The Last of Us Season 2 Finale: Is Ellie Really Dead?

We were only ever going to get half a story here. Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann made plenty of deviations from the PlayStation game they’re adapting in this season of The Last of Us. But early on, it became clear that they would replicate the game’s point/counterpoint structure—for better or worse. The result is a season of television that feels incomplete, because it is.

While The Last of Us season two is clearly interested in exploring characters who make terrible choices despite having incomplete information—something Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s old show, Game of Thrones, did often and well—it’s also left its audience in the dark, which prevents us from understanding any dramatic irony or the poignancy of understanding something our heroes do not. Instead, we, like them, are just along for the ride.

And this final episode feels very much like a ride. After last week’s flashback interlude, there’s a lot for Ellie to do before the season wraps. She returns to the theater, where Jesse (Young Mazino) is tending to Dina (Isabela Merced), removing the crossbow bolt that’s stuck in Dina’s leg. Following the operation, Dina asks Ellie what happened at the hospital. At first, Ellie tells her that she got two words out of Nora (Tati Gabrielle): “wheel,” and “whale.” Then Ellie starts to break down, horrified by her own capacity for violence. “I made her talk,” she says. “I thought it would be harder to do, but it wasn’t. It was easy. I just kept hurting her.”

While she did torture Nora, Ellie didn’t kill her; instead, she just left the cordyceps infection to do its work. Dina takes Ellie’s side, saying maybe Nora got what was coming to her. In a moment of vulnerability, Ellie wonders if maybe Nora didn’t. Then she tells Dina what Joel did in Salt Lake City, and how Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) is the daughter of the doctor Joel murdered. Shaken by the news, Dina tells Ellie they need to go home, and Ellie seems to agree.

That’s easier said than done, though. Tommy (Gabriel Luna) is still out there, and they need to meet him at a rendezvous point so they can all head back to Jackson together. Ellie and Jesse head out, while Dina stays holed up in the theater. On the way, Jesse learns that Dina is pregnant with his kid, making his irritation at Ellie’s recklessness even worse. Before they can hash anything out, they stumble onto a squad of WLF soldiers hunting down a lone Seraphite, whom they strip and drag away. Ellie wants to intervene, but Jesse holds her back—they’re outnumbered three to one, and he is not dying out here.

Briefly, the episode pauses to give us another perspective. At a WLF encampment in front of a Costco, Elise (Hetienne Park) talks to Isaac (Jeffrey Wright). Abby and her team have been missing for at least a day, and the timing could not be worse—a torrential downpour is about to escalate into a terrible storm, just before the WLF plans to invade the island home of the Seraphites. Elise thinks Isaac values Abby too much. Isaac tells her that the two of them might not survive the assault—but Abby was supposed to be the next leader of the WLF.

In a final bit of downtime before things really escalate, Ellie and Jesse have a huge argument. As they fight, radio chatter alerts them to the WLF engaging with a sniper—Tommy. They scramble to high ground so they can find him. But then Ellie spots a Ferris Wheel in front of an aquarium across the sound—and immediately snaps back into her plan to find Abby. It’s a choice that gives both the viewer and Jesse extreme whiplash. Tommy is out there; they can hear the gunfire; he needs help. But Ellie stubbornly says they don’t know that the WLF is shooting at Tommy, and if it is, he’ll handle himself fine. He’d want her to go after Abby, even.

The two part ways, but not before having a final exchange that bluntly underlines the theme of this season—and presumably the next. Jesse moralizes about what’s good for the community. Ellie yells “FUCK THE COMMUNITY.” Her community, she says, was murdered in front of her, and she doesn’t think Joel would stop trying to get his revenge if the roles were reversed.

While Jesse’s stoic sense of right and wrong is annoying, the fight also makes Ellie seem childish. She seems more like an angry kid violently mourning her surrogate dad than a grief-stricken young woman wrestling with a resolution she’ll never get. This feeling only intensifies as her quest takes on its final leg this season.

Ellie crosses the sound in a motorboat she finds abandoned by the WLF, who are all off to invade Seraphite island. Ellie is detoured there, briefly kidnapped and nearly murdered in a baffling scene that seems to exist only so she’ll understand that the Seraphites are Also Bad. When she escapes, she finds that Abby is not in the aquarium. Instead, Ellie surprises two more members of Abby’s team: Mel (Ariela Barer) and Owen (Spencer Lord).

The standoff goes poorly. Ellie shoots Owe; the bullet goes clean through him and grazes Mel’s neck just deeply enough to be fatal. As Mel fades, she reveals she’s pregnant, and begs Ellie to cut the baby out—offering to walk her through the process. Ellie is overwhelmed, and Mel dies before the baby can be saved.

This is a notable departure from The Last of Us Part II, in which Mel and Owen both fight back against Ellie, who kills them in self-defense. With a knife, even. Taken in conjunction with Ellie saying she did not kill Nora at the start of the episode—along with the fuzzy flashbacks of “The Price” immediately preceding this ugliness—it seems that the HBO version of the story is attempting to sand off the video game’s rougher edges, trying to keep Ellie sympathetic, if not likable.

The Ellie of The Last of Us Part II is possessed by an insatiable rage. The Ellie of HBO’s The Last of Us just seems confused, like she’s still not sure what the consequences of her actions might be. This is an interesting difference, but it’s one that the rest of the story has not been adjusted to accommodate. If Ellie is so torn, why does she remain so driven? Perhaps “The Price” was too good at showing us her happier times, giving the impression of closure where Ellie does not seem to have any.

Jesse and Tommy find Ellie breaking down in the aquarium, and take her back to the theater, where she seems once again ready to let go of her quest. Tommy, in one of his only lines this episode, affirms Ellie’s decisions, telling her that Abby’s team was guilty. But he also asks if Ellie can make peace with not finding Abby. Ellie says she’ll just have to.

But that’d before Abby appears, getting the jump on Tommy after he goes into the theater’s lobby. She kills Jesse as he and Ellie race to his aid. Kaitlyn Dever’s return to the story is formidable; she seethes with palpable rage in this brief scene as Abby. “I let you live,” she tells Ellie, furious. “And you wasted it.” She points her gun at Ellie, and there’s a shot. We won’t see what happens until season three.

But even then, it might be a while before the cliffhanger is resolved. Because final scene of season two finally pulls the big bait-and-switch at the heart of The Last of Us Part II: It flashes back to Abby, waking up from a nap as she surveys the stadium that the WLF has converted into a community. When The Last of Us returns, we’ll see how Abby spent the three days Ellie was out there, looking for her, and finally get a more complete picture of the conflict in Seattle. It might not be a clearer one, but it’ll certainly be bigger.