This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Last of Us, now streaming on Max.
In a way, referring to this as the Season Two finale of The Last of Us feels like a misnomer. Yes, it is the final installment that we will be getting this year — or possibly, according to co-creator Neil Druckmann, for more than another year. But it in no way feels like a conclusion to anything, other than this period where Ellie was the series’ primary point-of-view character. There’s a silly cliffhanger where it seems as if Abby has shot and killed Ellie — a classic case of what TV writers refer to as “schmuckbait,” where only someone who knows nothing about storytelling or television would believe what just seemed to happen — and then the story rewinds to the day Ellie and Dina arrived in Seattle, only now we’re following Abby as a member of WLF(*). The season doesn’t so much end as it just stops, abruptly and somewhat confusingly.
(*) When we first catch up with Abby inside the stadium, she’s holding a copy of City of Thieves, the novel by Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, about two young Russian men who, during World War II, are sent behind enemy lines on a pointless quest. Seems apt, even if they were searching for eggs (on behalf of a military officer who wants a cake at his daughter’s wedding) rather than vengeance.
This is the inherent risk of splitting your source material across multiple films or TV seasons. When it works, you get the two recent Dune movies, where it felt like Denis Villeneuve needed that much time to properly cover the important material from the book. When it doesn’t, like with the end of the original Hunger Games movie series, it can feel like a naked cash grab, padded out to the point of pleasing only the most hardcore fans. (And not even them sometimes.)
At only seven episodes compared to Season One’s nine, this round of The Last of Us doesn’t so much feel padded as incomplete. Yes, serialized dramas are built for stories to bleed from one season into the next. But usually there’s some sense of a clear character and/or story arc for an individual season — whether it’s fully resolved within that season, or comes to an important turning point at the end. This is not that. This is four episodes (minus the opening chapters and the Joel flashback) of Ellie seeking revenge against Abby, and various people suggesting why it might be a bad idea, all leading to a literal bang and then the perspective shift. It feels like we’re getting only half the story, because we are, with no way of knowing how long it will take for the other half to arrive. It’s a deeply unsatisfying way to begin an extended hiatus, regardless of whatever issues may have existed previously.
Even if you accept that the show had to tell this revenge story, no matter how much Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal’s chemistry together elevated this series above being Smarter Walking Dead, the execution has been iffy — carried more by the intensity and magnetism of Ramsey’s performance than by anything they were given to do with Isabela Merced.
For starters, there was the way the season framed Ellie and Dina’s decision to stay in Seattle once they not only discovered that the Wolves were far larger, more organized, and dangerous than they had assumed, but learned that Dina was pregnant. If the show had portrayed one or both of them as ambivalent about the idea of being a parent — whether in general or in this broken, scary world in particular — then the idea of them staying would have made more emotional sense. It would be a way to put off thinking about it, or even to let fate make a decision for them. But from the moment Dina told Ellie, it was clear that both of them were overjoyed at the possibility. Yet still, they refused to leave. It’s not until early in the finale, after Dina has been injured — and after Ellie has finally told her the full story about what Joel did and why Abby came for him, and that Ellie knew most of it already — that Dina finally acts like someone who regrets ever having come here, and endangering herself and her pregnancy.
After that — and also after a long and implausible explanation for how Jesse was able to track down Ellie and Dina within a sprawling urban environment he’s never been to before — our heroes begin planning to get the hell out of here, and grab Tommy on the way home. Jesse scolds Ellie a bunch for being selfish. We are perhaps meant to be on her side — she’s the main character, and he’s a guy we barely know(*) — but nothing he says seems unfair or unreasonable. In a reality like this, when Maria and friends have managed to build a relative paradise like Jackson, Ellie’s decision to take off on this crazy quest has implications that go far beyond the risk to herself and Dina.
(*) In addition to the flashback episode shining a light on how much the show lost by killing off Joel, it also underlines what a disappointing job the season has done in establishing many of the new people like Jesse, and even Dina. She’s been around for the entire season, and he’s been in more than half of it. And neither character feels as fully developed in that time as Joel’s dad and Gene did within the space of a few minutes apiece in the last episode. Some of that is a credit to older and more experienced actors like Tony Dalton and Joe Pantoliano being able to do a lot with a little. But Young Mazino and Isabela Merced are doing well with what they’re given; they’re just not being handed as much to dig into as their veteran counterparts.
Young Manzino
Liane Hentscher/HBO
As the trio sets out to find Tommy, we run into the other big structural problem of the season: We know both too much and not enough about the other Seattle characters. If Druckmann, Mazin, and company had decided to show things only as Ellie learned about them — only seeing the Seraphites whenever the women came across their handiwork, or their corpses, and not meeting Isaac or any Wolves who didn’t directly cross paths with Ellie and Dina — then it would have felt disorienting in an interesting way. And it would have made sense with the plan to now switch over to Abby’s POV for a while. Instead, we were given context that this season’s protagonists didn’t have, yet not enough knowledge to really understand the conflicts at play between the Wolves and the Seraphites, or even within different WLF factions. Ellie being captured by the Serpahites, and only saved from disembowelment because they all need to run off and deal with an attack by Isaac’s forces, would feel even more harrowing if we knew as little as she did about who these people are and why they’re doing this to her.
While hanging out at the bookstore again, Ellie thumbs through a copy of The Monster at the End of This Book, a self-aware Sesame Street tie-in where Grover is terrified about meeting the title character when he gets to the last page, then relieved when the monster turns out to be him. The Last of Us has already done its version of that, when Joel turned out to be the monster at the end of the season. Here, it seems like we are headed for a sequel. On the way to rescue Tommy, Ellie figures out where Abby has been hiding out, and again chooses revenge over family. Abby’s gone by the time Ellie gets there, but she manages to kill two of her sidekicks, and is horrified to realize that one of them was very pregnant. She tries to deliver the baby herself, with instructions from the dying mom, but this is not The Pitt (nor is it Station Eleven, another Max postapocalyptic drama which had a memorable episode built around childbirth). Ellie has no clue what she’s doing, and she fails at the impromptu task. She has become the exact thing she came to Seattle to punish, and she has started to recognize this.
Perhaps if not for the transparently phony cliffhanger, that would feel like enough of a character arc for the year. But the shooting is obnoxious, and the shift in POV not as gracefully executed as it should be, ending an uneven season on a real bum note.
Kaitlyn Dever is a world-class actor in her own right, and maybe moving Abby to the forefront of the narrative will finally give this revenge plot the emotional clarity it’s struggled with to this point. But whether it works or not, that’s a long way off. And we’re left with this finale to consider until then.
