TL;DR – A slightly odd finale that has me ruminating about the strength of the season.

Disclosure – I paid for the Max service that viewed this show.

End Credit Scene – There is a behind-the-scenes making-of.

Warning – Contains scenes that may cause distress.

The Last of Us Review –

Well, we have come to the end of Season Two, and I was not ready, and I don’t mean that from a more existential way, though there is a bit of that in there. But more, the fact that this season only being seven episodes long caught me entirely off guard. Now, our final episode of the season has to do a lot of heavy lifting to stick the landing, and I am concerned going in, that this might be too much of a task to ask of it.  

So, to set the scene, at the end of Feel Her Love, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) becomes separated from Dina (Isabela Merced) and Jesse (Young Mazino) in the park, which leads to her discovering that there are places where the cordyceps have built up enough that it can affect people with their spores, but also where she enacted the first part of her revenge. Now, from here, we will be looking at the episode and season as a whole, so there will be [SPOILERS] ahead. 

This was a bit of an odd fish in that it felt like everything and nothing happened all at once, and I am not sure how to think about that. But before I get into my thoughts on that, I did need to champion the parts of the episode that I very much liked. To begin with, I think this might be a bit of a broken record because I have said it all season, but congratulations to the whole production team. The set dressers, the costume designers, the visual effect artists, the composers, and look everyone. You can feel all the work that has gone into every frame of this series. This is so important in most forms of television, but in a post-apocalyptic setting, it is imperative because you need to believe the world you are seeing. Sometimes, it is just the little things like having a small shot of a crane crashing into two skyscrapers or complete sets of building interiors filled with decades of decay.

Also, I continue to like the characters in this series. Jesse and Dina have much-rounded characterisations in the television adaptation, and I think the series has been better for it. This is really important for where the series is heading because you need to believe in them. Also, while I might be in the minority in this episode, but I didn’t mind that much how Ellie was portrayed. I know that she has been labelled as more inconsistent than her video game companion. However, given what a traumatic event she suffered in Through the Valley and the layered responsibilities that have been thrust onto her, it makes sense that she would struggle in that framework. On that front, I honestly liked the fight she had with Jessie in the library about what community means to them, the clashing forms of responsibility.

However, while I was really interested in the episode and how it was progressing, I had a growing concern about the ending that was heightened with the bombing of the Seraphites. Thus, we need to have a conversation about the season as a whole. I am just going to come out and say it, but following the way the video game was structured was a mistake. They barely pulled it off last time, and I think it only worked because of the sheer novel addition for the time that duct-taped over the severe pacing issues that were caused by it. The problem is that all of those structural issues are still there, and now there is no shock of it happening to help smooth it over. It also hurts because in two scenes in this episode, Kaitlyn Dever shows how good she is, and it is a shame there was not more of her this season.  

But it is more than that. Right at the start of the season in Future Days, they decided to open the season by explaining what Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) motivation was for killing Joel (Pedro Pascal). This would be a good idea if you were running the story chronologically. However, it is a profoundly wrong choice if you want to shock your audience by suddenly changing to the point of view of the protagonist because the audience not knowing why she killed Joel was the main shock that made that change of view work. Then, you compound this by telling the audience that you will have to wait for a year or two to see how that plays out, undercutting the reveal for a limp cliffhanger. This is part of why this season felt so uncompleted; at best, it felt like we were getting 1/3^rd of a story. It undercuts how well each of the individual episodes worked because, in the end, that choice meant that they now don’t feel like a coherent whole.     

In the end, do we recommend The Last of Us: Convergence & Season Two? Look, while I did have some issues with how they tried to land the finale and the ramifications that it has for the season as a whole, I was still impressed with the production and the writing and acting of the characters. We got big splashy battles in Through the Valley, thoughtful character works in The Price, and everything in between. While I don’t think this structure will help the series, and I am sure that someone will eventually re-edit it into chronological order, ala Arrested Development or Bobba Fett, I am prepared to be proven wrong next season. Have you seen The Last of Us yet? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of The Last of Us
Directed by – Nina Lopez-Corrado, Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, Mark Mylod, Peter Hoar, Kate Herron & Stephan Williams
Written by – Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross & Craig Mazin
Created by – Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann
Based On – The Last of Us Part II by Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross and Naughty Dog
Production/Distribution Companies – Naughty Dog, PlayStation Productions, Sony Pictures Television, The Mighty Mint, Word Games, HBO & Max
Starring – Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, Gabriel Luna, Isabela Merced & Yong Mazino with Jeffrey Wright, Kaitlyn Dever, Spencer Lord, Danny Ramirez, Ariela Barer, Hettienne Park, Ben Ahlers, Rutina Wesley, Robert John Burke, Tony Dalton, Joe Pantoliano, Catherine O’Hara, Alanna Ubach, Tati Gabrielle, Josh Peck, Michael Abbott Jr. & Finn Higgins and Kendra Anderson, Sean Kuling, Andrew Diaz, David Miranda, Ezra Agbonkhese, Noah Lamanna, Maurice Dean Wint, Cheonguk Park, Carlos Rodriguez, Jag Bal, Jake Allyn, Ryan Masson, Samuel Hoeksema, Makena Whitlock, Erica Pappas, Hiro Kanagawa, Sarah Gore, Reedan Elizabeth, Meagan Buggey, Everly Buggey, June Laporte, Glenn Ennis, Andrew Prest, Rebecca Ferguson, Molly Scarpine, Samuel Hoeksema, Aoife O’Donovan, Brittany Haas, Greg Liszt, Corey DiMario, Miranda Menne & Gustavo Santaolalla
Episodes viewed – Future Days, Through the Valley, The Path, Day One, Feel Her Love, The Price & Convergence