The Last of Us: Season 2

Let’s start by showing yall the trailers shall we?

Trailer:

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DISCLAIMER: This isn’t a typical review. I didn’t sit down and watch this season episode by episode—I watched breakdown videos, tracked the fan discourse, kept up with viewership trends, and dug through the wreckage that was once audience goodwill. This is more like a review of a storm. One I watched from inside a bunker with snacks.

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TRIVIA TO START WITH: Kaitlyn Dever plays Abby. What makes this interesting is she originally campaigned to play Ellie. Fans even supported her for the role before Bella Ramsey was cast. So it’s kind of poetic—maybe darkly so—that she’s now in the show as Abby. That casting stirred the pot so hard that HBO had to assign her extra security due to the backlash this character still gets from game fans alone.

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PLOT RUNDOWN: Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the daughter of the surgeon Joel killed in Season 1, is out for revenge. So she tracks Joel down and… well, you know.

Ellie (Bella Ramsey), devastated and broken after witnessing Joel’s death, goes on her own revenge tour, dragging her girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced) along for what should be a grief-fueled journey but somehow feels more like a couples’ murder-cation.

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CHARACTERS & CAST:

• Ellie (Bella Ramsey): Season 1? Nailed it. Season 2? She still looks like she’s 14 and suddenly acts like she’s lost half her brain cells.
• Dina (Isabela Merced): Sweet, sarcastic, loyal—and apparently down to start a relationship and a revenge campaign in the same week.
• Abby (Kaitlyn Dever): Ruthless and broken. She’s a tank in the games. Here, she’s intense, conflicted, and magnetic. Also heavily protected by HBO security.
• Joel (Pedro Pascal): Tragically short-lived, but still a powerhouse presence. More on that below.
• Isaac (Jeffrey Wright): New character. A military leader who is absolutely terrifying. The man blows up his own men in a truck to eliminate a threat—including a soldier played by Josh Peck. Yes. That Josh Peck.

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POSITIVES (MINOR SPOILERS):

Okay, let’s talk about Episode 2.

The infected are back, baby! You want zombies? We get an entire undead swarm attacking a snow-covered city. The highlight? Tommy flamethrowering a bloater. Absolute chaos. It’s the kind of episode people wanted more of in Season 1—and it’s easily the best this season has to offer.

Also: Joel’s death scene. Yes, it’s brutal. But the show actually makes it more heartbreaking and emotionally raw than the game. Abby’s friends are crying, begging her to stop. Ellie bursts in to find Dina sedated and Joel bloodied. She tries to help but gets thrown down and pinned.

Abby takes the broken golf club—yes, it broke in half—and kneels down to slit Joel’s throat. Ellie, helpless, crawls toward his corpse and cuddles with his body, sobbing. The episode ends with her riding off with Dina, dragging Joel’s wrapped-up body behind their horse. This is not a spoiler—it’s an emotional wrecking ball.

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NEGATIVES:

And here’s where the show faceplants.

• Ellie is nerfed. She barely kills anyone. She hesitates. She mopes. She’s no longer the apocalypse’s angry Terminator—just a tragic, moody NPC.
• Ellie and Dina’s revenge quest? Feels less like grief and more like summer camp. “Welcome to Camp Murder. Come learn how to have fun… and maybe commit some murders, IDK.”
• Stretching the story into three seasons was a mistake. The fans left after Joel died in Episode 2. Meanwhile, HBO expects people to come back two years from now for Season 3, which will focus on Abby. I don’t know who this is for anymore.
• Also: there’s a very questionable scene where Ellie gets bitten in front of Dina, who doesn’t know Ellie’s immune. Dina’s rightfully concerned. Ellie tries to explain, and Dina responds by saying she’s pregnant. Then they kiss. Then they have sex. Because trauma is the new foreplay, apparently.
• Bella Ramsey no longer fits the role. Not her fault, but Ellie is supposed to be in her mid-20s now, and Bella still looks 14. It’s like they’re trying to age up a character without aging up the actor. It doesn’t work.
• Viewership plummeted. Game fans checked out when Season 2 was announced. TV fans dipped the second Joel died. There was even discourse where TV fans blamed game fans for “not warning them”—as if the entire internet didn’t spoil this the day Part II came out in 2020.

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FINAL THOUGHTS:

The writing is on the wall. This franchise is crumbling under its own weight. Stretched out seasons. A neutered protagonist. A two-year wait between installments. And now, we’re expected to come back and spend a whole season with Joel’s killer?

RATING: 2.5/10

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SPOILER WARNING

Let’s ruin the ending!

Abby finds Ellie. Tells her:

“I let you live… but you wasted it.”

Then shoots her. Doesn’t kill her. Just shoots her. Cut to black.

Then we rewind a few days and see Abby standing in her stadium home, staring over a railing like she’s posing for the next sad HBO promo image.

So yeah. That’s the cliffhanger. See y’all in 2027 for Season 3: The Redemption of Abby Nobody Asked For.