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Spoilers for The Last of Us season 2.

Greetings Popversians, and welcome to Lore Corner! Each week, video producer Ashley V. Robinson and staff writer Grant DeArmitt are going to take you deep into the pre-existing lore behind some of pop culture's most exciting adaptations, such as the gut-wrenching post-apocalyptic thriller The Last of Us. Enjoy! 

With The Last of Us season 2 almost at an end, the series creators have decided to bring us back to a warmer, better past, when Joel Miller was still alive and Ellie was still under his care. That's the basic premise of season 2, episode 6, an episode made up almost entirely of flashbacks to Ellie's birthdays over the years. During one flashback, Joel begins to teach Ellie how to play guitar, and if you were watching the show with someone who's played the Last of Us games, odds are there were a few tears in your household.

That's because the song Joel sings is Future Days, a number that has become as linked to The Last of Us franchise as earlier numbers such as Through the Valley and Take on Me. Used as part of the soundtrack for the second game (and worked into the story much like it was for the TV show), Future Days is a heavy, emotional tune that summarizes Joel & Ellie's relationship better than words ever could...

And yet, its inclusion in the show is technically a plot hole.

Give us a second and we'll explain.

What is Future Days by Pearl Jam?

Future Days is the 12th and last song on Pearl Jam's 10th studio album, Lightning Bolt. The song was written and performed by the band's front man/lead singer/guitarist, Eddie Vedder, and important to note for our purposes, the song was released in October of 2013. Seven years later, the song became an emotional touchpoint when it was used in Naughty Dog's The Last of US Part II. In game, the song is sung by Joel (played at that time by Troy Baker) as he is teaching Ellie guitar, and then in flashbacks after his death.

Ever since, the song has been associated with the game (though it wasn't written for it, as we'll get into later). And naturally, fans were expecting it to make an appearance some time in the TV show. But even before the music actually came into the Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey-starring series, the creatives were already paying homage to it, naming the first episode of this gut-wrenching season in its honor.

But here's the problem: according to the history established in the TV series, Future Days couldn't have existed.

When does Joel sing Future Days in The Last of Us Part II?

For a show that adapts its source material pretty strictly, there's one odd change between HBO's The Last of Us and the games of the same name. That is, the timeline of events. In The Last of Us games, the cordyceps apocalypse begins in late 2013, with the infection killing off the majority of humanity in the months leading up to the next year. However, in the HBO series, the creators pushed the cordyceps outbreak back, to 2003. 

Since we'd never ask you to do math here at Popverse, we'll tell you that that's a full ten years before Pearl Jam released Lightning Bolt, and by extension, Future Days. So unless Pearl Jam was recording and releasing music a full decade into an actual global apocalypse (who knows? I wouldn't underestimate Eddie Vedder), Joel was singing a nonexistent song in The Last of Us season 2, episode 6.

But you know what? That is 100% alright.

Was Future Days written for The Last of Us? 

The above question is one of the most frequently googled when it comes to the relationship between The Last of Us and Future Days, and honestly, it says everything you need to know about that pairing. No, Future Days was not written for The Last of Us Part II - production on the game didn't start until 2016, three years after the Vedder-sung number hit the US charts. However, after its emotional usage in The Lats of Us sequel, the song is so engrained in the patchwork of the game that fans still assume it must have been written for that reason.

Helping this idea is the fact that in 2020, Eddie Vedder performed a version of the song for that year's (virtual) game awards. Made extra impactful by the fact that it was performed during a real-life global pandemic, the performance was a highlight of that year's strange ceremony and is still getting views on the Game Awards YouTube page to this day.

So let us suggest this to you - Future Days has earned its place in HBO's The Last of Us adaptation, even if we have to do a bit of historical rewriting to make it canon. Pearl Jam has been active since 1990, so they would've been on the music scene for a decade plus before the apocalypse. Somewhere in that time, Eddie Vedder must've come up with Future Days before he did in our universe, and Joel Miller must've decided it would make for a good song to teach guitar.

The Last of Us season 2 finale airs May 25 on HBO & Max. 

You don't need to beat the game to prepare for the next one—here are all the major new and upcoming games coming our way.