We finally got Joel playing the guitar and singing ‘Future Days’ to Ellie in The Last of Us Season 2 Episode 6, but here’s the thing: it doesn’t make any sense.
The newest episode of The Last of Us focuses almost exclusively on Joel and Ellie in the years before Season 2, exploring how their relationship turned sour as Ellie got older and grew wise to his lie(s).
Before we get to what happened with Eugene and their fateful talk on the porch after the barn dance, we see them celebrating Ellie’s 15th birthday in Jackson. Joel trades his way to a cake (baked by Seth, of all people) and refurbs a “gee-tar” as a present.
She asks him to play and sing something, and while he’s reluctant at first, he lands on ‘Future Days’ by Pearl Jam. It’s a wonderful, emotional moment ever-so-slightly retooled from the game, but there’s something wrong with it that you probably haven’t realized.
Why ‘Future Days’ doesn’t make sense in The Last of Us
‘Future Days’ was released in October 2013. In The Last of Us, the Cordyceps outbreak began on September 26, 2003.
In other words, the song came out over 10 years after Outbreak Day. Unless Pearl Jam survived the pandemic and still had the facilities to make and release new music on a wide scale, ‘Future Days’ wouldn’t exist within the world of the show – so, why would Joel sing it?
In defence of the original game, the outbreak originally started in 2013, so it’s not too much of a stretch for Joel to know it by the time we reach this moment in Part 2.
Also, it’s just a fun continuity error. The song has thematic weight in the context of The Last of Us’ story (“If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself,” sums up Joel’s actions at the end of Season 1 and how violent Ellie becomes in her pursuit of Abby), and more importantly, the showrunners simply don’t care about the song’s chronology.
“Neil [Druckmann] and I had, you know, a solid conversation and arrived at the following conclusion: We didn’t give a sh*t because it is an important song to the story,” Craig Mazin said on the show’s official podcast.
“And thematically, it’s incredibly important because Joel is trying to figure out what his future is with Ellie, and Ellie is trying to figure out what her future is as herself, not as someone’s kid.
“And where they’re heading into the future, which we accelerate them into five years later, they have arrived at ‘Future Days’. It is, in fact, the past that is the anchor that is still holding them back.”
At the end of the day, The Last of Us is fictional; if the showrunners want to include a song because it means a lot to fans and feels emotionally appropriate, why shouldn’t they?
For more, read why The Last of Us chose A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’, find out what happens to Jesse in the game and why Ellie is immune, and check out our list of the best TV shows of all time.
Source link