The Last of Us Season-Finale Recap: The Monster at the End of This Season
Though otherwise made up entirely of flashbacks, the penultimate episode of The Last of Us’s second season ended with Ellie arriving back at the Pinnacle Theatre in the midst of a rainstorm, a stark reminder that she had ended the preceding episode by torturing Nora. After an hour focused on Ellie and Joel’s relationship, with all its ups and downs and intense, often hurt, feelings, here was a reminder that not only had the sweet Ellie of the first season vanished forever, but the Ellie of the present had crossed a line that we, and she, could not imagine herself crossing before Joel’s death. What’s more, the Ellie who has emerged over these episodes seems intent on making the same mistakes as Joel by putting her own need for revenge ahead of the greater good.
That this episode is called “Convergence” only adds to the ominousness. Though Ellie has remained the season’s focal point, it has introduced other parties that have brushed fleetingly against her and Dina: Abby and her friends, the larger WLF organization to which they belong, and the Seraphites. And, in addition to Jesse and Dina, there’s Tommy, who’s out there somewhere and presumably not in a particularly safe place. All of those elements coming together does not sound like a formula likely to yield peaceful results. That the word has yet another meaning becomes clear only in the episode’s final scene. The opening moments bring us out of Ellie’s past and back to her grim present. The closing moments play an entirely different trick with time.
The finale begins with a scene of what was going on inside before Ellie’s arrival, as Jesse tends to Dina’s crossbow-bolt-stricken leg. It is, as might be expected, quite painful, so painful that Jesse wonders why Dina refuses a slug of alcohol before he pushes the arrow through. Dina’s resting comfortably when Ellie arrives and has recovered enough to care for Ellie’s wounds, but all is not well. Ellie was only able to get two words out of Nora: “whale” and “wheel.” Ellie then recounts how “easy” it was to torture Nora. “I just kept hurting her,” she tells Dina. “Maybe she got what she deserved,” Dina replies, to which Ellie says, “Maybe she didn’t.” Ellie knows she’s crossed a line and she’s not sure if it was worth crossing. To underscore this, she then tells Dina the story of Joel and the Fireflies, revealing why they wanted to kill Joel in the first place. “We need to go home,” Dina says, her commitment to bloodshed waning. Ellie seems to agree.
As the sun rises, a title reveals this is “Seattle: Day 3.” Inside, Jesse and Ellie pack to leave; the stated plan is for the two of them to rendezvous with Tommy while Dina barricades herself inside the theater. As they make their way to Tommy, Jesse reveals both how he found their theater hideout and his suspicion that Dina’s pregnant, which Ellie unwittingly confirms. He’s already unhappy to be in Seattle, but the information that he’s set to become a father both increases his urgency and heightens his frustration.
While hiding out in a parking garage, Ellie and Jesse witness a group of Wolves capturing and tormenting a young Seraphite. Ellie’s instinct is to defend the victim, but Jesse is not on board. “This,” he tells her, “is not our war.” But it’s definitely the Wolves’ war. At WLF headquarters, Elise and Isaac confer about the mounting storm as Isaac inquires about the whereabouts of Abby and her friends. The others Isaac could take or leave, but Abby is the sort of soldier he needs if the WLF wants to win this war, even if neither he nor Elise survive long enough to see its end.
When Jesse and Ellie reach the bookstore where they’re supposed to meet Tommy, he’s nowhere to be found, so while they wait they have a heart-to-heart. Yes, Jesse loves Dina, he says, but not in any way that could threaten the relationship between Dina and Ellie. He fell hard for a woman who recently passed through town, he explains, but he also felt he could not leave Jackson. The town had given him too much and expected him to lead it one day. And besides, he was taught “to put other people first.” At this point, Jackson must seem quite far away to Ellie, but Jesse’s story resurfaces one of the season’s central themes. That Ellie has not put others first goes unspoken, but it doesn’t need to be said.
Before they can discuss this point further, their stolen walkie lights up with the sound of Wolves dealing with a sniper Jesse and Ellie deduce must be Tommy. They head upstairs to scope out the landscape. Jesse believes he knows where Tommy is holed up, but Ellie also comes to a realization: The Ferris wheel is next to the aquarium. It’s the whale and the wheel Nora spoke of. This must be where Abby is. So what’s it going to be? Jesse assumes they’ll head toward Tommy; Ellie assumes they’ll go take out Abby. After all, it’s what Jesse voted for in the town-council meeting, isn’t it? It’s not. In fact, Jesse’s commitment to Team Ellie doesn’t extend much further than bailing her out when she’s in trouble because, he tells her, “Everything you do you do for you.” Though Jesse’s message in their previous conversation couldn’t have been clearer, it apparently did not sink in.
