Spoiler Alert: Spoilers follow for the Season 2 finale of The Last of UsWe spent what felt like an eternity waiting forThe Last of Usto return, and now, less than two months later, it’s gone again. This Sunday saw the release of the second season finale, and it certainly ended with a bang, with its final moments set almost exactly halfway through the video gameThe Last of Us Part II.
Showrunner Craig Mazin recently hinted thatthe show might need a fourth seasonto faithfully adapt the entire plot. While we’re skeptical of that notion, what’s clear is that the third season will look different. It’s making a big structural gambit that will likely polarize fans (and this comes after the show has already shaken up the status quo by killing Joel). But whether that pays off or not,the season finale closed out this year’s arc effectively and has us eager to see what happens next.
The Last Of Us
Ellie’s Revenge Quest Ends With a Bang
On Ellie’s third day in Seattle, tensions within Ellie’s team reach a breaking point. Dina is recovering from her wounds, while Ellie learns that Abby is hiding out in the local aquarium. She chooses to pursue and kill her, even upon learning thatTommy needs help fighting off the WLF, and this leads Jesse to abandon her.
After being captured by the Seraphites (in a sequence that admittedly feels like filler), Ellie escapes and makes it to the aquarium. She encounters Owen and Mel, promising to let them live if they direct her to Abby.Owen instead pulls a gun, leading Ellie to shoot him dead, while Mel bleeds out after a stray bullet grazes her neck.
‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 Just Nailed a Tired TV Trope in the Best Way Possible
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This also leads to maybe one of the show’s most upsetting sequences to date, as Ellie realizes that Mel is pregnant. As Mel passes, she begs Ellie to save her child, but she doesn’t understand the proper medical procedure, and the unborn baby dies with its mother. The trauma of this encounter seems to finally break Ellie out of her bloodlust, as when Tommy arrives shortly after, she’s much more open to his suggestion to return to Jackson, having realized her quest for revenge has only caused her further pain.
But upon returning to the theater and mending fences with Jesse, Abby arrives and takes Tommy hostage, believing he killed her friends.She shoots Jesse dead in another shocking death, leading Ellie to beg for Tommy’s life, admitting she’s the guilty party. Recognizing Ellie from three months before, a bloodthirstyAbby snarls, “I let you live,” and she fires the gun as the screen cuts to black.
‘The Last of Us’ Season 3 Will Heavily Feature Abby
But this isn’t the end of it:the finale’s closing moments flash back to “day one” in Seattle, as Abby awakens in the WLF hideout. The path forward for the third season immediately became clear. In a formal gambit reminiscent ofRashomon, the show will retell the events over the last three days in Seattle, this time from the perspective of the WLF,and more specifically, Abby.
This structural choice was a huge part of what madeThe Last of Us Part IIso impactful as a game. In depicting Joel’s murder so early, Neil Druckmann intended to make the player want revenge, before forcing them out of Ellie’s perspective and making them look more objectively at the consequences of her bloodlust. Some fans in recent weeks have argued that this season’s revenge plot has felt too one-sided, and that both the WLF and the Seraphites have been underdeveloped, but that’s arguably the point: Season 3 will give us their perspective in full.
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It’s no accident that Abby becomes significantly more sympathetic in the game’s latter half, as we see her slowly start to question the WLF’s war against the Seraphites. This is all before she watches her only friends slowly get killed one by one. Already, the show hasn’t shied away from the fact thatEllie’s revenge questis bringing her to a point of no return, but getting Abby’s half of the story forces us to question who the real villain is, orifthere is even one. In a poetic twist of fate, despite not understanding what drove Joel to such murderous lengths that he became the villain in someone else’s story, now she’s gone through the exact same journey.
Admittedly, the episode ends so abruptly that the story simply feels incomplete, and thus it’s not quite as satisfying an ending as the first season finale. But it also feels strangely purposeful in ending abruptly, and more than anything, it teases an exciting (if likely polarizing) path forward for the series, and one that will feel different from anything we’ve seen prior fromThe Last of Us. We’ll likely have another long wait, but we can’t be more excited.The Last of Usis streaming onMax.
