 1, but swiftly fell in love with the grim and brooding characters as they navigated increasingly high-stakes situations. The friendship between Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) was so fraught with genuine loss morphed into familial love that I couldn’t think of anything comparable in a recent small-screen series.

The choices they had to make and the ways those choices altered them — especially when they resulted in friction or even resentment — felt real. By comparison, Season 2 concluded on May 25 leaving an overall feeling of soap-operatic hot air.

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Courtesy photo

It’s clear that a lot of people have a lot of opinions — many misogynistic and/or homophobic — about how the series has played out in fidelity to the game. I don’t really care about that. HBO Max made this show to appeal to a broad audience, and I’m a part of that. 

With the exception of a few instances in a few episodes, Season 2 failed on basic storytelling levels.

The first major hurdle was the opening episode, which took place five years after Joel’s Rambo-style rescue of Ellie from a hospital, in which she was about to be vivisected for science in order to find a cure for the fungal plague that had brought down the world decades before. 

You see, Ellie is immune to infection by the cordyceps — a fungus that takes over animal bodies and controls their brains, turning them into flesh-eating zombies (a real thing, but only a threat to organisms like ants… for now). Joel’s mission in Season 1 was to bring her to a facility where her immunity could be investigated and replicated. However, their en route travails built such a bond of love and trust that he would have rather let the world remain mushroomed than see her die. Hence, the rampage/rescue.

After all that tension and meaningful catharsis, it was hard to be dropped into a walled-in version of Jackson, Wyo. — a self-satistied fortress city full of Pendleton wool-wearing hunky cowboy “Real Western” dudes whose only apparent threats seemed to come from 20-somethings who hate their “dad.” (I imagine not unlike present-day Jackson.) 

For real, Ellie’s characterization was so annoying right off the bat that I walked away from the TV more than a few times.

Romance, interpersonal drama, coming-of-age, blah, blah, blah. All that happened. Then, in Episode 2, Joel got clubbed to death (literally, with a golf club) by a brand-new character (Abby) in what appeared to be an abandoned finance bro’s mountaintop lodge-mansion. Amid all that, we learn that Abby’s been on a vengeance hunt because her doctor-dad was among the dozens cut down by Joel in the hospital where Ellie was being held five years before.

The brutality of that killing notwithstanding — and it is excruciatingly graphic — Abby is a nonentity. That could be the fault of the performer (Kaitlyn Dever), who somehow managed to be so icily intense that it came off as hammy. I’m not sure how she did that, but either she deserves an Emmy or a Razzie.

Following that, the rest of the season played out in what felt like an overlong montage of set pieces in Seattle, where Ellie and her lover Dina (a weirdly smug and insufferable Isabela Merced) are tracking down Abby to kill her for killing Joel for killing Abby’s dad… meanwhile we meet a bunch of other people that it’s very hard to care about, while Joel’s heroic brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) dutifully takes it upon himself to save everyone with little to no thanks, and gets shot for it.

You see how this might all get a little tedious — especially with the mostly absent mushroom zombies, who gave Season 1 its baseline sense of mortal dread. 

By the finale, when Ellie gets captured by a bunch of scar-faced cultists, inexplicably escapes and is motoring her way to downtown Seattle in a dinghy to exact her revenge, it’s long past time to give a rip about any of it. 

My recommendation to bring this series back to life: Bring back the mushroom zombies.

Both seasons are streaming on HBO Max, but I’ll stick with Season 1.