SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 2 finale of HBO‘s The Last Of Us.
The Last Of Us Season 2 has come to an end, but Ellie and Abby’s story is far from over.
Sunday night’s finale is ends on quite the cliffhanger, but it is a 50-minute episode filled with action that needs to be unpacked before we get to that ending. The episode picks up moments after the events of Episode 5, as Jesse (Young Mazino) is attempting to extract a crossbow bolt from Dina’s (Isabela Merced) leg. Remember, Episode 6 was dedicated to flashbacks of Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) leading to the iconic porch scene, where Joel finally tells Ellie the truth about what he did at the hospital in Salt Lake City.
So, when Ellie arrives back at the theater after torturing Nora (Tati Gabrielle), she decides to reveal everything about Salt Lake to Dina, including the information she just received from Nora that Abby’s dad was the unarmed doctor who Joel killed. Dina seems to take the revelation in stride, relieved that Ellie has finally told her the truth, but given everything they’ve already sacrificed to get to this point, this is the moment where a few huge questions begins to linger over everyone’s head: What would it cost them to keep going? And, at this point, what is Ellie’s honesty even worth?
“Look where Ellie tells the truth. She tells the truth at the middle of the most private and close relationship she has after — not before, leading up to, during, or immediately after — confirming that she and this other person are in love,” co-creator Craig Mazin told reporters during a press conference ahead of the finale. “Telling the truth is vulnerable, and in this world, you tell the truth, you’re weak, you’re giving something away…Then, on her face, consider how close it is to the way Joel looked when he was talking to her. It will always be hard.”
He continued: “What we ask of the audience is to understand why they’re lying. They’re not lying to manipulate. They’re not lying to be evil. They’re lying to protect themselves. When they stop lying, it means that there is an extraordinary trust there. But in both cases, when they fess up, Joel or Ellie, they believe they may be losing the person that they love because of it.”
Telling the truth does bring Ellie closer to Dina, at least for the time being, but that may not necessarily be the case by the end of the episode, when Ellie’s actions begin to really catch up with her.
By now, we also know that Tommy (Gabriel Luna) is also in Seattle, so Jesse and Ellie set out to find him. It’s a short-lived joint quest, though, as tensions between the two of them begin to grow almost immediately, especially after they encounter a group of WLF soldiers torturing a Seraphite child. Ellie wants to intervene, but Jesse holds her back. Tensions escalate again when Ellie spots the aquarium and realizes that must be where Abby is, given Nora’s hint about the whale and the wheel. Jesse tries to dissuade her from going, insisting they should find Tommy and leave Seattle, which prompts an outburst from Ellie who is, quite frankly, tired of Jesse acting as though he stands on a moral high ground.
To make matters worse, this is also when Ellie finds out that Jesse voted against sending a crew to Seattle in the first place. Particularly in the show, Mazin explained that he and co-creator Neil Druckmann wanted to put more emphasis on Jesse’s standing in Jackson to, hopefully, make him seem like one of the most trustworthy, level-headed characters — which only makes this confrontation from the game even more emotionally salient.
“She makes a point that I think is so solid that I start to think, ‘Oh, yeah, so there goes another hero,’ because she’s right,” Mazin said. “It’s not that what she’s doing is right, but his belief that he is moral is so challengeable, and it is so arbitrary that ‘I am moral and upstanding and sacrificial to people as long as they’re on the inside of this wooden fence, but if they’re outside the wooden fence, I’ll just let them die, even if they’re a kid.’”
But, to be fair, he and Druckmann said they were aligned early on about the way that Jesse would vote.
“I think in our conversations of how Jesse voted, we were both under the same kind of notion. He would vote to protect Jackson, because Jesse is more about the larger community, at least the community he belongs to, not the community of mankind, than about the individual,” Druckmann said. “There’s some overlap there between Jesse and Joel, because I believe in similar circumstances, Joel would have voted the same way.”
Once they split, Ellie sets off for the aquarium. At the same time, as a massive storm is brewing, it seems as though the WLF are launching an attack against the Seraphites. Ellie finds a small boat and launches it into the water, but a wave quickly overturns the boat, sending it and her washing ashore on an island off the coast of Seattle. And on that island, she is confronted by Seraphites who very nearly hang her. They’re stopped only by the sounding of an alarm that tells the Seraphites their village is under attack.
More on that later, Mazin promises.
“I have so many questions, and I understand that the audience does too. I sort of want to assure them that those questions are correct and will be answered,” he says. “What is going on? How did that war start? Why? How did the Seraphites start? Who is the prophet? What happened to her? What does Isaac want? What’s happening at the end of Episode 7? What is this explosion? What is all of it? And all of it will become clear.”
It’s basically a stroke of luck that allows Ellie to escape and make it to the aquarium, which is where things really start to go off the rails. She finds Mel (Ariela Barer) and Owen (Spencer Lord) arguing in the depths of the building and holds them at gunpoint, demanding to know where Abby is.
She tells them to point to Abby’s location on a map, but when Owen reaches for a gun instead, Ellie instinctively fires her own, killing them both. Rest assured, the audience is not supposed to be rooting for Ellie at this point, Mazin and Druckmann say.
Somehow, they managed to make this sequence even more jarring than in the games by adding a horrific interaction between Mel and Ellie. As Mel, who is pregnant, is bleeding out, she instructs Ellie to cut the baby out of her. Ellie is in shock, and she can’t even make an incision before Mel stops breathing, but Jesse and Tommy find her still kneeling over Mel’s body, knife in hand, who knows how long later, haunted by what she’s done.
