The wait is almost over. The Last of Us Season 2 will soon premiere on HBO and Max, ending the nearly two-year-long wait since the video game adaptation debuted to rave reviews.
The second season will reportedly pick up five years after the explosive Season 1 finale, which showed Joel (Pedro Pascal) going to drastic lengths to save Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) life. Series co-creators Neil Druckmann, who created the game, and Craig Mazin spoke to Entertainment Weekly about what fans should expect from the seven new episodes, which will adapt only parts of the sequel video game, The Last Of Us Part II.
Mazin and Druckmann had already made it clear that the events of Part II will be stretched out over multiple seasons, but Mazin revealed they expect the show to “extend past a Season 3,” though the show has not yet been renewed for a third season.
“We have a plan,” Druckmann added. “We know what we need to do going forward, but we couldn’t tell you right now exactly how many episodes or how many seasons it would take to get there.”
The Season 2 logline reads, “Five years after the events of the first season, Joel and Ellie are drawn into conflict with each other and a world even more dangerous and unpredictable than the one they left behind.”
Several stars have been added to the cast, including Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, Young Mazino, Tati Gabriel, Danny Ramirez, Jeffrey Wright and Catherine O’Hara.
Druckmann explained that they mapped out Season 2 by zeroing in on certain parts of Part II‘s narrative arc, which allowed them to flesh out certain points of the story and reincorporate deleted material they created for the game. Season 2 may have less episodes than Season 1 — just seven compared to the first season’s nine episodes — but Mazin promised each episode will feel “like a meal.”
“We have seven episodes. They are high-calorie, dense episodes,” he said. “If you consider action and drama and scope to be the things that create an epic nature, each one of these episodes packs quite a wallop. You will not be bored.”
Druckmann also noted that some of the new material in Season 2 will be “pretty brutal.”
And it looks like there is still more news to come regarding Season 2. Druckmann teased there is one character, who has yet to be announced, who has never been seen before in the games but will be making an appearance this season.
“There is a pretty prominent character that is talked a lot about in the game, similar to what we did with Frank [Murray Bartlett] in Season 1, that is in this season,” he revealed. “There’s a very, very cool casting that I hope we can talk about soon.”
The Last of Us Season 2 will premiere this April on HBO.
