Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 finale.
The vicious cycle of revenge is cycling on in The Last of Us. What began with Joel (Pedro Pascal) wiping out the Fireflies in Salt Lake City, progressed into Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) torturing and killing Joel, and more recently evolved into Ellie (Bella Ramsey) setting out on her own warpath, has now resulted in Abby and Ellie coming face to face in a blaze of violence.
After a penultimate episode made up entirely of flashbacks, the finale of the show’s second season played out over the course of Day 3 of Dina (Isabela Merced) and Ellie’s stay in Seattle. In the aftermath of Ellie torturing Nora (Tati Gabrielle) for information about Abby’s whereabouts, Ellie and Jesse (Young Mazino) spent the following morning trying to make it to the rendezvous point Jesse had agreed on with Tommy (Gabriel Luna) while a wounded and pregnant Dina remained behind at the theater. But after hearing a report on their stolen radio that the Wolves were under attack by a sniper—i.e. Tommy—at the marina, Jesse pushed to change course.
In the process of surveying the city, Ellie realized the two words Nora had given up, “whale” and “wheel,” were likely in reference to Seattle’s aquarium, and decided to instead make her way there to finish what she’d started. However, it wasn’t Abby she found at the aquarium, but Abby’s friends, Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). Although Ellie insisted she would let them live if they told her where Abby was, Owen tried to pull a gun on her and Ellie fired off a shot that went straight through Owen’s throat, killing him instantly, before also nicking Mel’s neck. It was a fatal wound, but Mel was still alive for long enough to reveal she was heavily pregnant and try to convince Ellie to perform an emergency C-section on her to save the baby. It was clear Ellie was devastated about what she had done and wanted to help, but had no idea how to do the surgery before Mel bled out. Tommy and Jesse then showed up to bring a distraught Ellie back to the theater.
Unfortunately for the Jackson crew, just as they were getting ready to get the hell out of the war zone of Seattle, Abby finally showed back up and didn’t waste any time getting down to business. After subduing Tommy and killing Jesse, she recognized Ellie and realized who she was dealing with. Ellie begged her to let Tommy go and she responded by instead pointing the gun at Ellie and telling her that she had let her live and Ellie had “wasted it” before we hear her fire a shot. However, we didn’t see if the bullet hit its mark, as the show flashed back in time to three days earlier in Seattle—except this time we were seeing things from Abby’s perspective. The episode then cut to black, meaning Ellie’s fate will remain up in the air for a few years until Season 3 eventually rolls around.
“Now, we’re actually in more of a traditional cliffhangery mode, where you’re telling a story, and then you end the season with something that says, ‘Whoa, this is going to change a whole bunch of things, and we’ll see you when we get back and pick it up from there,’” series co-creator Craig Mazin told Collider. “I’m always thinking about, what are the things that only The Last of Us does? Let’s do those as much as we can. And then, you go for it and you make your decisions and mostly just try as best as you can to think about the audience experience and how they’re going to feel when they arrive at the end of something. Hopefully, we set them up to want to return when we come back for the next run.”
In the meantime, however, The Last of Us Part II video game can provide some insight about what’s likely to come in the show. So, for those who don’t already know what happens in the game, now’s your chance to stop reading before we get into some spoilers.
This cliffhanger ending heralds a major switch-up in the Last of Us story, as it marks the controversial moment in the game when the main playable character flips from Ellie to Abby. And while Ellie does survive this encounter with Abby, it’s likely that won’t be revealed in the show until at least a few episodes into Season 3, as we’ll first need to see everything that happened to Abby during those same three days in Seattle.
The change is intended to show you things from Abby’s point of view and make you empathize with her as well as Joel and Ellie. However, that’s not always the reaction it prompted in the game, seeing as some fans hated Abby so much that the actor who voiced and provided the motion-capture performance for her in the game, Laura Bailey, was subjected to significant harassment and death threats directed not only at her, but at her infant son. On a 2024 episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Isabela Merced revealed that HBO also felt the need to increase security for Dever during filming due to concerns over the toxicity directed at Abby. However, Mazin has said he was pleasantly surprised by how much better Joel’s death went over with fans of the show than it originally did with the gaming community.
“They understood, ‘Oh, my God, no! Somebody that we loved is dead. What will happen now?’ It was not, ‘Let’s go stand in front of HBO and throw eggs or blame Kaitlyn Dever.’ No. People reacted like a normal audience would theoretically react,” he told Collider. There are people who are angry at the video game who will stay angry forever, and they will be angry at the show. If Neil [Druckmann] hands out free money, they’ll be angry about the denominations that the cash was in. It was amazing, actually, to see how many people were like, ‘I hate Abby. Kaitlyn Dever should win an Emmy.’ They understood what that’s about, and that was actually quite encouraging.”
How the show will handle Abby’s POV is obviously still up in the air. But, according to Mazin, it won’t be possible to finish telling the Last of Us story in just three seasons of television. “There’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome.”
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