“I remember when [Craig] described it before I read it, he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I made it darker.’ And I’m like, ‘How could it be darker?’ And then I read I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, it is darker,’” Druckmann said. “But… sometimes we have to go there, and it was important for this moment to, if you’re rooting for Ellie, make you feel dirty, because that’s what collateral damage does.”
At this point, everyone, even Ellie, is starting to question this mission. Ellie has more blood on her hands than she ever anticipated, and she hasn’t even found Abby yet.
“This moment also called for Bella to have and display such a profound level of regret and failure. In this moment where you do feel like, ‘Oh my god, how am I still on this journey with you?’ I think it’s important for people to see that it’s not like Ellie is going, ‘I’m cool, whatever, it happened, let’s keep going for Abby.’ This breaks her,” Mazin explained.
But, will this be the thing that finally gets Ellie to drop her vendetta and go home? It certainly seems like it, as Tommy and Jesse gather her up and bring her back to the theater, where she resigns to the idea that she will be leaving Seattle without confronting Abby — or, at least, she thinks she will.
As Ellie and Jesse are talking in the theater, they hear a commotion in the lobby. They run out to find Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) holding Tommy at gunpoint. She shoots Jesse in the head before pointing her gun at Ellie, who is begging for her not to shoot anyone else. The screen cuts to black as the gun goes off again, leaving audiences to question what the hell is going to happen next.
In the final scene of the episode, Abby wakes up in what appears to be a WLF compound, and the words “Seattle Day 1” pop up in the corner of the screen, indicating that we’re about to relive these nightmarish three days all over again, just from a different perspective this time.
It’s difficult to pick a place to start dissecting those final moments. First and foremost, Mazin sought to quell anxieties about the upcoming third season by letting viewers know “we haven’t seen the last of Kaitlyn Dever, and we haven’t seen the last of Bella Ramsey, and we haven’t seen the last of Isabela Merced, and we haven’t seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story.” And that’s all he’s willing to say, for now.
But, where do any of these characters stand with each other anymore? With Jesse dead, where does that leave Ellie and Dina?
“I mean, how could it not have a drastic impact [on their relationship], especially when he’s the father of this baby, but also a very close friend, a former romantic partner?” Druckmann mused. “Yeah, it’s going to mean a whole lot.”
Ultimately, they want audiences to feel unsettled. After all, there is a lot more story to tell.
“What I want the audience to feel thematically at the end of the season is that they aren’t where they were, but they’re not yet where they are going to go. That there has always been a story that we’ve been telling about the good and bad of love, but we switch which side is good and bad sometimes…” Mazin said. “We understand that both Ellie and Abby are moving forward in trouble. They are in moral trouble, because their certainty is beginning to fail them, and we can see it here with Ellie, for sure, because faced with the consequences of the things she’s done and the people that didn’t deserve to die, she’s starting to feel maybe a swing of the pendulum. We don’t know where these two are going to end, but what I would hope the audience feels is that they are not done. They are not done growing, or they are not done falling. We’ll have to wait and see which it is.”
The Season 2 finale does seem to indicate that, at the very least, the beginning of Season 3 will focus largely on Abby. However, Druckmann assures audiences who haven’t played the game and aren’t privy to where this story is going that there is an “epic nature to it of what’s about to happen, but this other story is going to be really important coming back to Joel and Ellie and everything that you’ve seen so far.”
“The question that we’re asking, and the thing we’re interrogating in this story is, when you’ve committed such horrible things, depending on your circumstance, can you ever come back from that?” he said. “We see in that porch scene, Joel is trying to come back from what he’s done, even though he doesn’t regret it. Now, we have these two characters that are on this downward spiral, trying to do justice for the people that they love, and we’ll see how far that goes.”
At this point in the story, it’s not easy to root for Ellie, but she’s still our main protagonist. So far, we’ve been on her side. We’ve wanted to see her seek justice for Joel. After the finale, it’s natural to be questioning whether Ellie is really justified, especially given all the collateral damage.
“As Ellie moves through Seattle, her focus is so clearly on Abby. Even that moment when Dina tells her their names, Abby is the name she repeats, because Abby is the one who did it, that makes sense. But in that horrible scene where Joel dies, Ellie says, ‘you’re all going to effin’ die’ not ‘Abby, you’re going to die,’ ‘you’re all going to die.’ There is something kind of prophetic about that. It’s almost as if she put that hex out there that she could no longer control,” Mazin says. “I think it’s clear to her that Mel didn’t deserve to die. Mel didn’t hurt her. Mel didn’t hold her down. Mel didn’t hurt Joel. We saw even more than that, before Ellie shows up in the room, Mel is trying to help Dina, is horrified by what Abby is doing and tries to stop it and fails, which is her own shame.”
But, Mazin points to Ellie’s conversation with Tommy toward the end of the episode to give audiences a hint as to where all this is headed and whether Ellie will see the error of her ways.
“Ellie says ‘So, she gets to live?’ and Tommy says, ‘can you make your peace with that?’, and she says, ‘I guess I’ll have to.’ That’s interesting, because what if something changes and you don’t have to. Now what? I don’t think the story’s over,” he teased.
Added Druckmann: “There is an obsession there that, in our conversations, the metaphor has been, often, drug addiction. That you can get over it, and you can relapse, and the question is, can she fully get over it?”
Begged to tease just a little more of what’s to come in Season 3, both Mazin and Druckmann replied cheekily with brief answers that are sure to excite gamers and leave those who haven’t played even more confused.
“Rats, what should we talk about?” Mazin asked, to which Druckmann replied: “You know, there’s a certain crane that you’re seeing in Episode 7 that is very telling.”