The Last of Us Season 2 Ending Explained: How Does It Set Up Season 3?

This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 finale and The Last of Us Part II.

Not to crib the title of another HBO show, but: and just like that, after seven episodes, The Last of Us Season 2 is over. And if you thought it would wrap things up neatly? Well, you don’t know showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who co-wrote the finale with Halley Gross. Because not only is there a nail-biting cliffhanger, there’s one after that nail-biter.

Don’t worry, there’s more The Last of Us to come… Like a cordyceps fungus, the adaptation of The Last of Us Part II may grow into not just one more season, but a fourth one if the powers that be have their way about it. And given the way we think things are going in The Last of Us Season 3? Yeah, we’re gonna need that fourth season. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The Last of Us Season 2 Ending Explained

The finale had a lot of ground to cover, literally, as Ellie (Bella Ramsey) traveled all over Seattle in her quest to find and kill Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). In the process, she ended up hashing things out with Jesse (Young Mazino), who intuited that not only are Ellie and Dina (Isabela Merced) together, but that Dina is pregnant. And then in a horrifying moment, Ellie ended up killing two members of Abby’s crew, Owen (Spencer Lord) and the very pregnant Mel (Ariela Barer), once Owen pulled a gun on her.

Thankfully for fans of Ellie – and Ramsey – despite her turn towards the dark side, leaving Nora (Tati Gabrielle) to die in the previous episode, it seems like Ellie does indeed have a heart, and was wrecked by watching Mel die. And in the final moments of the episode, we even get to see Ellie offering to sacrifice herself to save Tommy (Gabriel Luna) as Abby holds him at gunpoint after killing Jesse. That lesson in self-sacrifice may be short-lived, as Abby fires at Ellie as we cut to black. Yikes!

There is a lot more going on in the hour, as Ellie traipses around the Emerald City. Like some sort of post-apocalyptic Forrest Gump, we keep getting glimpses of the war between the WLF (Washington Liberation Front) and the cultish Seraphites, though never the full picture. Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) is looking for Abby and rallying his troops. The Seraphites almost gut Ellie before someone blows up their village. And there’s the question of what Abby’s crew was doing at all… Why was Abby not with Isaac and the WLF? What were Mel and Owen up to? Why were there bloody bandages piled in their outpost, and who was the young Seraphite being chased by WLF soldiers that Jesse seemingly let die?

Fans of the games likely know what that was all about, and what’s coming next – and if you don’t want spoilers from the games, stop reading now. But the fact is that the arc presented in this season, for the most part, is done. Ellie was split from Joel (Pedro Pascal), watched him die, went on a mission of vengeance… And in the final moments of this week’s episode realized that’s not the right path to travel on, reconciling what Joel did with what she needs to become. It’s Jesse and Tommy who help her drive it home, as they make plans to return to Jackson Hole.

“But Abby gets to live,” Ellie says, trying to wrap her mind around the idea that they’re leaving.

“Are you able to make your peace with that?” Tommy asks.

“I guess I’ll have to,” Ellie says.

Jesse picks up where Tommy left off, explaining that the reason he returned for Ellie after she left him to go kill Abby is that he knows she would stop at nothing to save him, if the chips were down. But with that last careful statement from Ellie, it’s clear she’s learned that the price of vengeance is often too high. It took a little while for Ellie to learn empathy, and poor, pregnant Mel needed to teach it to her by dying. But Ellie is able to relate Mel’s death back to how she would feel about Dina dying, and how Jesse saving her is a better choice than Ellie killing Abby.

Unfortunately, Jesse pays for this immediately. But in the exchange with Abby that follows, it’s clear that Ellie is ready to let things go to save Tommy and Dina; Abby is not. “I let you live,” Abby says. “I let you live, and you wasted it.” Ellie was ready to walk a new path, but Abby is looking for retribution. We’ll see if she ends this particular cycle of violence by killing Ellie, Tommy, and Dina when the show returns for Season 3, right?

Where The Last Of Us Is Probably Going In Season 3, Based On The Games…

Or not. So, we do need to talk about the scene that immediately follows Abby seemingly shooting Ellie. We cut in on Abby in a bunker, having fallen asleep reading a book titled “Thieves of the City” by Ben Davidoff (which, as a side note, does not seem to exist in our real world). Manny (Danny Ramirez) wakes her up, explains Isaac wants to talk to them, Abby wanders out into a stadium that is filled with farm animals, crops, and much more (shades of Fear the Walking Dead Season 4)… And then the text on screen pops up saying “Seattle: Day One” as we cut to the credits to the tune of Soundgarden’s “Burden In My Hand.”

