SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments, including the ending, in the Season 2 finale of “The Last of Us,” currently airing on HBO and streaming on the service known at present as Max.
The final scenes of Season 2 of “The Last of Us” are as intense as the show has ever been, and that really is saying something. On her third day in Seattle, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) attempts to pilot a tiny dinghy across Seattle harbor in a driving thunderstorm to get to the pier-side aquarium where she believes Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), the woman who killed her father Joel (Pedro Pascal), is located. Instead, a massive wave washes Ellie into the territory of the Seraphites, a.k.a. the Scars, a violent religious sect who string up and disembowel anyone they believe to be an enemy. That’s exactly what they almost do to Ellie, until she’s saved when the Seattle militia the Washington Liberation Front (or WLF) launch a nighttime sneak attack on the Scars’ main encampment, and they abandon Ellie to defend their home.
Then, after she breaks free from the noose, Ellie gets back into the boat and finally reaches the aquarium as a giant explosion erupts in the Scar territory behind her. But Abby isn’t there. Instead, Ellie finds Abby’s friends Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer); she holds them at gunpoint and demands they show her where Abby really is. Owen tries to shoot back. Ellie fires and kills him, and Mel is shot in the neck in the crossfire — at which point, Ellie realizes Mel is pregnant. As Mel bleeds out, she begs Ellie to cut her fetus from her womb. But Ellie has no idea how, and sits in helpless agony at Mel’s side as she dies.
Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and Jesse (Young Mazino), who’ve tracked Ellie to the aquarium, bring her back to the abandoned theater where Ellie’s girlfriend Dina (Isabela Merced) has been recuperating. They agree on a route home to Jackson, and Tommy leaves Ellie and Jesse in the theater to start packing up in the lobby. Suddenly, there’s a loud thump. Ellie and Jesse race out of the theater, and Jesse is immediately shot in the head and killed. Ellie takes cover and sees a gun to Tommy’s head. She hears a voice, demanding she stand up. It’s Abby.
For the first time since Joel’s death, Ellie and Abby are face to face. Ellie tells Abby she killed Abby’s friends and pleads for Abby to let Tommy go. “I let you live,” Abby says, filled with fury. “And you wasted it.” She aims her gun at Ellie, Ellie screams, Abby shoots, and the screen cuts to black.
Suddenly, we cut to Abby asleep on a couch. Her other WLF compatriot, Manny (Danny Ramirez), wakes her up and tells her WLF commander Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) wants to see her. She rouses herself and walks through what we realize is WLF headquarters, inside the football stadium that once was the home of the Seattle Seahawks. The words “Seattle: Day One” come on the screen, and the episode ends. We’ve gone back in time three days, and now the story is focused on Abby.
This twist mirrors the 2020 video game “The Last of Us Part II” almost exactly; in the game, Ellie disappears entirely as players move forward as Abby instead, an exercise in radical empathy. What the twist means for the show is less clear.
In a press conference on May 23 about the Season 2 finale, creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (who co-wrote the episode with Halley Gross, Druckmann’s co-writer on “Part II”) said they didn’t know yet how much — or, rather, how little — they expect Ellie, Dina, Tommy and Jesse to appear in Season 3.
“Even if I thought I knew now exactly how it was going to go, I’m experienced enough to know that two weeks from now we may have a different idea of how it should go,” Mazin said. “All I can say is 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.”
Added Druckmann, “Whether you will see them on screen or not, their presence will be there throughout.”
In an interview with Variety, Ramsey was more definitive, saying they “most likely” expect to have a smaller role in Season 3.
“I haven’t seen any scripts, but yes, I do expect that,” Ramsey said. “I think that I’m going to be there, but not a whole bunch. We’ve had conversations about that. I sort of have a rough idea of what it’s going to be, but I can’t tell you.”
In the press conference, Mazin did provide more clarity about other aspects of Season 3 — mainly concerning unresolved questions about the origins of the WLF and the Seraphites, and what drove them to war.
“Those questions are correct and will be answered,” Mazin said. “How did that war start? Why? How did the Seraphites start? Who is [their] prophet? What happened to her? What does Isaac want? What’s happening at the end of Episode 7? What is this explosion? All of it will become clear.” As for whether Season 3 will bring Joel back in more flashbacks — like, perhaps, a look at what Joel and Tommy were doing in the 20 years between the outbreak of the pandemic and the start of the show — Druckmann wouldn’t rule it out.
“I wouldn’t have guessed we would have a short story about Joel’s dad before we wrote the season, so there you go,” he said, referencing a flashback to Joel’s childhood from Episode 6. “You can’t predict these things.”
Mazin also said that he and Druckmann entertained several options for how to incorporate Abby’s story into the show, including intercutting her narrative with Ellie’s, or alternating episodes between them. But in the end, they decided to stick to the structure of the game, which Mazin acknowledged was a considerable risk for a hit show that had already killed off one of its stars in Episode 2.
“You keep asking people, ‘I know you love this, we’re taking it away and giving you this now,’” he said. “Then, hopefully they go, ‘Oh, you know what, we actually really like this.’”
