The Last of Us Season Two: Game References and New Theories from the Trailer

The first full trailer for The Last of Us Season 2 is officially here, giving us a look at Ellie and Joel five years after the events of the first season.

In the new season, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are starting to take viewers through the events of the second game, The Last of Us Part 2, and fans of the games will recognise plenty of familiar faces, as well as some new ones.

But alongside finally seeing elements from The Last of Us Part 2 in live-action, there are also plenty of hidden details and Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the teaser, as well as some brand new scenes that have sparked some tin-foil hat theories. So read on for everything we caught in The Last of Us Season 2 teaser trailer and what we think might be happening. Don’t worry, we’ll keep things spoiler-free, except for at the end where we’ll give you a big ol’ warning.

Familiar Faces and Places

Bella Ramsey is reprising their role as Ellie. Set five years after the events of the first season, Ramsey’s Ellie is now living in Jackson, Wyoming. In case you don’t recall, that’s the town from Episode 6 of Season 1 where Joel is reunited with his brother Tommy.

Speaking of Joel, the teaser shows a Miller mailbox, illustrating that the Texan has also fully settled in Jackson after the events of season one. If their living situations correlate directly to those from the game, we can infer that Ellie’s moved into her own home at this point in time and Joel is staying nearby in the town.

While they were traveling companions in the first season of The Last of Us, Ellie and Joel seem more distant in Jackson, as signaled by the stern look given by Ellie as she approaches her former travel buddy’s porch. Joel can be seen plucking away at his guitar, preparing to have a conversation with his proxy-daughter. If you’ve played the game, you’ll know the importance of the conversation about to be had here…

Gabriel Luna also returns as Joel’s brother, Tommy. He was last seen welcoming Joel and Ellie to Jackson, Wyoming where he lives as part of a larger commune of survivors. In the teaser Tommy is holding his trusty rifle, which makes sense given his talent for long-range shooting – something he passes on to Ellie in the video game.

He looks on as something approaches the walls of Jackson. Moments later, the teaser suggests Jackson comes under attack by Infected and we know that Tommy has a somewhat leadership role in the community.

Tommy is shown with his wife Maria played by Rutina Wesley. Last time we saw her she was pregnant, meaning there could well be a small child running around Jackson somewhere. Tommy is looking injured and the two look distraught over something. Given what we know about the game, this could be about any number of events that happen, but is most likely either a reaction to the aftermath of the infected attack on Jackson, or something much worse.

Throughout the trailer we can hear Future Days by Pearl Jam. This is the same song Joel plays for Ellie at the start of The Last of Us Part 2. Weirdly, this song is somewhat of an anachronism as the song was released in October 2013, but the zombie outbreak in the game began in September 2013, weeks prior to the album’s release.

The HBO series actually started its zombie outbreak a decade earlier in 2003. Of course, in the trailer this song is used completely non-diegetically, meaning that Joel isn’t playing it himself here. It would certainly be odd for him to play a song that wouldn’t have yet been written by Eddie Vedder in the show’s timeline, so we wonder what grunge deep-cut he’ll go for instead to avoid creating some sort of Pearl Jam paradox.

And here is a closer look at the guitar Joel gifts to Ellie, complete with the iconic moth design on the neck. The guitar features heavily in The Last of Us Part 2 as an item that connects Ellie and Joel, given that he teaches her how to play the instrument. It symbolizes the father-daughter relationship between the two and is an enduring part of their connection.

That moth can also be seen on Ellie’s forearm tattoo that she received to cover up her infected bite. The symbolism of the animal being is that no matter how dark things get, you always have to draw yourself to the light in the world – something easier said than done in the world of The Last of Us.

Just after this, we see an exact reproduction of an early scene from the game where Joel is singing the aforementioned Pearl Jam song to Ellie, continuing the show’s habit of recreating cherished memories shot-for-shot from its source material.

New characters for Season Two

We’re going to see either Ellie or Joel play the guitar quite a few times this season, surely. Here Ellie is playing a guitar she finds in a Seattle music shop for Dina. Maybe it’s friendly, maybe it’s something more.

In the game, this optional moment sees Ellie play Take on Me by A-Ha. Although it’s not a required part of the gameplay, this moment is one of the most memorable from the games.

In the second season of The Last of Us, Dina is played by Isabella Merced. You might recognize her from Alien Romulus. While she’s also someone who grew up after the outbreak and is able to hold her own in terms of survival, she’s got a very different outlook on life than Ellie, showing that many people have adapted differently to the post-apocalyptic world.

Young Mazino from Netflix’s Beef will be playing Jesse, another resident of Jackson who is introduced in The Last of Us Part 2. A friend to both Ellie and Dina, we suspect that Jesse might be more important in the third season if indeed HBO decides to split up the second game into multiple seasons.

This shot of Ellie and Dina riding around the town’s perimeters as part of a routine security duty echoes an early mission from the game, in which Ellie and Dina take on a scouting mission around Jackson.

You can see an infected approach Ellie in this one scene. It certainly looks like the store that Dina and Ellie have to fight their way out of when patrolling the outskirts of Jackson in the game. But while this moment serves as a tutorial segment in The Last of Us Part Two, it precedes a chain of events that will alter Ellie’s life forever.

