The Last Of Us Season 2 Improves Dina & Ellie's Romance In One Key Way Over The Game

Warning: This article contains spoilers for "The Last of Us" season 2 and the video game "The Last of Us: Part II."

Both seasons of "The Last of Us" have been caught between a rock and a hard place. The show is forced to balance the desires of fans who merely wanted a direct 1:1 recreation of every single cutscene from the acclaimed video game ... versus the rest of us who actually wanted a proper adaptation of the story, changes and all. As I laid out in my review of season 2 for /Film, the series remains at its best when it remembers to follow that latter approach. For my money, showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin make this entire venture worthwhile when they're making bold choices such as inventing entire characters out of nowhere, expanding certain storylines beyond the scope of the source material, and especially taking gambles on antagonists like Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) to account for the storytelling needs of a completely different medium.

The next round of social media discourse, for better or worse, will likely revolve around the relationship between Bella Ramsey's Ellie and Isabela Merced's Dina. Gamers will remember how, even before Joel ends up on the wrong end of a golf club, their video game counterparts consummate their feelings for one another while holed up in a stash house as a blizzard rages outside. The two friends-turned-lovers share a rather touching moment together (no, not just that kind of touching, you perverts) where they get to be innocent teens, for a change: smoking weed, comparing scars, and flirting as if the zombie apocalypse hasn't happened.

While much of "The Last of Us" season 2 has followed the sequel game fairly faithfully thus far, including their big kiss at the community dance, one crucial part of Dina and Ellie's dynamic has undergone a bit of an adjustment. The show skips over the obvious moment of sexual tension in their tent on the way to Seattle during episode 3, choosing instead to feature an intimacy scene at the very end of episode 4. Here's why this change makes for a better journey for both characters.

Not to break any hard-hitting news here, but what if I told you that what works in video games doesn't necessarily translate to live action? Although this applies to various aspects of "The Last of Us," the most subtle of them concerns the otherwise straightforward romance between Ellie and Dina. In "The Last of Us: Part II," the Jackson storyline unspools with gamers having to play a little bit of catch-up to account for the four-year gap between games. Ellie and Joel are on poor terms for initially withheld reasons. Abby becomes a playable character without any explanation at all. And Ellie clearly has some sort of history with her bestie Dina that we aren't fully aware of just yet. That last part, however, is easiest to go along with because we're literally in Ellie's head almost every step of the way and are already predisposed to seeing things through her own eyes. In the show, however, it's a wildly different experience to passively watch two actors doing their best to sell viewers on a love story that we've hardly actually seen on screen.

That's where "The Last of Us" season 2's most necessary change comes in. Instead of cramming the biggest moments of their relationship into the relatively short amount of time before they set off to Seattle to get revenge on Abby, the show carefully doles them out along the way. Episode 3 gives them plenty of time and space while traveling on horseback to grow even closer together, while the aforementioned tent scene almost feels bolder for not having them act like hormonal teens. Following Joel's death, we see how Dina and Ellie are developing a more grown-up partnership together — one that will hit all the harder towards the end of the season and into season 3. Sure, they still flirt over their drunken kiss from before and even make big ol' heart-eyes at each other during the famous "Take On Me" guitar cover sequence. But don't these instances feel even more like momentous milestones in their relationship when they haven't actually had sex with each other yet?

Contrary to popular belief, the art of adapting a story like "The Last of Us" requires more effort than just following the outline of the original game. It'd be the easiest thing in the world to simply treat the source material like storyboards and film everything exactly the same way. (In my house, we call that the "Zack Snyder's 'Watchmen' approach.") It's much more difficult to actually take account of the inherent differences between mediums and adjust accordingly.

Nowhere is this more clear than the ending of episode 4. Although the broad strokes remain the same as in the game — Ellie and Dina encounter the Washington Liberation Front soldiers in Seattle, run into a nearby subway tunnel full of infected, and only narrowly escape to a nearby theater that they turn into their hideout — the changes made in terms of the drama and tension hit much differently and way harder. Not only was it a clever bit of writing to have Dina so skeptical of Ellie's immunity that she literally holds her at gunpoint overnight, refusing to believe that her bite wound isn't what it seems. But once it's clear that she's telling the truth, the show goes even further and drops another emotional bomb on us: Dina admits she's pregnant with Jesse's (Young Mazuno) child. And just when it feels like the stakes couldn't possibly get any higher, the writers choose this moment to give the characters (and us) a release valve from the ever-mounting pressure. When the two finally have sex, it's a payoff to almost four whole episodes of setup.

Call me crazy, but I'd say that this is an overall improvement over how it goes down in the game. The evidence speaks for itself, frankly. When the episode ends with Ellie and Dina resolving to explore Seattle on their hunt for Abby "together," hand in hand, viewers have likely never been more invested in them as a couple than they are in that moment.

New episodes of "The Last of Us" season 2 air on HBO every Sunday.