This article contains spoilers for season one of The Last Of Us

One of the most-watched and talked about TV shows of 2023 was The Last Of Us, and the new trailer for season two that dropped last week has already garnered 158 million views across platforms in just the first three days, which is a record for HBO and Max originals.

If you haven’t seen the series yet, there’s still time to catch up. Set in a not-so-distant future, The Last Of Us follows hardened smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he escorts 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) on a terrifying journey across a ruined USA. This future is filled with cannibalistic humans who have been infected and driven mad by the cordyceps fungus, causing mayhem among the uninfected population.

With season two premiering on 14 April (in the UK), we’ve picked out some of the big questions surrounding the new season and our thoughts on what exactly will happen to Joel and Ellie.

What will Joel and Ellie do next?

At the end of the first season, Joel discovers that the plan to save humanity involved the removal of part of Ellie’s brain so the Fireflies can study it and replicate her immunity to cordyceps. When Joel finds out that Ellie has to die in order for this to happen, he decides to get her out instead – killing a bunch of soldiers, the surgeon operating on Ellie and even an ally.

As they’re driving back to Jackson, Joel avoids Ellie’s questions at first, but then Ellie makes Joel swear that the lie he has told her is the truth.

And what will the Fireflies do with Joel’s decision?

Joel didn’t kill all the Fireflies in his efforts to save Ellie. So, their plan may not have died with the doctors involved. We have to assume that someone in the Fireflies shared this plan with someone outside of the hospital, so it isn’t exactly contained. What happens when news of Marlene’s murder and Ellie’s kidnapping gets back to the rest of the organisation?

Will Joel tell Ellie the truth?

Well, he may not have a choice. Especially if the Fireflies come looking for Ellie, which we have to assume they will. And if the new season two trailer is anything to go by, Ellie seems to find out from someone else and confronts Joel. “You swore!” she tells him.

Where will season two pick up?

This is the big question. The second part of the video game picks up on the story four years after the first with Joel recapping events to Ellie at the start of part two. It’s only through a flashback scene in the game that we find out that Ellie uncovered the truth two years before, and her relationship with Joel is now strained.

However, four years is a long time, and that’s a lot for the TV series to fill in. The first season did a brilliant job of staying loyal to the game’s story while expanding on characters and certain narrative threads. Will season two see the writers do something similar? Perhaps even putting together a whole season to cover the time jump between the two parts of the video game?

In a recent interview with series creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, the pair explained that because of how huge part two of the game is, they’d always planned to split the story into more than one season. But will anything change in the TV version? Maybe.

Druckmann says: “I love the changes that we’ve made. It’s a different version of that story, but its DNA is in there. Maybe more than excited, I’m really curious what their reaction will be.”

What will happen to Joel?

Another major question that fans have is about Joel’s fate. In the second part of the video game, Joel dies. The daughter of the surgeon killed in the finale of season one (a woman named Abby) seeks revenge for her father and looks for Joel and, eventually, kills him. But how loyal will the series stay to the game? We know that Kaitlyn Dever has been cast as Abby for season two, but the timeline could be extended or adapted depending on where the show goes with the story.

The second season of The Last Of Us will premiere on Sky and NOW on Monday 14 April.

Image: HBO