Cliffhangers are a TV staple. Who killed J.R.? How will Picard escape the Borg? Who will Negan smash with his bat? The difference is TV used to operate on a reliable schedule. When the first season of Lost ended with Jack and Locke staring down a hatch, we knew we only had to wait four months to find out what was inside it. And once we did, we’d get 24 episodes to unpack where the story goes from there.
Things are different now, however, in an era where we’re lucky to get a new seven-episode season of a prestige genre show every two years. And that production reality was on my mind as the last scene of The Last Of Us’ second-season finale finally revealed the structural gambit that gamers have long known was coming: The reason the show has made a point of labeling Ellie’s time in Seattle is because it’s now going to flashback and revisit those same three days from Abby’s perspective too—building to the moment where she’s holding Ellie at gunpoint on Day Three.
The question is: Are we still going to care about all the emotional minutiae of this season in two years? In the game, the shift to Abby’s perspective happens about halfway through The Last Of Us Part II, which means this episode is really more of a midseason finale than a proper button to the Seattle arc. And given that co-creator Craig Mazin is already teasing that they may need a fourth season to truly wrap up this storyline, it might wind up being even less than a midseason finale when all is said and done.
So while I found individual scenes and moments from this finale incredibly compelling, it’s hard to judge it as a capper to this season because it’s not really interested in being one. Like House Of The Dragon, Severance, Stranger Things, and even Andor before it, The Last Of Us has now officially become a shrinkflation TV show that gives its audience less and expects them to be just as grateful for it. And, frankly, I think a lot of streamers and showrunners are currently way too overconfident about what audiences will put up with and when this current bubble of stretched-out storytelling tolerance will burst.
Which isn’t to say that I needed this finale to wrap up everything in a nice, neat bow. But I did want it to deliver a sense of thematic finality—to clarify the emotional beginning, middle, and end of the season, even if there’s still more plot to unspool. “What has Ellie’s revenge mission wrought?” could have been a powerful emotional button if this episode had lingered on the tragedy of Jesse’s death. “How has Seattle changed Ellie and Dina?” could have been another, if Isabela Merced weren’t so weirdly sidelined this week.
But “What did a character we don’t really know do for the last three days?” is basically at the bottom of the list of things I care about right now—the sort of hook that only exists because this show is adapted from pre-existing source material and needs to get ahead of fan explainers that would spoil that structural twist in the long gap between seasons. A good cliffhanger leaves you wanting more. This one just kind of made me shrug, especially because we already know much more about Abby’s motivations than gamers did when the POV shift happened.
It’s an odd choice for a season that seemed to find its thematic groove last week and occasionally does so in this episode as well. While I was worried that this Seattle-focused hour would feel as hollow as the video game-y fifth episode, I was surprised by how riveting I found things like Ellie and Jesse’s morality debate and the harrowing Mel/Owen death scene. On the official The Last Of Us podcast, Mazin and Neil Druckmann have talked about community as one of the big themes of the season, which isn’t something I’ve connected to much before this. But I thought it was a fascinating point of divergence between Ellie and Jesse here.
While both characters have a certain macho protectiveness to them, Jesse is first and foremost driven by a sense of communal responsibility. He sets aside his personal wants and desires for the good of the group—whether that means turning down a potential relationship to stay in Jackson as a future leader or handling Ellie and Dina’s burgeoning romance in the chilliest way imaginable. Ellie, however, is more like Joel. Her community is whoever she cares about most in the moment, the larger group be damned. That’s why she’s able to so callously ignore the fact that Tommy is in trouble and keep on with her revenge mission instead.
Yet as Tommy reminded her back in “The Path,” Joel’s protective streak never included an obsession with vengeance. He fought like hell to save the people he loved, but cut off his feelings for the people he lost. Ellie, however, literally puts vengeance for a dead man over the needs of the living people she loves. Back on New Year’s Eve, Ellie condemned Joel for being selfish. Here Jesse rightfully uses the same sentiment to describe her too.
After a season in which Ellie has been frustratingly reckless at times, it’s a relief to have someone there to call her out. In fact, if there’s an overarching theme to this episode, it’s the idea of Ellie fully, if somewhat inadvertently, breaking bad. In one of the episode’s most horrifying scenes, she tracks down Owen and Mel at the Seattle Aquarium to try to force them into giving her Abby’s location. But she winds up shooting Owen in self-defense and hitting Mel in the neck in the process, only to then discover that she’s pregnant. Watching a dying Mel desperately try to find a way to save her baby via an emergency C-section echoes both Dina’s own pregnancy and Ellie’s harrowing birth in the season-one finale. (Ariela Barer’s “please please please” was devastating.) Only here there’s no miraculous happy ending for either party, which leaves Ellie shaken by both what she’s capable of and what she’s not.
Indeed, the other big theme of this episode is the hypocrisies of human behavior. Ellie came to Seattle to hunt down Abby and her crew, yet she’s horrified and traumatized each time she contributes to one of their deaths. Her moral code is frustratingly but also fascinatingly inconsistent. She’ll abandon Tommy to track down Joel’s killer, but when a young Seraphite is being tortured right in front of her, she feels an innate pull to jump up and help him—even more so than Jesse, whose loyalty to Jackson allows him to take a “this is not our war” approach to the situation.
