The Last of Us: The Series Thread

[Jaicee]

Hynad said:

Jaicee said:

Oh well, to clarify, what I meant was...well maybe I'd better break down the structure of the game as I see it. If we can say that Part 2 is divided into an opening chapter, a two-part main body (half Ellie's chapter, half Abby's), and a concluding chapter, it's the intro and the concluding sections that have a mixture of Ellie-focused and Abby-focused scenes. All the stuff around Seattle, by contrast, is neatly divided between Ellie's journey and Abby's. What I meant to suggest before was the possibility that the TV series might divide that in half, with season 2 covering everything up to the end of Ellie's journey through Seattle and season 3 picking up with Abby's and concluding at the end of the game's content.

The show most likely won’t follow the same narrative structure as the game. Abby will probably be introduced very early on, to set her path towards Joel in parallel with Ellie’s. In the game, it was done separately because constantly switching between both characters in short sequences would have broken the gameplay beats, what with both having different upgrades and whatnot. But with the show, they don’t have to worry about that. I think it has the potential to be better told and have better pacing than the game.

I can see the very first scene you see in season 2 will be Abby rushing to the surgery room, finding her dead father and reacting to it. Then they’ll continue with “current day” Ellie getting ready for her watch round. They very well could decide to start with whatever happened during that 5 years gap, showing us more of the relationship between Joel and Ellie instead of relying exclusively on flashbacks like in the game. And then the rest of the season switching back and forth between Ellie and Abby, as we learn more about Ellie’s grudge against Joel, and with Abby slowly zoning in on Joel’s location. With the series finale showing her finally getting revenge on him. That’d be one heck of a season cliffhanger for those who haven’t played the game.

That's certainly an interesting possibility! Part 2 was originally supposed to be an open world adventure taking place mainly in and around Jackson wherein Abby gets her revenge at point determined by the player. Much of the content planned for that version of the game was eventually scrapped or changed into flashbacks or diary entries. It's possible that season 2 could take us down a narrative path similar to what was originally intended for the game. I think that's essentially what you're suggesting here at least. However, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason the game was streamlined into the more linear structure we know was because the overarching storyline kept changing and the material needed to be streamlined in order to establish the right sense and balance of tension. In other words, the pacing of the story beats would've been adversely affected by leaving it an open world adventure. When you think about it that way, it makes you wonder if changing the medium from video game to TV show would necessarily alter the plot structure calculations so fundamentally as you suggest.