Latest news with #season2
BreakingNews.ie
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- BreakingNews.ie
Review: The Last of Us season two finishes with a bang
* Warning: This article contains spoilers if you have not seen The Last of Us season two * The Last of Us season two finished with a bang, literally, leaving viewers with an agonising wait for season three. After the death of Joel (Pedro Pascal) in episode two, a huge shock for those who didn't play the video game, there were questions over whether the show would be as good to watch. Advertisement The emphatic answer is yes. We got the flashback episode going into his relationship with Ellie (Bella Ramsey), and a slower pace with Ellie's journey to Seattle with Dina (Isabela Merced), but the season finale was action-packed. Ellie finally confessed her secret with Joel to Dina, about how her father figure killed a hospital full of people to save her when she was due to be sacrified in a bid for a cure to the zombie pandemic. The awkward reunion between Jesse (Young Mazino), Ellie and Dina is broken up when the former pair must set out to find Tommy (Gabriel Luna). Advertisement The last of us subverts the zombie genre as it has always been more about the human characters and their relationship, much more so than the likes of The Walking Dead. This is one of its biggest strengths and it was shown again in the season two finale, as Ellie and Jesse were forced to confront some uncomfortable truths. There is also more action as we see more of the brutal guerrilla warfare between the militia WLF (wolves) and cultish seraphites. Ellie's confession to Dina appeared to be the end of her quest for vengeance over the brutal killing of Joel, until she realises Abby (Kaitlyn) is hiding out in an aquarium on a dock. Advertisement As Jesse and Ellie part ways, we see one of her character's most intense yet vulnerable moments as she tells him: "Let me tell you about my community. My community was beaten to death in front of me while I was forced to f***ing watch.' After a close call with the seraphites, Ellie kills Owen (Spencer Lord) and his girlfriend Mel (Ariela Barer), with a tragic conclusion. After Tommy and Jesse come to her rescue, the trio prepare for a return to Jackson. This leads to the dramatic conclusion as Abby catches up to shoot Tommy in the leg and kill Jessie before confronting Ellie. "I let you live," she shouts, before firing. We're left with a huge cliffhanger, before a time shift which the show is known for. It shows Abby looking out over WLF HQ, an abandoned stadium, and suggests season three will focus on her backstory, like in the game. The season finale of The Last Of Us is on Sky Go and NOW TV
Forbes
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘The Last Of Us' Season 2 Created A New Ellie Out Of Thin Air
The Last of Us Sunday night's finale of The Last of Us season 2 capped off not only the short string of episodes, but finalized the case for gamers that this show has gotten wildly out of bounds in terms of its source material. Yes, similar events happen. The same characters are present. But often these…are not the same characters. Specifically, HBO's The Last of Us has invented an entirely new Ellie for season 2 that didn't exist in the (much better) season 1 and certainly did not exist in the games at all. To start, this isn't meant to be put on Bella Ramsey. The worst thing you can say about Ramsey is that it's too bad they couldn't get six inches taller between seasons and they just look almost the same age despite a time jump. Ramsey has had great performances, but great performances of often very bad scripts and things that fundamentally alter Ellie from the game. The Last of Us This is not the same Ellie. This Ellie feels like a kid going on a fun road trip with her girlfriend, only occasionally remembering what she's there to do when a switch is flipped and she temporarily activates revenge mode. The show is deathly afraid of portraying Ellie as unsympathetic or cruel, a girl trying to avenge her father figure but realizing how hard and sad it makes her when people start actually dying, often by accident. Game Ellie is not this. Game Ellie has spent five years training to be a killing machine bordering on being an actual sociopath as she carves her way through the WLF to her specific targets. By this point, it's deeply weird that show Ellie has killed barely anyone. One guard, I think. She left someone to die and accidentally killed two other people this week. Yes, it's true that in a video game, you're murdering dozens and dozens of people in levels, and while that's not necessary here, this Ellie has lost almost all teeth outside of maybe the Nora spore scene that was the one instance she felt like game Ellie for about 90 seconds. Ellie Ellie did not kill Owen and Mel by accident in the game. She shot Owen dead and stabbed Mel in the neck. When she found out she was pregnant, she said 'good,' in what is easily one of the most chilling moments of the game as you realize what she's becoming. Again, it didn't have to be this way. There was footage released before this season showing Ramsey in intense ballistic fight training, and even if that extra height wasn't happening, Ramsey could have been unleashed in a much more game-like fashion instead of being forced to bumble through this storyline like it's the Goonies. Because Ellie is the way she is, that's also had a ripple effect on the characters around her. Jessie is not a huge jerk to her in the game. When Dina learns what Joel did she still supports Ellie, and doesn't turn away from her. The exact opposite of what happened here. The Last of Us The show has been obsessed with keeping Ellie likable as a lead when the game is supposed to be much more complicated than that. They have also made her come across as impossibly dumb, an idiot kid setting out on a stupid revenge quest relying on Dina to make it less stupid as she's incapable of planning anything. And she's not even good at the actual revenge part. It is not shocking to see that the best episode of the show this season was the flashback episode of younger Ellie with Joel, a time period when she was not being written poorly. But after his death, her characterization went totally off the rails, and it's unclear if it will recover. I dread to see what major changes the show will continue to make to her from here. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘The Last Of Us' Finale Viewership Down 30% From Premiere, With Two Catches
