Posted in: HBO, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: opinion, the last of us

The Last of Us S02: The Biggest Change The TV Series Made to Ellie

After one season and the first episode of Season 2, it's pretty clear that HBO's adaptation of The Last of Us made a major change with Ellie.

Everyone has a take on the new season of The Last of Us, with many weighing in on the changes the TV series makes from the PlayStation video game. Season one was totally faithful to the main arc of the first game, barring moving the story quicker and the change to a supporting character's entire story. The first episode of the second season alone has minor changes to the story set-up but suggests it's still going to be faithful to the main arc of The Last of Us Part 2, moving a few events here and there, reviewing new character Abbie's motivation upfront, but the biggest change has been to Ellie's character. That change was there since season one.

The Ellie in Season Two of The Last of Us Starts Out Already a Sociopath

In the original games, Ellie was a guarded kid, and in The Last of Us Part 2, Ellie is driven by the story's key tragic event to become obsessed with revenge, and she kills a lot of people along the way. Not all of them deserve it. It sets her up in parallel with Abby, whose entire drive in the story was violent, murderous revenge in the first place. Before Ellie's trauma, she was settling in, and there was a distance between her and Joel because she sensed that he lied to her when he killed the Fireflies and surgeons who were going to sacrifice her life to try to find a cure for the cordyceps plague. In the opening hours of the game, Ellie was lost, quiet, and contemplative while keeping her distance from Joel. In the second season opener of the TV series, Ellie is sullen like a stereotypical teenager and openly hostile to Joel. And in the opening minutes of the season two premiere, she's already a bloodthirsty, thrill-seeking sociopath. This is the biggest change from the character in the game that nobody seems to have picked up on.

Ellie Has Been a Sociopath Since Season One

In season one of The Last of Us, Ellie was revealed early on as a sociopath already. She was already a snarky, slightly obnoxious, and defensive kid before, until the moment when she stumbled upon a trapped infected and idly tortured and stabbed it just to see what that was like without any emotion. That was outright sociopathic behaviour. This means she became a sociopath in the TV series before Joel even met her. Her first appearance in season two has her in full sociopathic mode already, crossing the line in a training defense course and nearly choking her sparring partner even after he conceded, and revelling in it.

She's seen enjoying sniping infected from afar with a sniper rifle, with no empathy that they used to be people. Later, in a sequence taken from the game, Ellie and her on-again, off-again crush Dina (Isabela Merced) go on patrol and flagrantly disobey their group leader's orders to rush ahead after finding a scene of carnage and recklessly rush into a warehouse after infected predators. Unlike in the game, where Ellie and Dina methodically investigate and hunt the infected, the two of them are reckless idiots out for a laugh, while in the game, they're more trained and cautious. Considering she's already a dangerous, violent sociopath when season two begins, it really doesn't take much for the coming tragedy to turn her into a murderous sociopath perfectly willing to kill people, not just infected.

HBO Seems to Love Horrible Main Characters

"This isn't TV, This is HBO" now has a whole new flavour that's been going on for years. Being a prestigious cable channel that doesn't need to worry about censorship from the FCC, they can depict main characters who go from flawed to outright murderous. It's almost a brand for HBO to have asshole protagonists now. The writers of The Last of Us TV series seem to revel in making the video game characters even more horrible than in the game, and the game already went pretty far. Joel is still pretty much the same character he is in the games, but then the character has already gone to the extreme there, so there's probably no great need to make him even more terrible and guilt-ridden. None of this is a knock on Bella Ramsay and her fully-committed portrayal of Ellie. It's what the scripts call for, and she's doing the job and selling it. Whether the viewers want to follow that path of murderous rage is an interesting question.

The Last of Us is on HBO.

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