The Last of Us Season 2 Kinda Bungled the Story

26 May, 2025

(Spoilers for both The Last of Us Part 2 the game as well as The Last of Us the TV series.)

So despite it being very trendy to hate The Last of Us, mostly because it's violent and takes itself very seriously despite being flawed in a multitude of ways, I'm a sucker for it. The first game hit me at just the right time in college. The second game came out in the midst of the pandemic and was a nice distraction, and I dare say it was a small part in me coming to terms with my gender identity, playing through a violent post-apocalyptic pandemic as two strong, flawed women.

I personally liked the Abby gambit. I was puzzled by her introduction, I grew to hate her as Ellie did (despite guessing why she did what she did), and with the third act¹ switcheroo, I came to appreciate her as a character, flaws and all. Although the game's pacing is hard to predict and can come across as a bit of a slog by the time it concludes, overall I was enthralled by the story it told.

Season 2 of the TV show kinda fucked that rhythm up, and at this point I'm not sure if it can recover.

I'm all for adaptations drastically changing the source material. Annihilation the book and Annihilation the movie don't even really tell the same story; they just have similar settings and some shared ideas (and the same title, of course). That said, I think both stories are great!

The Last of Us season 2 seems to be trying to tell the same story, and just isn't doing it as well. That's not to say it's all bad though, so let me start with the positives.

The Good

Jackson

I loved seeing more of Jackson's politics, and I thought that the infected assault on the town was really effective as a "good television" action set-piece and provided a bit of extra character motivation as to why the people of Jackson would be extremely hesitant to support seeking revenge for Joel.

Catherine O'Hara

That's it, that's the section.

The Stalkers and Spores

Two infected things noticeably absent from season 1 were reintroduced this season, and I thought they worked pretty well. I'm hoping season 3 will see the spores expanded with the infamous Rat King.

I was hoping to see Shamblers as well, but I don't mind them not showing up. Maybe they will in season 3, but they're more of a gameplay thing anyways (although that's what I thought about stalkers).

The Actors

All the actors did incredible work with what they were given. Special shoutout to Isabela Merced (Dina) and Young Mazino (Jesse (RIP)).

The Scenes That Were All But Shot-for-Shot Taken From the Game

• Jesse chastising Ellie for kissing Dina before revealing he was joking
• Abby running from the horde under the fence
• Ellie and Dina running from the WLF and encountering infected underground
• The climax before the start of the flashback to day one that closes out the finale
• The music store
• The Apollo exhibit

There's Definitely Other Stuff Too

"This wasn't in the game but it's nice." "Ooooh that's a cool shot." "That was a change but I think it works." "Hey, it's Cypher from The Matrix!" All that kinda stuff. You get the idea.

Mixed Bags

Ellie and Dina

I love Ellie and Dina. Lesbian icons (well, lesbian and bisexual icons, respectively). In the game they hook up and are madly in love before they leave Jackson. The biggest romantic drama has already happened, we just see it come together.

In the show they play the "will they, won't they" game quite a bit more. I understand it makes for "good television" to play with the audience like that. And the moment of Ellie getting bitten, Dina about to kill her, Dina hearing and slowly believing Ellie is immune, Dina revealing she's pregnant, and them hooking up... that was a masterful beat.

I... still don't quite know how I feel about all of it. I think maybe it works? But I really enjoyed that the game didn't play this game at all except for when the stakes were low. And it made the reveal of Joel's death more impactful, since some early trailers for the game made it appear as if Dina would be the one getting killed by the visitors. So... ya win some, ya lose some?

Isaac

The extra flashbacks and other scenes involving Isaac were quite well done and gave us some more insight into the character that was only given to us in Act 2 of the game via in-game dialogue.

But... Isaac's entire presence in the season felt completely out-of-place. Again, it feels like they thought the audience was too stupid to gather what was happening between the WLF and Seraphites without some extra scenes from their perspectives. But if they had instead kept in some of the other scenes (finding the bodies of Abby's friends at the hotel and TV station, the scene at the school), we probably wouldn't have needed that.

Maybe one Isaac flashback accompanied by them finding a FEDRA wanted poster would have been nice, but overall this all felt like it belonged in next season. It just wasn't narratively necessary (yet).

What Wasn't So Great

Abby's Motivations

This is the big one.

We did not need this spelled out. The mystery of Abby kept me engaged in the game. Having everything spelled out right upfront makes everything much more... boring. And especially when she finally finds Joel, and instead of the subtle look in the face, we get this big cinematic zoom-in of "YEAH THAT'S RIGHT, THE GUY WHO KILLED MY DAD, THIS IS HIM" is just... too much.

AND THEN. And then. She gives that fukken villain monologue to Joel, explaining who she is, why she's there, what she's been through. I stuck with the season to see if maybe they'd come up with a good reason for that, but now that it's over, it just feels insulting to the viewer's intelligence. Any sense of interesting ambiguity is destroyed.

Ellie's Motivations and Morality

Again, we are shown early on why Ellie is on this journey. She and Joel made up. In the game we don't find this out until after she's lost everything, after she fails to get revenge, fails to go back to living a normal life, goes after Abby again, loses her fingers and thus her closest connection to Joel, loses Dina and her adopted child... only then do we realize that she was just starting to rekindle her relationship with Joel right before it was taken away from her. And suddenly everything is recontextualized, and it's that much more of a gut-punch.

Here it's just... "Oh okay so she did know. Aww, she did make up with him." It still has impact, but there's less of it.

Once she leaves on her revenge quest, we watch Ellie slowly devolve into an amoral killing machine focused only on revenge. In the show, the finale especially sees her questioning her morality, and Dina's questioning is more explicit as well. Once again, the ambiguity is killed.

The Finale's Seraphite Island Scene

Here's a reminder of how it goes down in the game.

Ellie gets a boat and recklessly makes her way towards the aquarium where she knows Abby is. The boat crashes just before she gets there, and she swim-crawls her way onto the dock and into the aquarium.

In the show, the boat crashes and Ellie washes onto the Seraphite island, where she is almost hanged and gutted, before they are called to help defend the village, leaving her. Then she boats back to the aquarium.

...What the hell was the point of that?! So that we can watch season 3 and say "Ohhhh that's what was going on!"? There's already plenty of that to be had.

Also, making the evil Seraphite kid do the disemboweling motion was, IMO, a bad choice, arguably even in poor taste. Something I thought worked really well in the game's story was showing that a lot of the Seraphites are just trying to live their lives according to their religion, and the WLF is straight-up murdering them. And the other way around. The problem is with the violent leaderships of each group.² The evil kid makes it feel like the show wants us to think that the Seraphites are all irredeemably evil, and that just gives me the ick. I guess I could imagine that maybe it was just that one kid being part of the most murderous family in the village or something, but still, I really hope this isn't a sign of things to come.

Overall, the game left more unsaid, and the TV show played too many cards and said too much. The game's most masterful storytelling strokes were in its ability to refrain from showing its hand until the moment was right. The show still did a lot right, but almost all of its best cards have already been played. I hope it still has more tricks up its sleeves for season 3. I want to believe!