The Last of Us Creators Address Season 2’s Biggest Continuity Error: “We Didn’t Give a Sh-t”

The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin has addressed the biggest continuity error with Season 2 head-on. When Season 1 of The Last of Us debuted over two years ago, it opted to make one major change when compared to the video game. That change was to move the timeline of The Last of Us forward, which resulted in “Outbreak Day” taking place in 2003 rather than 2013. While this tweak to the timeline more or less didn’t have any major impacts in Season 1, the same cannot be said for Season 2. As a result, Mazin has opted to address this conflict right away rather than beat around the bush.

For those who have played The Last of Us Part 2, it’s well-known that the song “Future Days” by Pearl Jam plays a huge role in the game. Without spoiling much, the song is thematically relevant and serves as a refrain throughout the course of the narrative. With The Last of Us Season 2, it’s clear that “Future Days” is going to play a big role as well given that Episode 1 of this new season was, in fact, titled “Future Days.”

The problem with “Future Days” existing in the TV show version of The Last of Us, though, is that Pearl Jam didn’t write and release the song until 2013. This means that if the song does appear later in Season 2, which it likely will, there’s no way that it should be a tune that exists simply because Eddie Vedder and company never created it. Despite this, Mazin said that himself and fellow The Last of Us producer/director Neil Druckmann decided that “Future Days” was too important to the story of the series to be left out, even if its appearance doesn’t necessarily line up.

“So ‘Future Days,’ that song didn’t exist in 2003 when the world ended and Neil 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,” Mazin said in the latest episode of The Last of Us podcast. “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.”

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Generally speaking, it’s not shocking that Mazin and Druckmann opted to go in this direction with The Last of Us Season 2, as not including or alluding to “Future Days” whatsoever would have likely been a major issue for many fans of the series. Still, it’s funny to see Mazin acknowledge that “Future Days” being in this universe doesn’t make sense and is something that they just had to accept when making this new season. Whether or not there will be any other timeline inconsistencies like this moving forward in Season 2 remains to be seen, but this glaring issue has now been addressed formally.

The Last of Us Season 2 is airing now on HBO and Max and will last seven episodes in total. New episodes are set to premiere weekly on Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.