Next season of The Last of Us won’t be the last of it. In a new interview, the show’s co-creator Craig Mazin said that the upcoming third season of the show will not finish the story of the second video game, The Last of Us Part II. “There’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season,” Mazin said. “Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome.”
The quote comes from an extensive interview with Collider where Mazin, ahead of the upcoming season two finale, spoke about working on the third season, which HBO officially greenlit a few weeks back. “It would take forever,” Mazin said about finishing the events of the second game in the third season. “There are natural perforations in the narrative where you can go, ‘Okay, let’s tear it here.’ I think there’s a decent chance that season three will be longer than season two, just because the manner of that narrative and the opportunities it affords us are a little different. The thing about Joel’s death is that it’s so impactful. It’s such a narrative nuclear bomb that it’s hard to wander away from it. We can’t really take a break and move off to the side and do a Bill and Frank story. I’m not sure that will necessarily be true for season three. I think we’ll have a little more room there.”
Audiences have not yet seen where season two ends, but it certainly seems to be aiming at one of the second game’s biggest “perforations” that Mazin mentions. Assuming the game’s big point of view shift is the end of this season, there is definitely a lot more story to go, but it’s a bit of a surprise to hear Mazin flat out say they don’t want to wrap it up next season.
Thankfully, Mazin confirms that they don’t start writing anything until—not just the upcoming season is planned, but even further in advance. “We always think ahead,” he said. “We thought ahead to season three and season four, to try to get as much visibility as we can, so that we don’t end up in a situation where we’re sitting down and getting into details for a season and then going, ‘Oh, man, if only we hadn’t had that person say that one line or be in that spot or wear that jacket, this would be so much cooler.’ So, we really do try to think things through fundamentally. The challenge for our first season was, how do we tell this big story in a way that’s complete and doable within an amount of time and with the budget we have? And with this season, it was, ‘Okay, this source material goes way beyond one season.’”
In fact, it might take three seasons. The season two finale of The Last of Us airs Sunday; we’ll have much more then.
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