The Last Of Us Season 2 Is Using “Deleted Material” From The Games
Restore the Druckmann cut.
The Last of Us Season 1 proved that a video game adaptation shouldn’t just faithfully translate its source material, but expand on it. Joel and Ellie’s zombie-ridden odyssey was fleshed out with new villains like Melanie Lynskey’s Kathleen, and interludes like the episode focused on Bill and Frank’s love story.
Season 2 poses new challenges. Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have already revealed that the season will only adapt part of the sequel game, The Last of Us Part II, leaving a lot of room for new ideas. Now, we know some of that extra content will be coming from the cutting room floor.
The Last of Us Season 2 includes areas from The Last of Us Part II Remastered.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Druckmann and Mazin teased the April premiere of The Last of Us Season 2. “Each episode is like a meal. You can have a light dinner or you can go to a 12-course French restaurant,” Mazin said. “We have seven episodes. They are high-calorie, dense episodes. 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.”
The article also revealed the series will adapt scenes cut from the game, including the “lost levels” included in 2024’s The Last of Us Part II Remastered. Those levels weren’t plot-heavy — they followed Ellie at a party, some exploration of Seattle’s sewers, and a tracking mission — but if Season 1’s approach is anything to go by, those moments will just set the stage for bigger ideas.
Season 2 will include previously unseen characters, like Season 1’s Frank (Murray Bartlett).
Notably, the show will again flesh out characters who never appeared in the game. “There is a pretty prominent character that is talked a lot about in the game, similar to what we did with Frank in Season 1, that is in this season,” Druckmann said. “There’s a very, very cool casting that I hope we can talk about soon.”
While that’s not a lot to go on, it does demonstrate that the show’s creators — even those who worked on the game — understand the difference between gaming and television as storytelling mediums. The games had to put gameplay first, but the show can take a minute to breathe and tell us more about its stars. One of the most memorable episodes of Season 1, which saw Ellie and a friend exploring a derelict mall, was based on expansion content for the original game. Now, it sounds like Season 2 will take a similar approach, stripping the gameplay from side stories to focus on the, well, stories.