As they split up and Isaac’s forces roll out, Ellie makes her way to the aquarium by boat. She barely makes it, then finds herself dragged into the woods by Seraphites when she makes it to shore. “I’m not from here. I’m not a Wolf!” she tells them, but it doesn’t make any difference. After being hung by her neck, Ellie’s on the verge of being disemboweled in the traditional Seraphite style when an alarm draws her captors away, allowing her to escape and continue on her way to the aquarium to hunt for her targets.
She does not find Abby, but she does find Owen and Mel talking about Abby. They’re in the midst of an intense conversation about what to do next when Ellie’s arrival makes the decision for them. Ellie demands that each point to Abby’s location on a nearby map and promises not to kill them if their answers match. “She’s gonna kill us either way,” Owen points out, but Ellie says that’s not true because she’s not like them. Owen agrees to show her, but when he draws a gun on her instead, Ellie kills him and, with the same bullet, accidentally shoots Mel in the neck. Then the scene somehow takes an even darker turn: Mel is pregnant and begs Ellie to deliver her baby by caesarean. But Ellie doesn’t. She freezes and never makes the incision as Mel bleeds to death and her baby dies with her. It’s another moment she’ll never be able to undo, no matter how deep her regret.
Tommy and Jesse soon arrive and take her away, but their reunion will prove short-lived. Back at the theater, Ellie appears to be in shock while Jesse and Tommy work on an escape plan. Whatever remorse she’s feeling lives side-by-side with her unhappiness that she did not get a chance to kill Abby. Talking to Jesse, they come to a kind of understanding. He hates that he had to leave Jackson to look for her but also knows that Ellie would do whatever it took to save him. Then, after a matter of seconds, she fails to save him. Abby has arrived and immediately kills Jesse, thinking he’s murdered her friends and unaware that he’s traveling with Ellie. Ellie doesn’t hesitate to tell her that she’s responsible for their deaths, even though it was Abby she wanted to kill. She pleads with Abby to let Tommy live. Abby responds by pointing the gun at Ellie and pulling the trigger. Then the episode cuts to black.
But it doesn’t stay black. In the next scene we see Abby being woken up in order to report to Isaac, then walking into the ruins of a stadium that has been repurposed as WLF headquarters. Then a chyron appears: “Seattle: Day One.”
This ending and Joel’s death are the two huge spoilers that those familiar with the Last of Us games knew were coming and would likely unsettle, and maybe even alienate, viewers who didn’t know what to expect. Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, it seems clear that, like the game, the next season will revisit the days since Ellie’s arrival in Seattle from a different point of view: Abby’s. It’s a challenging move in several respects. What began as a show about Joel and Ellie transformed this season into a show about Ellie without Joel. Next season appears poised to be a show about Abby with Ellie relegated to a supporting role, for a while at least.
The season also gave us, like Ellie, many reasons to dislike Abby. It offered a few moments of Abby and her friends that suggested the sense of loss they all were experiencing, but it also depicted her as a sadist whose quest for revenge challenged even her closest friends’ commitment to supporting her. To then make such a character the focus of the series for a stretch asks a lot of viewers who, understandably, hate her. But that’s why you hire someone like Kaitlyn Dever, who’s been quite good in her limited appearances so far and seems likely to rise to the challenge of the third season. And it’s worth considering this: Ellie has abandoned whatever moral high ground she used to occupy. Everything ugly that can be said of Abby now also applies to her. There’s darkness around every corner in The Last of Us. It only occasionally takes the form of the infected.
Infectious Bites
• Is anyone else a little worried about Shimmer? We’re told Ellie’s horse is okay (not that she asks), but you can’t just leave a horse on its own that long, can you?
• The field Abby looks out over in the episode’s final shot should look familiar to both players of The Last of Us Part II, who will recognize it as SoundView Stadium, and to anyone who’s watched a Seattle Seahawks game, as SoundView was modeled on on the team’s home turf (currently named Lumen Field, but known as CenturyLink at the time).
• It’s always worth paying attention to the books read by this series’ characters. Ellie delighting in the children’s classic The Monster at the End of This Book is funny but also telling. Grover realizes he’s the monster of his own story. Should Ellie come to the same conclusion? Can she?
• Thieves of the City by Ben Davidoff, on the other hand, is not a real book. The novel Abby fell asleep reading is a goof on City of Thieves, a novel by Game of Thrones co-showrunner David Benioff, who also wrote the novel adapted by Spike Lee into the great 2002 film 25th Hour (from Benioff’s screenplay). Both are excellent, even if you’re not a Game of Thrones fan.