top of page

"They Made Their Choices": Recreation and Adaptation in HBO's 'The Last of Us'

Wrecked plane fuselage on a desolate black sand landscape under cloudy skies, conveying a sense of abandonment and eeriness.

The Season Two finale of HBO's The Last of Us aired on the 25th of May to a great deal of online controversy, becoming the second lowest-rated episode of the series. There’s no shortage of opinions on this drop in popularity, but many of them tend to follow a theme: the show didn’t manage to hit the same narrative beats as its videogame counterpart, The Last of Us Part II, or it hit them in a less satisfying way.


For what it’s worth, I thought this season finale provided a fascinating spin on the game’s moral dilemmas, and a truly thought-provoking dissection of the concept of community, but I’m not particularly interested in weighing the merits of each digression against the source material.


Rather, the whole thing got me thinking about the challenges adaptation can pose in contrast to the seemingly safer space of recreation – Season 1 of the HBO series, which transplants moments from game to screen far more often than Season 2, received greater critical acclaim, generally garnered a higher viewership, and was lauded by multiple outlets as the greatest videogame show of all time. This is all relative, of course, with Season 2 being hugely successful by any metric, but the seemingly universal approval of Season 1, and the impossible standard it set, provides food for thought nonetheless.


If you’ve found a winning formula as strong as that of the games, why change it? Why attempt to alchemise different narrative ingredients into the same satisfying story?


The easy answer is that the first game lent itself to the screen more easily; it may have used (and revolutionised) the medium of gaming back in 2013, but it told its story through cinematic language. The second game was more complicated and less linear, and warranted these changes as a result.


However, as I’ve been keeping up with Season 2 while making the final editorial decisions for my forthcoming debut novel, Lichtenberg, I’ve found myself thinking about it from another angle. Re-engaging with my work in this sense, and knowing that was my last chance to change it, made what was once complete feel disarmingly open again, and I became suddenly preoccupied with the things I didn’t say, and the ideas I didn’t express, rather than the ones I did. And that mindset can be dangerous. Stephen King’s The Stand, for example – another post-apocalyptic tale – was updated, extended, and revised to the point that the setting changed from 1980, to 1985, to the 1990s. A work can be permanently unfinished if you allow it to be.


In this vein, the comments of Last of Us co-creators Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin in a behind-the-scenes look at the Season 2 finale really resonated with me. They discuss their rationale for incorporating a sequence cut from the game into the show, in which Ellie washes up on the island of the mysterious ‘Scars,’ who mistake her for a member of the WLF and swiftly condemn her to a brutal execution, prevented only by nearby gunfire. Suddenly alone, Ellie steals a boat and resumes her pursuit of Abby. Many fans have formed an online consensus that this scene was unnecessary, taking up precious minutes of screentime to reiterate Ellie’s drive for revenge even as countless dangers block her path, but Druckmann argues that here we also ‘get to see how chilling it is to be surrounded by everybody that’s trying to exact violence, including children that have been taught to hate people outside of their group,’ while Mazin adds ‘these were the very people that [Ellie] was trying to defend earlier, when the very same thing was happening to one of their kids, and this is the problem with people who have lost any sense of similarity of sin. “What we do is justified. What you do is evil.”’


These are prominent themes of Lichtenberg, so I empathise strongly with the desire to flesh them out. There’s always an opportunity to clarify something, to raise new ideas or old ones in new ways. But deciding a piece of work is open to revision is to run the risk of destroying what people liked about it in the first place. Stories are an artform, not a science, and maybe the ones that resonate should be left alone.


That said, I realise that revising a published work is not the same as adapting it for another medium, and I actually think it was quite brave to take The Last of Us in a new direction for television. It doesn’t detract from the game or retcon it in any way; you can choose to interpret particular scenes as having occurred in the background of the games, where they don’t contradict the narrative, but that’s about the biggest impact the show can have on the source material. Not to mention that some changes likely have just as much to do with budgetary and logistical decisions as writing choices.


Leaving the realm of recreation is a risk, and I think interesting adaptations are to be admired, particularly when we seem to be on the cusp of countless one-to-one, live-action remakes of animated films from the past few decades – the upcoming How to Train Your Dragon springs to mind, and ironically the animated film is such a departure from the book that it would be more dynamic to recreate the source material onscreen. These beat-for-beat remakes can feel more like repackaging than storytelling, though the first season of The Last of Us should not necessarily be counted among them; it occasionally diverged from the game’s narrative, and in interesting ways.


I just wonder where the line should be placed between indulging and subverting the expectations of fans. There will always be people to claim adaptations have missed the mark, misunderstood characters, or butchered key themes, but might they sometimes have a point? It was one thing for me to accept that Lichtenberg was a finished novel when it had only lived in my head beforehand, but if a writer is called on to adapt their existing story, as beloved as The Last of Us, should they take their audience’s initial yes for an answer? Should they tinker again with their own creation, or just recreate it faithfully? It’s an interesting dilemma, I think, and ultimately a good one for any writer to have.


Comments


  • Facebook
  • Temple Dark Books on Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Temple Dark Books on Threads
  • Temple Dark Books on YouTube

©2025 by Temple Dark Publications Ltd.

77 Camden Street Lower, Dublin 2, D02XE80 Ireland

'Channel The Dark', 'Kiranis' and the SFI Logo are Trademarks

of Temple Dark Publications Ltd.

bottom of page