HBO’s The Last of Us TV adaptation is expected to release in 2022, but two important game characters are still missing and their absence might have a large impact on the story. While the series announced a late casting of Storm Reid as Riley, and a recasting of Bill as Nick Offerman, the majority of the cast has been confirmed for a long time. Despite the fact that the series is slated to be a faithful adaptation of the original The Last of Us video game, the characters of Henry and Sam now seem unlikely to be cast.

The original The Last of Us follows Joel and Ellie as they attempt to traverse the United States in search of a cure for the cordyceps infection that has destroyed most of the population and is transmitted via bites or spores. Henry (Brandon Scott) and Sam (Nadji Jeter) are two brothers who have traveled from Hartford that Joel and Ellie meet in Pittsburgh. The two The Last of Us characters have a large age gap, with Henry being 25 and Sam 13, leaving Henry in a parental role during their time in the game. Before the group can leave the city, Sam is bitten but doesn’t tell anyone and transforms the next morning. Henry shoots him in self-defense and then, blaming himself for Sam’s death, takes his own life.

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Henry and Sam play an important role in developing Joel and Ellie’s narrative. There are a lot of parallels between the two pairs as both include a character forced into a fatherly role by the situation, struggling to get the younger member of the party to obey when they want to follow their more youthful desires. Sam and Henry’s narrative serve as a stark example to Joel, Ellie, and the player of what could happen if they’re not careful enough - and helps Joel to reevaluate how he treats Ellie. By not including these characters in The Last of Us adaptation, HBO risks losing that important parallel and a key moment that raises the stakes and demonstrates how many risks there are in this new world.

Henry with Sam in front of him in TLOU

As well as removing an important story beat from the original narrative, not including Henry and Sam in The Last of Us adaptation would have another effect. Henry and Sam are two of the relatively small number of named people of color in the original game, along with Marlene (Merle Dandridge). While removing them would mean removing some of the few original characters of color, the casting for The Last of Us TV show has already been more diverse which helps to mitigate this issue.

Not including Henry and Same in HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us would have one major positive side. In the original game, Henry and Sam both die early on and Marlene is also cast as an antagonist and killed in the endgame. Not including Henry and Sam but using a more diverse cast of characters might help The Last of Us to avoid the tired horror trope of predominantly killing off Black characters. While there is a slim possibility that Henry and Sam might still be cast in The Last of Us TV adaptation, if they aren’t it will ultimately have both positive and negative effects on the resulting show, depending in part on how the showrunners handle it.

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