The Last of Us HBO The Last of Us season 2 ended its second season abruptly this weekend, with just seven episodes compared to season 1's nine. It was so sudden that many viewers didn't even realize it was the finale, and now we have some stats in that…do not look great. The finale of The Last of Us season 2 saw a 30% drop in viewership compared to the season 2 premiere. It also dropped 55% from the season 1 finale. Bad, quite bad on its face, but there are two caveats here that are worth exploring before alarms fully start going off. Still, it's probably not great to simply hand-wave this away given what's happened with the show this season. You can still look at other reported figures, usually live viewing, for trends here. The Last of Us season 1 almost doubled its viewership by its finale. It went up almost every week other than a big drop on Super Bowl weekend. The Last of Us HBO Season 1 also has three episodes above a million live viewers and season 2 has zero, indicating an overall trend even of post-live viewership is a huge factor now. And that's even with almost double the viewers of the season 1 premiere to start with. Viewership appears to have dropped sharply after the premiere, which was not actually Joel's death episode, rather the next one was. But views were middling all season with no big increases seen over time like season 1 had. Even if it's not 30% lower in the end, it seems possible, if not likely that it is lower than the premiere. Regardless, these trendlines are not great. Reasons for that? I have more to say on this, but no, things have certainly not moved in a great direction in season 2 in a number of ways.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Rehearsal season two review – TV so wild you will have no idea how they made it
Season two of the Rehearsal opens in a cockpit, where the atmosphere is almost unbearably strained. With the plane apparently on a collision course ('we have those hills to the right of the airport, remember?!'), the co-pilot begins to panic, but the captain haughtily dismisses his colleague's concerns. Sure enough, the plane begins to plummet, before crashing into a fiery wreck. We zoom out to reveal a set, where Nathan Fielder stares and blinks into the camera gormlessly, having conducted this horrifying performance – one of many reconstructions of real-life disasters to come. This is, of course, the comedian's totally wild docuseries, in which he prepares people for big life events via elaborate (and occasionally unethical) walk-throughs. The first season culminated in Fielder possibly causing untold psychological damage to a child actor who was only too happy to accept him as his real dad (he apparently hadn't grasped the extent to which he was part of an intricate plan to help a woman who wasn't sure whether she wanted to have kids). This time around, Fielder tells us that he has decided not to involve any children. But if you're expecting something a little less problematic, you're in the wrong place. In fact, at the end of the finale (which aired in the US over the weekend), I realised that all I had written for the final 30 minutes was 'how on EARTH did they do this????' over and over again, like a bad version of the typewriter scene in The Shining. Indeed, there is much here that will remind you of a horror film, and many scenes you will surely watch with your fingers over your eyes. Which is hilarious, given that the premise of this season is so incredibly mundane. Fielder has theorised – largely through careful study of thousands of pages of dry government documents – that plane crashes are directly linked to a lack of communication between pilots and first officers. His new quest, he says, is to improve aviation safety by forensically analysing how those conversations unfold and how pilots can give one another better feedback. And, er, by creating his own replica of Houston airport. Of course, as he explains to the pilots, actors and experts whom he inveigles into the rehearsal, HBO will only open its chequebook if his potentially life-saving, industry-leading experiment is also a comedy. Cue another six episodes of wondering just how much anyone knows at any one time, as Fielder constructs another televisual hall of mirrors where the fake and the real collide with all the violence of his staged plane crashes. As with season one, the producers have managed to find civilians who are so uniquely awkward that they feel like integral parts of the chaos. These are people who blur the line between committed normie and aspiring actor so well that many have, in fact, been accused of being fake. But they are all real, from baby-faced first officer Moody, who is convinced his girlfriend is cheating on him with her customers at Starbucks, to Jeff, an older pilot who freely, maybe even proudly, admits that he has been banned from all known dating apps. As always, Fielder gets in way too deep with everyone – not least a lovely young man named Colin, who gets his own rehearsal-within-the-rehearsal about his faltering love life. It's one of many, many tangents in a series that also touches on dog cloning; Evanescence's gothy rap-rock hit Bring Me to Life; neurodiversity and mental health; and a fake singing contest called Wings of Voice, which led one contestant, Lana Love, to give a tell-all interview to Variety where she angrily stated that she had 'signed up to be a singer, not a lab rat'. These strands weave around one another as the supposed goal of improving aviation safety comes in and out of focus. There are frequent links back to Fielder's previous work, on shows such as Nathan for You and The Curse, which only makes the whole thing more meta. It does at times feel a little overwhelming, even for a man whose whole thing is essentially artful self-absorption. And yet, navel-gazing and the many ethical questions raised here aside, Fielder pulls it off spectacularly. He shows impressive commitment to the bit in episode three, where he undergoes a physical transformation that is as horrifying as it is sublime. And the last episode sees the end justify the means, as he channels all he has learned into a knockout conclusion. The Rehearsal is frequently plane-crash TV – but my oh my, does it stick the landing. The Rehearsal season two aired on Sky Comedy and is available on Now.
