What ‘The Last of Us’ Season Premiere’s Final Moments Really Mean

On Sunday’s second season premiere of The Last of Us, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) experienced something familiar to queer folks of almost any generation. It’s the chill that comes when you’re showing affection to your partner in public and suddenly sense you’re being watched. Not by a Cordyceps-infected zombie but by a person who doesn’t like what they see. They sling slurs—as Seth did during Sunday’s premiere—or worse. Sometimes, you have someone like Joel (Pedro Pascal) who will have your back. Often, you don’t.

The moment, show creator Craig Mazin tells WIRED, reflects The Last of Us’ key tension: Humanity is partially stuck in 2003, “because that’s when the world ends on our show.” Fear has deepened some people’s prejudices. Others, attempting to rebuild familial bonds in a world where whole families have been wiped out, accept allies they otherwise wouldn’t. What The Last of Us aims to do, then, is accurately remember the world the way it was and make its best guesses about how it would have moved forward on issues like religion, race, gender, and sexuality under the pall of a zombie apocalypse.

“If there is a moment that is upsetting, it is in and of itself a reminder of the way things were,” says Mazin. “We didn’t just want to sweep that under the rug.”

Still, portraying queer people, and queerphobia, in the media remains a fraught proposition. The Last of Us, in all its permutations, is a product of its time, but the show’s second season is airing in an America different from the one that existed in 2013, when the first game came out, or even 2023, when the first season did. In 2025, queer people, specifically trans folks, are facing a barrage of attacks from President Donald Trump’s administration, from attempts to bar trans women and girls from women’s sports to restrictions on federal funding for gender-affirming care for anyone under 19.

To Mazin’s mind, his show’s portrayal of homophobia simply serves as a reminder of people’s views two decades ago—even if people are watching it at a time with a queerphobia all its own.

Neil Druckmann, who cocreated the game and the show, remains very aware of how both are received by audiences. When I ask him and Mazin about how they balance the queer storylines in their show, stuck in 2003, against a 2025 in which trans rights have become a contentious matter of public debate in the US, his answer is direct.

“How do we deal with what’s going on in the world and how is that bleeding in and affecting our story? And I would say zero percent,” Druckmann says. “We try to just shut out all outside pressure and voices as much as we can and really focus on the story … If people love it, that’s awesome. If people hate it, that’s their choice. But we have a certain integrity and authenticity that we must apply to the story that we will never compromise on.”

Based on a series of videogames released by developer Naughty Dog, The Last of Us became a prestige TV juggernaut when its first season aired. At the time, it received accolades and condemnations for its LGBTQ+ characters. The queer media advocacy organization GLAAD gave it an Outstanding New Series award in 2024. Elsewhere, online commentators lashed out at the show’s creators for fleshing out LGBTQ+ storylines that were only hinted at in the games, and promoting queer “propaganda.”

Naughty Dog’s games—The Last of Us, The Last of Us Part II, and The Last of Us: Left Behind—also faced varying levels of praise and backlash for their inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters. Queer fans have embraced the games and also frowned upon their use of a transgender character’s deadname. Still, in a medium that’s traditionally reacted harshly to diversity, the games’ characters like Lev—a trans man born into a religious sect—has been seen as a beacon of inclusivity.

Queerness on The Last of Us represents something else, too: A framework for building community at a time when nearly everyone has lost their family. Postapocalypse, the America seen on the show has divided into religious sects, cults, splinter groups seeking revenge. Queer people, accustomed for generations to building chosen families of their own, demonstrate an alternative framework for rebuilding.

“The deeper message of the games and the show is the idea that there is such a thing as a queer way of being that could also be an answer to collective trauma if only we would be open to it,” say Ramzi Fawaz, a cultural studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The games and the show both do such a good job of representing queer people by not making them tokens and simply making them potential models of another set of choices.”

During the Last of Us’ first season this manifested in the show’s now-infamous “Long, Long Time” episode. In it, a conspiracy-believing prepper named Bill (a non-player character from the game portrayed by Nick Offerman) meets a man named Frank (Murray Bartlett) when the latter wanders onto his property. Prior to the Cordyceps outbreak, they maybe never would have crossed paths or agreed on anything. In a world infested with zombies, where Bill’s conspiratorial ideas have somewhat proven true and Frank’s level-headedness has proven useful, they fall in love. Bill opens up to life outside of his bunker, outside of his conservative worldview, and even makes friends; Frank learns the value of Bill’s overpreparedness.

World-building this way has its upsides and downsides. The Last of Us can be a mirror, a reminder that attempts to make a place “great again” are inherently retrograde. Again implies that life was better before, even if it wasn’t better for everyone. It also forces the show to treat its characters, particularly its queer ones, in inhumane ways.

These tensions emerge in season 2 in Jackson, Wyoming, where dozens of survivors of the Cordyceps plague have built a somewhat safe and stable existence. Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) helped establish the settlement; Ellie, now an effective fighter and sharp-shooter, helps protect it. But it has also become a microcosm of America in the early aughts.

“One of the problems with Jackson,” says Mazin, “is that they’ve become a bit complacent. They feel safe enough that somebody can get drunk at a party and start tossing out homophobic slurs, to repeat the kind of shitty little sins that [people] used to feel free to commit when the world was not in an apocalypse.”

Re-creating those shitty little sins—or challenging them—on television comes with complications. After HBO aired the “Long, Long Time” episode, the homophobic backlash was swift. Most of it seemed to come from a vocal minority—the episode was the series’ most-watched to date when it aired—but they were mighty enough to seemingly review-bomb the episode and take to the internet with “gay agenda” allegations.

Offerman won an Independent Spirit Award for his performance, and when he accepted he gave his response for what to say when people ask, Why did you have to make it a gay story? “Because you ask questions like that,” Offerman said. “It’s not a gay story, it’s a love story, you asshole!”

At least some of this comes from gamers who are still upset about the LGBTQ+ representation in The Last of Us games. The Last of Us Part II, on which the show’s second season is loosely based, was considered groundbreaking when developer Naughty Dog released it in 2020. Its queer representation, which extends beyond Ellie and Dina, was a big deal in a medium that has been pushing back against inclusivity since at least the days of the first Gamergate.

At the same time, Part II’s inclusion of Lev, was also not wholly well-received by the queer community. Some derided the game’s use of Lev’s deadname. Some said the game, and its predecessor, fell into the “bury your gays” trope, killing off its queer characters too willingly. Others, like Kotaku’s Riley MacLeod, noted that “Lev isn’t necessarily a complex character, but he also doesn’t just walk around being trans like so many trans characters in media do.” The show’s creators wouldn’t confirm if Lev would make an appearance this season but said viewers would likely see him on the show and that he would be a trans character. Just before the show’s second season premiere, HBO renewed The Last of Us for a third season.

Ian Alexander, who played Lev in the game, told WIRED in 2021, “I completely understand people’s frustrations [about the deadnaming scene]. Obviously, the writers have the best intentions and wanted to bring authentic representation, and they might have missed the mark a little bit with that.”

Attempts to show people in all their complexity, though, might mean occasionally missing the mark. The Last of Us offers complicated and messy queer characters and politics rather than relying on trite stereotypes. And messiness means sometimes people will feel uncomfortable.

Sunday night’s episode marks the show’s first breath-holding moment of the season; it won’t be the last.