The “Last of Us” Season 2 finale begins the only way it can — in pain. Jesse (Young Mazino) treats a screaming Dina (Isabela Merced) by removing the crossbow bolt that pierced her leg in “Feel Her Love” and deduces, through her insistence that she “can’t die” and refusal of any alcohol to numb the pain, that she is pregnant with his child. Ellie (Bella Ramsey) makes it back to their theater shelter hours later and immediately checks on Dina, who in turn washes Ellie’s wounded back. Ellie recounts her encounter with Nora (Tati Gabrielle), informing Dina that all the former Firefly told her about Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) whereabouts is that she is by a “wheel” and “whale.”
“I just kept hurting her,” Ellie says, shocked by the violence she herself unleashed. When Dina says Nora may have gotten what she deserved, Ellie replies, “Maybe she didn’t,” before revealing the truth about why Nora, Abby and their friends hunted down Joel (Pedro Pascal) in the first place. In a moment of dramatic clunkiness, “The Last of Us” repeats out loud for the third or fourth time this season that Joel killed Abby’s father, a doctor, and doomed humanity by refusing to let the Fireflies operate on Ellie. Dina responds to the news by somberly telling Ellie, “We need to go home,” and completely changing her mind about their mission (despite emphatically asserting in “Feel Her Love” that it would not matter to her if a person she loved had hurt their killer’s family first).
The next morning, Ellie sets out with an angry Jesse to meet back up with Tommy (Gabriel Luna). Along the way, Jesse baits Ellie into admitting that Dina is pregnant, which prompts him to tell her through gritted teeth, “I’m going to be a father, which means I can’t die. But because of you, we’re stuck in a war zone.” The fractures in their friendship deepen further when they witness a group of W.L.F. soldiers beating a young male Seraphite. Ellie tries to intervene but Jesse stops her, explaining, “I am not dying out here. Not for any of them. This is not our war.” Jesse is, of course, right, and Ellie’s impulse to intervene in the conflict feels both sudden and out of character.
Not our war
The “Last of Us” Season 2 finale cuts briefly away from Ellie and Jesse’s journey across Seattle to catch back up with Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and Elise Park (Hettienne Park). The latter informs Isaac that Abby has gone missing, as have both Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). Isaac reacts to the news badly, revealing to a dismayed Sergeant Park that he believes there is a high chance both of them will be dead by morning and that he thinks Abby is the only soldier suited to lead the W.L.F. in his stead. “It was supposed to be her,” he confesses. “Well, she’s f—ked off, Isaac,” Park counters. “So maybe it wasn’t.”
Ellie and Jesse make it to their rendezvous point only to discover that Tommy still has not returned to it. A tense conversation between Ellie and Jesse, in which the latter takes a condescending moral high ground over Ellie and announces that he was “taught to put other people first,” is interrupted by a W.L.F. radio call asking for backup against an unidentified sniper. Jesse and Ellie deduce that the sniper in question is Tommy and set out to help him, but Ellie’s trek there is derailed when she sees in the distance a ferris wheel next to an aquarium with a whale painted on the side of it. Using the clues Nora gave her, Ellie realizes that is where Abby is and decides to finish hunting her target down.
She meets resistance, though, first from Jesse, who tells her Tommy needs their help more than she needs her revenge. “You do everything for you,” he spits at her, revealing that he did not actually vote to send a posse out to avenge Joel during Jackson’s town council meeting in “The Path.” Ellie lashes out in response, condemning Jesse’s belief in helping only the people he considers part of his community and insisting that he would do the exact same thing as her if he was in her position. Angered and frustrated, Jesse sullenly parts ways with Ellie, but not before telling her, “I really hope you make it.”
You gotta be kidding me
She nearly doesn’t. Before she makes it to the aquarium, Ellie watches W.L.F. soldiers, including Isaac, boarding boats in the middle of a vicious storm. She follows after them in a boat of her own that gets quickly overturned by a massive wave that leaves her washed ashore an island inhabited by the Seraphites. She is strung up and nearly gutted by her new captors, but they decide to leave her alive when the W.L.F. launches a surprise attack on their island village. As Ellie sails away, explosions can be seen going off on the island, teasing a battle between the W.L.F. and the Scars that “Last of Us” viewers do not actually get to see.
Ellie eventually makes it to the aquarium, where she finds Mel and Owen, who reacts to Ellie’s arrival with an astonished, “You gotta be kidding me.” She demands they tell her where Abby is, and she tries to interrogate them the same way Joel did a pair of cannibals in “The Last of Us” Season 1. Her plan goes awry, however, when Owen tries to pull a gun on her, which forces her to shoot him. He falls dead to the floor, and Ellie realizes too late that her bullet shot all the way through him and into Mel’s neck as well. The W.L.F. medic collapses and begs Ellie to perform an emergency C-section on her with a knife — revealing the very prominent baby bump that was covered by her coat. Mel dies within moments, though, long before Ellie gets the chance to save her and her baby’s lives.
The deaths rock Ellie, who is left sobbing to herself until Tommy and Jesse arrive and take her back to the theater with them. The trio makes plans to return to Jackson, and inevitability that Ellie notes means “Abby gets to live.” “Yes,” Tommy responds. “Do you think you can make your peace with that?” Ellie believes she has to, and Tommy leaves to start packing their bags in the theater’s lobby. Alone, Jesse and Ellie mend their friendship. The latter* divulges that he went back for her because he knew she would do the same for him.
Before the two can properly apologize to each other, they hear gunshots and chaos in the lobby. When they run to investigate, Jesse is shot through the face by a waiting Abby, who keeps Tommy held at gunpoint and threatens to shoot him, too, if Ellie does not surrender. Ellie tosses her gun away, confesses to killing Abby’s friends and takes the blame for Joel’s actions in “The Last of Us” Season 1. “I let you live, and you wasted it!” Abby shouts back, but viewers do not see where her and Ellie’s confrontation goes from there.
*Moments before he is killed, Jesse once again mentions that he is going to be a father and Ellie also tells him that he is a “good person.” These lines feel like just two examples of how blunt, on-the-nose and uncannily literal the writing has been at times throughout “The Last of Us” Season 2.
Abby gets to live
Instead, “The Last of Us” jumps backward three days. Abby is awoken by Manny (Danny Ramirez), and viewers follow her as she walks through the football stadium that the W.L.F. uses as both a post-apocalyptic safe haven and base of operations. A title card appears in the corner of the frame: Seattle: Day One.
“The Last of Us” Season 2 then cuts to black for the last time, leaving viewers to sit in the aftermath of its sudden perspective shift, which is one of the many creative decisions that made “The Last of Us Part II” so divisive among gamers when it was released in 2020.
The season finale’s ending sets “The Last of Us” up to follow its video game source material and spend its next 7-10 hours entirely with Dever’s Abby and her friends. That is not necessarily surprising, given the previous events of the season and the fact that this week’s episode was written once again by “Last of Us” showrunner Craig Mazin and “Last of Us Part II” co-writers Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross. Nonetheless, it’s worth asking: Will casual viewers be interested in actually spending an entire season — or even just half of a season — solely with Abby and the characters who surround her? Will they be interested in abandoning the characters they have come to know for that long of a period of time?
It is a risk “The Last of Us” has chosen to take. Only time will tell whether or not it pays off. Either way, the closing moments of the HBO series’ latest episode mark a fittingly jarring end to a season that has, unfortunately, felt disjointed and clunky for much of its run.
“The Last of Us” Seasons 1-2 are available to stream now on HBO Max.
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