Spoilers follow.
“The Last of Us” looked heavy at the cameos and the roles invited since the start of season 1. Nick Offerman won an Emmy for his turn to a single episode in the “long, long” acclaimed by criticism, and the rest of the season was full of short -term stellar performances by Nico Parker, Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker and Melanie Looksy. All those who have turned out to be fleshy roles, but season 2 offers a more traditional cameo in episode 4.
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The episode opens onto a flashback at 2018, 10 years before the main events of season 2 of “The Last of Us”. We see a armored vehicle carrying soldiers from Fedra through the Seattle quarantine area. While the squad passes through the city, one of them – the compulsory joker of the group – tells a “funny” story on one of their brutalizing superior officers of civilians. While the actor playing this role is somewhat obscured by his massive helmet, you may have recognized his face or voice as belonging to Josh Peck, former star of the child of “Drake & Josh” by Nickelodeon.
Although his compatriots make fun of history, the commander of the soldier, Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), is not so amused. Soon we learn why. When the truck stops at an obstruction on the road, Isaac comes out with the only new soldier with the group’s fresh face, then quickly throws a grenade into the vehicle, killing everyone inside, including the character of Peck. It turns out that everything was planned with a rebel leader named Hanrahan, with whom Isaac joins forces. This change of parts foreshadows the state of Seattle seen in the chronology of the series in 2028, and there is more in the monologue of Peck than you think.
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Josh Peck’s cameo alludes to a major conflict of season 2
The story that the character of Josh Peck tells in the APC implies a group of civilians from Seattle has caught “broadcasting brochures”. One of the other soldiers asked if the literature concerned “WLF stuff”, referring to the Washington Liberation Front – the same militant group to which Abby belongs to the main story. The character of Peck replied: “I thought it was, he turned out later that it was a religious shit.”
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These two lines are in fact very revealing how Seattle arrived in the state in which we see it when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabella Merced) arrive. Later in the same episode, we see that Isaac is a WLF classification member, suggesting that he made defection to join Hanrahan and his faction after being frustrated by the repeated abuse of power of Fedra. The religious brochures mentioned probably refer to the other major group in 2028 Seattle – the cult seaphites, with which the WLF is locked in a brutal war.
In the current history, Isaac brutally tortures a captured seaphite, displaying exactly the same type of brutality that he apparently found so unpleasant when the character of Peck and the other agents of Fedra joked on this subject. Like the game on which it is based, season 2 of “The Last of Us” seems mainly interested in the cyclical nature of the conflict, and this is an excellent example of this idea.
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Josh Peck recently emerged in certain major shows and films
Those of a certain age (guilty) always know Josh Peck mainly of his time on “Drake & Josh”, but he has done a lot in the years since this program left the air. He expressed Eddie throughout the franchise “Ice Age” and Casey Jones on the cartoon “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” 2013, also on Nickelodeon. Live, he played roles in shows like “Grandpa” and in films like “Red Dawn” and “Danny Collins”.
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Recently, however, the peck roles have been a slightly higher profile. He played in short -term restart in 2021 “Turner & Hooch” on Disney + and won a main role in the series on “How I Met Your Father” by Hulu in 2023. That same year, Peck won a small role in “Oppenheimer” by Christopher Nolan.
Although his role in “The Last of Us” is also small, it is another part in a major, dramatic and large budget project, showing that Peck is clearly aimed at continuing to redefine outside the world of comedy where he most often worked. But given the speed with which he is sent to the Dystopian HBO series, we will probably not see his character.