Gizmodo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘The Last of Us' Showrunners Talk That Shocking Cliffhanger and Season 3 Teases
The wait between seasons one and two of The Last of Us was brutal, but at least that story had ended. We wanted to see what was next for Joel and Ellie, but it wasn't absolutely necessary. That's not the case for season two, though, which ends right smack in the middle of the story, with a cliffhanger that's sure to frustrate many viewers. It's all but assured that the wait for season three will be worse. In the meantime, you are probably wondering a few things about not just the end of season two, but what's to come in season three. And, thankfully, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann were happy to talk about that. Below, we'll tell you what The Last of Us team had to say about the season two cliffhanger, whether that was always the ending, how things might be changing for season three, and some of the questions you should be asking as you wait. Season two of The Last of Us ends in the middle of a key moment between Ellie and Abby before flashing back a few days to Abby. The implication, much as it is in the video game, is that we are about to see Abby's story moving ahead, and that's absolutely the plan. 'We often talk about what are we promising the audience going forward?' Druckmann said in a press conference. 'So, for example, it was important for Craig in episode five that we show Joel in that last scene, because then there's a promise of where we're going to next. And had we ended the season somewhere else, maybe like a few moments before, I think that we wouldn't be making the right promise of what this is about. And we're telling you next season, well, one is that there's just an epic nature to what's about to happen. But this other story is going to be really important coming back to Joel and Ellie and everything that you've seen so far.' In the game, though, the audience has a natural pain and discomfort when the point of view shifts from Ellie, a character you have been playing as, to then playing as her sworn enemy, Abby. Mazin admits it's one place a show comes up short compared to the video game but they hope they did as good a job as possible to duplicate it. 'We can't… reproduce the shock of becoming another person,' he said. 'In games, you are Joel. You are Ellie. You are Abby. And when that shift happens, it is jarring because you have been someone. But here we are watching everybody equally on a screen. We may identify with them from time to time in different ways, and we may be conflicted, but we're not them. So when we go to a scene where we're somebody else, there's the normal thing of, 'Whoa, I'm suddenly with Jeffrey Wright in a weird, creepy kitchen. And I'm watching him torture somebody.' That's a little jarring, but it's never going to be what a video game can do when you shift perspective in a massive way like that. So I think what we do, and what we're doing correctly, is honoring the notion that there is a time period where one person experiences it one way, and another person is experiencing it so wildly different, and yet they converge. It's a convergent storm… And that's what matters. But can we reproduce that gut-punch feeling? No. And I think if we had chased it, we probably would have fallen on our faces.' So if the show couldn't match that moment in the same way, was there ever a discussion of changing things? Maybe ending it differently? There was, but not for long. 'Honestly, we were open to a different ending,' Mazin admitted. 'We talked about it a lot. We considered everything. Of course, you want to play around. Like maybe we should just interlace the stories. Maybe we should just go back and forth. Maybe we should try this. Maybe we should try that. And then in the end, I just remember saying, 'Isn't this part of the genetics of how this story functions?' It's just part of the genetics. Now, what it means is we have to take risks as a television show and HBO has to back us taking risks. But then again, we did just kill Pedro Pascal. They understand that this show is going to be a different show every season, which is sort of a tricky thing to do when you're a hit show. You keep asking people like, 'I know you love this. We're taking it away and giving you this now.' And then hopefully they go, 'Oh, well, you know what? We actually really like this.' 'Oh, that's nice. Now we're giving you this now' because that's how the story works.' And so, in season three, the point of view will certainly shift to Abby. But, does that mean Bella Ramsey's Ellie won't be in season three? 'I remember when people were asking about season two, they were like, 'And what about Joel and when he dies?' I'm like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean 'When?' 'If!'' Mazin says. 'The [third] season will arrive, and it will do what it does. Even if I thought I knew now exactly how it was going to go. I'm experienced enough to know that two weeks from now, we may have a different idea of how it should go. All I can say is we haven't seen the last of Kaitlyn Dever, we haven't seen the last of Bella Ramsey, we haven't seen the last of Isabela Merced, and we haven't even seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story.' Druckmann added, 'Whether you will see them on screen or not, their presence will be there throughout.' Finally, season two may have focused on Ellie's story, and season three might focus on Abby's, but so much else is happening too. There's Isaac and the WLF. The Serephites. Their war. And Mazin wants fans to be aware of all of that. 'I think [all those other stories] bode well for next season,' he said. 'I have so many questions and I think and I understand that the audience does too. I sort of want to assure them that those questions are correct and will be answered. 'What is going on? How did that war start? How did the Seraphites start? Who is the prophet? What happened to her? What does Isaac want? What's happening at the end of episode seven? What is this explosion? What is all of it?' All of it will become clear.' When specifically? We don't know. In 2027 perhaps? Either way, the wait has begun. Watch all seven episodes of The Last of Us season two on HBO Max now.