Dina, meanwhile, had all the confidence in the world that if her family’s killer had gotten away, she would have stopped at nothing to hunt him down—even if her family had done something to hurt his people first. But when that hypothetical turns into a brutal leg injury, a reminder of how quickly she could lose her life or her pregnancy and the news that Joel is a mass murderer wavers her certainty a bit.
Even Jesse has his own tragic hypocrisies. It turns out he voted against Ellie’s Seattle plan at the council meeting because “it wasn’t in the best interest of the community.” Yet again and again, he puts his own life and future as Jackson’s leader on the line to save Ellie—first by following her to Seattle then by following her to the aquarium and eventually by running into danger alongside her. The bravery and compassion that makes him so qualified to lead is ironically what gets him killed before he can inherit the role (and, tragically, before he can meet his future child).
It’s a character sketch that could make for a fascinating contrast with Abby, who we learn is also being set up as a future leader as Isaac and Sergeant Park carry out some sort of massive W.L.F. attack we’ll presumably learn more about next season. Unfortunately, The Last Of Us’ commitment to the game’s rug-pull structure stops that parallel from really taking center stage. Abby hasn’t been a central character this season because the show wants to dramatically shift to her perspective in the next one. And Jesse hasn’t been a central character because, well, I honestly don’t know why.
Though Young Mazino is a strong enough performer that you still really feel Jesse’s loss despite him only taking center stage this week, why not take the chance to spend more time with him this season before killing him off? Similarly, why elevate Dina to co-lead status for so much of this season only to reduce her to a supporting ensemble player in this finale? Why has Tommy barely been a character since episode three? Why spend so much time with the Seraphites and Wolves when it turns out that’s all just table-setting for next season? And why kill off Owen and Mel without any table-setting only to (presumably) circle back around to them as part of Abby’s story next season?
In the game, the shift in perspective happens because you’re literally “playing” as Ellie and then switch to play as Abby. But the show has never been that strict about perspective. In a world where this season has regularly cut away from Ellie to dive into Isaac’s backstory, zero in on a Seraphite father and daughter, or follow Gail to a baseball game, withholding the story of Abby and her crew just feels arbitrary. In fact, given the pieces the show has put on the board this season, I think it would have made way more sense to slow down Ellie’s arc and spend more time in Jackson rather than rushing to get her and Dina to Seattle for so many repetitive “we barely survived” set pieces. And I think it would have made way more sense to tell Abby’s story in parallel, rather than hoping the character contrast pays off two years from now.
If the perspective shift does wind up working, I’ll be the first to celebrate it. But right now, it’s hard to see what this season has gained from its odd pacing and strange sense of focus. Last season delivered a series of episodic adventures that added up to an emotionally cohesive whole. This season has become much more serialized on a plot level but somehow lacks that same sense of cohesion, even if most of its individual episodes have been relatively strong. In retrospect, it feels like Mazin and Druckmann were too worried about getting ahead of spoilers and too concerned with keeping the game’s structure intact to adapt this chunk of the story in a way that truly makes sense as a season of TV.
As an episode in isolation, this is a strong hour of The Last Of Us with a trio of deaths that are effective in their quiet, underplayed brutality. They’re quick and ugly in a way you don’t usually see with “big” TV deaths. (There might be a fourth death as well, as we hear a gunshot ring out over the cut to black.) As a season finale, however, it winds up feeling more like an appetizer than something that will tide us over during a long, long hiatus.
Stray observations
- • I’d be curious to watch a version of this season that saved the reveal of why Abby killed Joel until the final scene of the season. I feel like that would play like an actual twist more than the “here’s where Abby was three days ago” thing.
- • Dina seems awfully mobile for someone who starts this episode getting a crossbow bolt shoved through her leg.
- • What we’ll accept in fiction is so funny. I’m willing to buy that the Fireflies could have magically made a cure from Ellie’s brain, but I found it implausible that in this post-apocalyptic world Ellie would have had enough swimming experience to survive a raging ocean with her giant backpack and boots on.
- • Indeed, while the shot of Ellie boating down the Seattle coastline looks cool, I found that entire sequence pretty implausible. Ditto the scene where she barely escapes the Seraphites’ ritualistic killing.
- • “I can do this alone if you want Ellie to stay” was such a devastatingly noble thing for Jesse to offer Dina. R.I.P. Captain Wyoming.
- • If Ellie had gone through with the improvised cesarean, this would have been the second time I’ve watched a show where someone in Seattle has an unmedicated emergency C-section. I should have known The Last Of Us wouldn’t be as gnarly as Grey’s Anatomy, though.
- • Would Ellie have set the world on fire to save Jesse, as he claims? Her refusal to go help Tommy felt like a real crossing the Rubicon moment for her morality, but I’m not sure if the show sees it that way.
- • I was confused why Ellie kept calling the tortured Seraphite a “kid” when he looked about as old as she is.
- • Who puts an I Spy book in the “read to baby” section?
- • Thanks so much for following along with this season of The Last Of Us recaps! Despite some rockiness this season, it’s been a pleasure to write about this show and read your own insightful takes in the comments. Here’s hoping we’ll all be back here in two years to do it again! You can find me over on Bluesky and Substack in the meantime.
