REVIEW: The Last of Us – Season Two [2025]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 7 | Runtime: 50 minutes
Release Date: April 13th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Home Box Office (HBO)
Creator(s): Neil Druckmann & Craig Mazin / Neil Druckmann & Halley Wegryn Gross (video game)

I hope you do a little better than me.

Five years is a long time to carry the secret Joel (Pedro Pascal) keeps from Ellie (Bella Ramsey) at the conclusion of the first season of “The Last of Us”. So long that we quickly presume it has a lot to do with the rift between them at the start of season two. Joel is trying to engage with her, but she barely acknowledges his presence when not holed up in her garage apartment. It’s become so bad that he’s even seeing Jackson’s resident psychotherapist (a great Catherine O’Hara) to figure out if there’s a way to make things better regardless of whether their bond will ever again be the same. Because once that Salt Lake City cat’s out of the bag, it’s never going back in.

Look no further than Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) to discover this truth. She’s the daughter of the doctor Joel killed. The one who was going to attempt making a Cordyceps vaccine out of Ellie’s brain. Those five years of knowing what he did drove her to dedicate her very existence to killing him. It did not matter how long it would take; Abby would not rest until Joel was dead. So, she and her friends joined the WLFs, learned to fight and hunt better than even the Fireflies could, and waited until the opportunity arose. You almost can’t deny her performing the deed either when fate and justice merge to present a perfect road forward. An eye for an eye. No more, no less.

Therein lies the first two episodes of the season. Five years of calm exploded and five years of hate hardened on a collision course. The rest? Consequences. Because the problem with eye-for-an-eye vengeance is, of course, that it can never work unless the owners of those two eyes are the ones killing each other. If not, there’s always another new eye opening itself up for destruction. Joel killed the doctor and lived. So, if Abby were to kill him and live, it would only make sense someone would hunt her much the same way. And she’d have no leg to stand on to say it’s unfair since her very existence as a target is a result of her saying it was her only fair thing to do. Round and round the cycle goes.

As such, there needs to be more to the story. Enter the Scars. A group of Amish-like people devout to a prophet who had a vision that explained Cordyceps as a new flood meant to wipe away humanity’s sins. They shun technology and seek to live off the land with bows and arrows as farmers and gathers in their forest home within Seattle. Well, Seattle is also the home of the WLFs—a paramilitary group whose numbers continue to increase every single time Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann turn their focus upon them. David versus Goliath in a brutal battle sparing no quarter for the enemy on either side. It’s a war between families, much like Ellie versus Abby. Murder in the name of protection. Tribalism at its worst.

We saw a little of that in season one with Kathleen’s (Melanie Lynskey) rebels pretty much turning into the very thing they fought against (FEDRA). It’s on an even bigger scale here because the WLFs didn’t simply spend all their time torturing conspirators in their tiny community. No, they sought to expand. To, for all intents and purposes, remake the world in their martial law image. The oppressed becoming the oppressor. Victims stockpiling enough power to ensure they would never be victims again. But the only logical end to that impulse is to create a replacement for the label. Fascism 101: target someone else so that no one else has the time to target you because it’s easier than accepting the reality that, once the latest group gets erased, you might very well be next.

It’s what happened during the Holocaust as Nazis sought to take over Europe. It’s what in turn is happening now with the Israeli Zionist ancestors of those victims dehumanizing Palestinians to take over the Middle East. It’s every genocide. And it’s apparently ingrained in our DNA. Because rather than joining forces to destroy the Cordyceps, the humans in “The Last of Us” more or less adapted to its presence and decided to seek taking control of what was left. It wasn’t enough for the WLFs to let the Scars live in peace. Or vice versa if we’re to assume both were equal opportunity aggressors rather than one being pushed to the point of needing to fight back in kind. I’m not familiar with the video game source material and mythology, but it’s not difficult to posit the Scars’ are here due to self-defense.

That brings us back to Ellie and Abby and their cycle of violence. Did Joel go overboard? That depends on whether you think he could have talked them into letting Ellie go. I find that hard to believe, so his actions inherently become an unavoidable cost of survival (although him knowing she would have willingly sacrificed herself definitely muddies the picture). Is Abby going overboard in her pursuit of Joel? No doubt about it. Because her father is already dead. And neither Joel nor Jackson poses a threat. Abby acts out of desire. Pleasure. That’s the thing about Joel, Ellie, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and the other “good guys” of post-apocalyptic narratives. They don’t mind spilling blood, but they never seek it. Abby, though? She lives for it. At least the version we know does.

This season is quite timely as a result. It really digs into the nature of one side’s freedom fighters being the other side’s terrorists. The more you stop seeing your enemy as a human with the exact same impulses and motives as you, the less human you become. It’s why the supporting cast proves a lot more important here than in the previous season. We need Mel (Ariela Barer) as a balm for Abby’s cruelty and Dina (Isabela Merced) and Jesse (Young Mazino) as one for Ellie’s selfishness. Yes, Ramsey is very good at being her own conscience once guilt and shame arise in the aftermath of what she ultimately does throughout this chapter of her journey, but that’s partially an extension of her also being that for Joel. The justifications simpler grow hollower with each subsequent episode.

I think the drama is as effective as it was in the first season as a result. The ways in which these characters wrestle with their morality is why I keep coming back and the show does not disappoint. The structure, however, can’t help feeling like it’s missing something. I loved the way we were able to really get to know Bill and Frank or Kathleen or even Pastor David. They didn’t feel like faceless figures to be used as expendable pawns to the story even though that’s exactly what they were. They felt whole. Because season two is so myopic in focus insofar as Ellie hunting Abby for revenge, those peripheral figures lose some autonomy. Besides Dina, the rest are rapidly introduced to kill, die, or save. The acting remains stellar (Jeffrey Wright, Tony Dalton, and Joe Pantoliano shine), they just also serve Ellie.

That’s okay. I was still riveted throughout and am genuinely intrigued with how the story continues considering the finale. If season one wasn’t as good as it was, maybe I’d be lauding this one with the accolades I gave it. Everything is relative, though, and nothing exists in a vacuum. And while the cliffhanger is quite similar to its predecessor—Joel took Ellie to Salt Lake City as promised and Ellie found Abby as planned with neither quest turning out quite the way they hoped—this one does leave us wanting whereas the first could have simply left us lingering in its bleak result. That’s the problem with adapting the first game as a single season before choosing to split the second into many. You intrinsically leave us needing more instead of demanding it.