Saying it just one more time — there are spoilers for the game in this section!

For fans of numbering days, this is a big deal, but it’s also a clear indicator to the audience that we have gone back in time, simultaneously to when Ellie first arrived in Seattle, back in Season 2, Episode 3. And in fact, if you have played The Last of Us Part II, you know this is exactly what is happening. If you also intuited that all those dangling plotlines with Isaac, Abby, Owen, Mel, etc, etc will be picked up in The Last of Us Season 3? You’re likely right on the money with that, too.

There’s actually a lot that has been going on with Abby while Ellie has been on her mission of vengeance, including discovering that a statement earlier in the season by one of the Seraphites that nobody leaves their ranks might not be as definitive as that particular cult-member thought. There are two extremely important characters in this plotline – Yara and Lev – that we have yet to meet on the show. And we’ll learn that Owen was at the aquarium, and near boats, for a very specific reason as well, which might not gel with the WLF’s plans.

In fact, tying into the overall idea Mazin and Druckmann have been playing with this season – matters of perspective – it’s almost definite that we’ll see scenes from Season 2 in Season 3, but from the perspective of Abby and her crew. Does that mean we’ll (no pun intended on the show’s video game origins) see a replay of Nora’s death, or Owen and Mel’s death? It’s quite possible, though we’re a long way off from that. The point is, there’s clearly been a lot left on the table in terms of the WLF and Seraphites war. That wasn’t an error or an oversight… We just haven’t seen what’s happening with them yet.

And though we don’t know this for sure, it’s more than likely this will all bring us back to that fateful moment in this week’s finale, where Abby seems to shoot Ellie.

…But Will This Play The Right Way On TV?

As has been a recurring refrain through both seasons of The Last of Us so far, there is a palpable difference between playing through a 20ish hour long game in a few sittings, and watching a TV show for one hour a week for two months, every few years. And frankly, if this goes the way it seems to be going, HBO is risking testing viewers’ patience.

To go back to what Mazin said about the narrative, while he did feel there’s “more room” to do side-stories like Season 1’s lauded Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) episode, he added that “there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season.” That seems contradictory – they’re going to add more stories, but also won’t have time to tell the main story – but let’s go with it, and speculate about how that could impact Season 3 and 4.

The most likely outcome is that Season 3 tells Abby’s story from her perspective, leading up to the moment, again, where she seemingly shoots at Ellie. There’s more of the game’s story beyond that which would likely be tackled in a fourth season. But what that means in actual TV hours is we’re potentially getting a nearly Ellie-free Season 3 of The Last of Us in a few years time, and then waiting another few years after that before Ellie takes center stage once again in Season 4.

Nothing against Kaitlyn Dever, Jeffrey Wright, Danny Ramirez, or any of the other excellent actors who would be part of that cast, but… What? Huh? The show already took a big risk killing off Pedro Pascal’s Joel, meaning the narrative pivoted from Joel and Ellie to Ellie and Dina. Pivoting once again to make Dever the star of the show could cause even more whiplash for the audience.

That’s not even to mention the idea that in real-world terms, viewers could be waiting two years plus an entire season of television to find out Ellie’s fate. To use a direct, applicable comparison, The Walking Dead nearly tanked its own franchise by making fans wait to see who Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) would beat to death with a baseball bat over six months. Keeping the “did Abby shoot Ellie” cliffhanger off the table for even longer is, uh, gonna be much, much worse for anyone who doesn’t break down and read a plot description of the game.

Instead, The Last of Us Season 3 needs to not spend an entire season on Abby. We need to get back to that Ellie/Abby moment and see what happens next in the season premiere – and then move past that point. Would that mean finishing up the adaptation of The Last of Us Part II in Season 3 of the series? Absolutely. This seems to be vehemently against the way Mazin and Druckmann are adapting the games, but if they really want to do a Season 4, come up with an original story, either a continuation, a flashback, or more on Abby and her Amazing Friends. The world isn’t over after The Last of Us Part II, and there are clearly plenty more stories they want to tell.

But if they drag out that cliffhanger for an entire season, Mazin and Druckmann risk making “The Last of Us” refer not just to the title of the show, but to the few remaining TV viewers.