Another recreation of a moment from the game, this time early on in Seattle where Ellie and Dina travel through the city’s underground subway tunnels. The red light matches that of the game as they encounter several infected and clickers. We’ve been promised a lot more infected in season two of the show, and this is a great example of the horror they bring.

A shot of Ellie’s knife, the one left to her by her mother can be seen her. Ellie’s mom was a bigger part of the HBO series than in the video game, so perhaps the show will expand even further on Ellie’s relationship with her mother in the second season. We may also see the return of Ashley Johnson, who played Ellie’s mother in the HBO series and voiced Ellie in the video games as further pages from the American Dream prequel comic may be referenced.

Ellie is very upset about something. Knowing this story, it could be one of a number of things but we’ll take a swing and think we might know what moment this follows. We won’t spoil that one here, though. If you think you know, then join the club.

Kaitlyn Dever makes her first appearance as Abby, as Catherine O’Hara’s nameless character (more on her in a bit) asks Joel, “What did you do?” Which if you know, you know.

You can also see a chain hanging from the fence post behind Abby, which may be a nod to one of the collectible dog tags from The Last of Us Part 2, so that’s a fun easter egg if that’s the case.

Abby is trapped between a wall and a collapsing fence, under siege from infected. This is a shot-for-shot recreation of a sequence from The Last of Us Part 2’s opening hours.

A mysterious stranger with a gun saves Abby from an Infected. Who is it? Based on what we know from the game it’s likely Joel who’s come to help.

Two horses are seen galloping, possibly away from the infected horde. Shot in the dark guess it’s Joel, Abby, and Tommy.

This is our first look at a Seraphite, sometimes known as “Scars”. They are a cult-like group from Seattle and one of the enemy factions Ellie fights against in the game. They are also the enemies of the WLF (Washington Liberation Front), who Abby is a member of.

The Seraphites worship the Prophet, a woman who had a vision that humans should return to living off of the land again, and abandon modern technology. This mural is in reference to her.

In the same way the first season of The Last of Us explored the lives of peripheral characters like Bill in more detail, perhaps we’ll see more backstory for The Prophet – how she became a saint to her following, and how she establishes the Seraphites in Seattle?

This is a shot of the WLF breaching a room. The WLF’s reliance on weaponry and brute force is the polar opposite of the nature-embracing Seraphites, and we expect to see this dynamic play out in greater detail when Ellie and Dina make their way to Seattle and see these two factions up close.

Ellie is seen returning fire with an automatic rifle, a weapon she wields in the game. It’s unclear, though, whether she’s firing at the WLF soldiers in the shot before. The magic of editing!

A captured Seraphite is chained to a wall. Their captor is the leader of the WLF, Isaac Dixon, played by Jeffrey Wright. Wright reprises his role from the game, in which he voiced and mo-capped Dixon. This isn’t the first time this has happened in The Last of Us HBO series as Merle Dandridge also played the live-action version of Marlene, leader of the Fireflies, whom she voiced in The Last of Us Part 1.

Things Not From the Game

It was previously announced that Catherine O’Hara, best known most recently from reprising her role as Delia Deetz in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, would be joining the cast of The Last of Us in Season 2. However, details of her character were not revealed. It now appears that she will be playing an original character, seemingly a therapist. She’s introduced talking to Pedro Pascal’s Joel, who we see with longer hair here. He also appears to be grappling with his actions from the end of the first season, hence why he might be seeking out O’Hara’s presumed therapist in residence in Jackson, Wyoming.

We don’t know who she is for sure, though. Could it even be that she’s the aforementioned Seraphite prophet? A long shot, seeing as she’s long dead in the game, but it wouldn’t be the first time the show has made a big change. Trailers can be crafty and she might not actually even be speaking to Joel in this scene, after all.

This is another moment not seen in the game is a horde of infected charging towards Jackson. Is this why Tommy was seen carrying his rifle earlier?

The infected horde from earlier return as they slam into the barricades of Jackson. It’s worth noting that no such event occurs in the game, so we’re seeing something new here. This may play into the theory that the events of the game may be changed to reflect original concept art of Abby being welcomed into the community of Jackson as she, Tommy, and Joel escape from the oncoming horde we saw them escaping from earlier.

Here’s where we going to go into spoiler territory for the game, so if you haven’t played it, we’d recommend you stop watching now.

SPOILER WARNING

In The Last of Us Part 2, Abby shockingly puts an end to Joel’s newfound homely existence by introducing his skull to a golf club. It all happens very quickly, but Druckmann later explained early drafts of the story we different, and that “Abby joined the community and you were playing as this new character until she betrayed Joel later on. And it just didn't work because Joel dying is the inciting incident, and you want to get to the inciting incident as quickly as you can.”

Could we see that version of events take place in season two of the show? The fact that a horde of infected is charging toward Jackson could mean that Joel and Abby are being chased back to the settlement instead of the chalet, which is the setting of his video game demise. Obviously, it’s all guesswork at this point, but it would be an interesting way for the season to go and give us a little more precious Pedro Pascal time.

And that’s all the game details we saw in the first trailer for The Last of Us Season 2. Will Joel teach Ellie Future Days, a song that shouldn’t exist in the series? Maybe it’ll be a different Pearl Jam song, or something else altogether. Let us know in the comments what you think it could be. The return of this version of the apocalypse will arrive in the form of seven episodes on HBO sometime in 2025.