The Last of Us - Season 2

For us gamers – myself included – season 2 has always been looming on the horizon like a ticking fan bomb. We know what’s coming, and where it’s headed. Part 2 was hailed by many as a masterpiece, but there is another camp – where I stand – that never bought into Abby’s premise. Her story, however well-meant and ambitiously told, never landed. It felt too long, too calculated – and ultimately too emotionally distant.

So how do you turn that into TV?
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Episode 1 opens strongly. Visually striking, well acted, and packed with little hints of the darkness ahead. The details are lovingly handled, and you get the sense that now it’s happening. But then it all slowly starts to come apart. The episode significantly embellishes the game’s opening – we get a hell of a lot of zombies. Does it work? Yes, it does. It’s action-packed and grand. A smart choice to stray from the game’s storyline, and it pays off.

And then we get to it: Episode 2. The episode that hardly surprised anyone who played the game, but was nevertheless a “Red Wedding moment” (Game of Thrones) for those who didn’t. It’s moving, brutal, but you also sit there with the feeling that it’s going to be very hard for the series’ creators to carry this beyond the first two episodes.

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Where episodes 1 and 2 at least manage to establish a mood and set the pieces in motion, the series then drops into a middle zone where episodes 3, 4 and 5 mostly feel like transit stretches. Not bad – just flat. There are flashes of potential, but the pacing is oddly unresolved, and several of the emotional beats feel imposed rather than earned. The series struggles to balance character development and plot progression, and the middle episodes end up in a kind of limbo: not intense enough to be nerve-racking, and not quiet enough to be moving. It feels as if something is constantly being built toward – but the climax never arrives.

Episode 6 is, ironically, once again an episode that – like “Long, Long Time” in the first season – barely has anything to do with the main story, yet still stands as the season’s most moving and best-told chapter. It’s beautiful, yes. But it also points to a fundamental problem with the series: when the side stories consistently feel stronger than the main plot itself, something is off. We should be invested in Ellie. In her grief, rage, and search for meaning. But instead we keep getting it in fragments and scraps that never quite fit together.

And the finale – yes, already in episode 7 – feels like a fight without sound. What, in the game, was an emotional abyss where both Ellie and we as players lose something of ourselves, is in the series reduced to stylized melodrama. Important scene? Check. Flashback? Check. But where is the psychological build-up? Where is the unshakable desperation and self-destruction? It all feels rushed – as if HBO doesn’t dare drag us all the way down into the dark, and so skips over the part that hurts most. And that is exactly where The Last of Us has to live.
I remember Ellie’s journey to find Abby’s hideout in the game as far more suspenseful and carefully built, but here it’s served up like a flat beer in summer heat.

The biggest betrayal, though, is still Ellie. Bella Ramsey does what she can – she has presence and talent – but the emotional journey the script sends her on feels artificial. Instead of a slow, brutal transformation, we get emotional explosions without build-up. It’s like reading the back cover of a book and being asked to cry over the whole thing. The absence of Joel (Pedro Pascal) also means there are some enormous shoes to fill.

Conclusion without a conclusion

The Last of Us – Season 2 wants to be deep, moving, epic and nuanced. But it feels like a compromise between two worlds: the complexity of the game and the format of the series. The result is something in between, stumbling in its attempt to balance it all. It wants to hit you right in the heart – but ends up brushing your shoulder instead.