As for Ramsey, they spoke with Variety about their difficulty with shooting that harrowing final scene directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado, why they loved getting battered with rain and sea on that dinghy, their secret sign language with Merced, and what was scariest about Ellie’s scene with the Seraphites.
Liane Hentscher/HBO
Let’s start at the very end. There’s obviously more that happens after the cut to black. Is that where you stopped shooting?
I actually haven’t seen it, to be fair, so I don’t even know where it cuts. But yes, I remember, it’s quite abrupt, and we did stop there. I actually found it really difficult. I feel like we should have like continued, because it was quite hard to just like suddenly stop. But yes, that is where it stops. Mwa ha ha!
A lot has to happen in those final moments. What is the emotional choreography of that scene for you?
Yeah, that was a mad scene. I’m seeing my friend get shot straight in front of me, seeing Tommy get threatened and almost dying, and it’s just so much going on. We actually did that scene a couple times, to get it just right. It was a really tricky balance, because obviously, so much tragic stuff is happening before her eyes, but at the same time she’s seeing Abby, this person that she’s been waiting for so long. That was a really challenging scene for me, and it took conversations with Craig and Nina, the director, to figure out what the right balance was of being traumatized and shell shocked versus this goal that Ellie’s had to kill Abby is there right in front of her — but then obviously, the tables have turns and it’s on her. It’s just a crazy moment.
What part of the balance was the most challenging for you to find?
It was going from the immediate grief of seeing Jesse get shot to then being in submission mode and pleading for my own life whilst it being Abby — it’s so specific. If it was anybody else, the scene would be easy, but because it’s her, there’s just so much going on in Ellie’s head in that moment.
I was fascinated by the differences between the show and the game, specifically with Ellie’s confrontation with Owen and Mel. On the show, killing Mel is an accident and Mel is alive when Ellie realizes she’s pregnant — whereas in the game, it’s the opposite. How did you feel about those changes?
I’d seen so much of the gameplay of the second game, but I hadn’t seen that scene, so I didn’t know about any of the changes. To me, what I read in the script and what we did on the day was just how it was. So that’s another — I had a lot of challenging scenes in this last episode! But yeah, that was a deep, dark sort of scene. I was really excited to get to do it and absolutely terrified, because how awful! That’s maybe worse than seeing Joel die, because I think in that moment, Ellie realizes she has become all of the parts of him that she never wanted to become. And now she’s seeing the consequences of her actions and her grief and her revenge and being unable to stop and think for a second.
Before Season 2 premiered, you told me that you listened to really upbeat music before those kinds of scenes. What were you listening to for that one?
I actually don’t think I was listening to anything. It definitely wasn’t the same as Joel dying. I really had to stay in a certain headspace for that one. Joel dying, it’s so immediate and so intense and so, like, loud. This one was way more quiet and intimate and still. There was definitely more of a darkening of the insides of myself beforehand.
Ellie spends so much time getting battered by the elements on that boat. Was that fun to do? I imagine you’re in some sort of water tank with fans blowing water in your face.
Yeah. It was right at the end of shooting, so I was absolutely exhausted, on my last little tether. But it was so fun. I love water and water scenes, and I just got to be in a heated water tank all day in the studio. I really had the best time. I also kind of know how to do boats and stuff like that, so that was exciting for me to be in the water and steering the dinghy.
The scene at the start of the episode, when Dina takes Ellie’s shirt off to tend to her wounds and Ellie confesses to Dina about what Joel did, is so sweet and vulnerable. What was that like to shoot?
It was really beautiful. There was a real feeling on set during that scene of just tenderness. It was so done so respectfully. It felt like a brief and rare pause and breath in it all. It’s not very often in “The Last of Us,” especially this season, that two people are sitting down together in a scene and having an emotional, tender moment that isn’t, like, traumatizing.
Isabela Merced told my colleague Kate Aurthur that during the subway sequence in Episode 4, you guys created a secret sign language with each other. How did that work?
We realized there were a lot of times that we’d be trying to sort of say to each other, like, “Do you need the toilet right now? Because I do, but do we have time?” And Isabela specifically was in skinny jeans and sometimes would be a bit uncomfortable, and she’d be like, “Can you cover me while I, like, fix myself?” Stuff like that. So Isabela came up with it. She was like, “We should just create a sign for that, so we don’t have to do this awkward thing of trying to say it when there’s people around.” I don’t really remember them now, unfortunately, but that was nice, non-verbal communication.
Did it ever involve action sequences that were really intense and you needed some support? That was part of Isabela appeared to be talking about.
Well, it was all quite light-hearted. We did have one for “I really don’t want to do this right now.” But it was done in a way of, like, we both know that we have to do it. I think that might have been like a weird head shake and a tongue out or something. It was just a comfort to know that there was someone in it with you.
What was it like to shoot the scene where Ellie is strung up and almost disemboweled by the Scars? Of all the scary things in that episode, it was the scariest to me!
The Scars are the most terrifying part of the season, I think. The actual feeling of the rope like around my neck — obviously, I’m on a harness and it’s not actually happening, but it’s tight. So it’s not hard to act. I’m fully safe, but it’s very easy to trick my mind into thinking that it’s not. All of the scary parts are the most fun to film.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
