The Last of Us season 2 ending, explained: 'There is another side to this story'

 The Last of Us season 2 ending, explained: 'There is another side to this story'....

What that ending flashback means for season 3, how it plays in the game, and more.

26/5/25

By Mediabuzz

"I let you live...and you wasted it." These are the last words we hear on The Last of Us before the season 2 finale cuts to black and ushers in a new reality.

Kaitlyn Dever returns to the show as Abby for the first time since killing Joel (Pedro Pascal) amid the final moments of "Convergence," the seventh and final episode of this season, which aired Sunday night on HBO. Just when it looks like Ellie (Bella RamseyBella Ramsey) is ready to drop her revenge mission and return to Jackson, in storms the object of that obsession. Now pissed because someone has been killing off all her friends, she fatally guns down Jesse (Young Mazino) and holds Tommy (Gabriel Luna) at pistol point.

She then turns the gun on Ellie and...

Darkness. The camera opens back up on a scene of Abby waking from a cat nap in her library. The location is the home base of the W.L.F. in Seattle, located in a giant baseball stadium. The field itself is filled with farming, garden beds, dog pens, and greenhouses; and the inside has been renovated into living quarters. We're now in the past, two days earlier — on the exact day Ellie and Dina (Isabela Merced) ride into town.

This is a narrative twist pulled directly from the video game, 2020's The Last of Us Part II. After the execution of Joel, gamers play as Ellie through the entire three-day story of her journey through Seattle, all the way to this confrontation in the theater with Abby. Then the game, similarly, cuts to black and drops players back in the past to relive the same events, but now they play as Abby, while Ellie's story takes a backseat.

In the same way Ellie's portion of the narrative included flashbacks to her relationship with Joel, Abby's story includes moments that explore her backstory with her father, the members of her crew, and her time in the W.L.F. HBO's The Last of Us, which was already renewed ahead of the season 2 premiere, will now be focusing on this material.

In a press conference held ahead of the season 2 finale airdate, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann declined to officially state one way or the other how they are adapting this next stage of the game. However, they offered plenty of teases."There is another side to this story that we have yet to really delve into," Mazin said. "There's no question that Abby is the hero of her story. Kaitlyn Dever is the hero of a story, always. If you have a Kaitlyn Dever, you use a Kaitlyn Dever. So I think where we go next, all I can say is it will always be centering somebody, whether it's Ellie and Dina, or whether it's Abby and Abby's relationship with Owen or new relationships. If you played the game, you probably know what I'm talking about. But if you want to boil it down, everything is under the cloud or sunlight of Joel, what Joel did to Abby, and what Joel did for Ellie. That will never change."

Even if Mazin and Druckmann knew exactly how they're going to present the events of season 3, Mazin acknowledged they could easily change course in the writing process at a moment's notice. "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 even seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story," he said.

Druckmann elaborated further, heavily hinting at the POV shift to Abby, "There's just an epic nature to it of what's about to happen, but this other story's going to be really important coming back to Joel and Ellie and everything that you've seen so far."

If the game is any indication, the big contenders for returning players among those who've been killed off are Nora (Tati Gabrielle), Owen (Spencer Lord), and Mel (Ariela Barer). As season 2 suggested, they had entire storylines that played out off camera in the timeline of the show before their deaths. Another contender is Jesse. Mazino told Entertainment Weekly that the one morsel he got from the showrunners was that Jesse and Tommy are "going to f--- s--- up, or something along the lines of that" in season 3. So we can assume we'll also be learning more about this duo's journey in Seattle.

Mazin and Druckmann also confirmed we'll learn more about the war between the W.L.F. and the Seraphites, which includes the fiery battle glimpsed on the island Ellie stumbled upon. (In the game, Ellie never travels to this island and we only learn about what happened there from Abby's playthrough.) Druckmann pointed out "a certain crane" you see high above Ellie and Dina around the tops of buildings in episode 7, which hints to a specific Abby-centric sequence from the game. Mazin, rather cheekily, joked, "Rats...What should we talk about?" which is no doubt a reference to the "Rat King" from the source material.

If season 1 was about Joel and Ellie, season 2 became about Ellie's story, and now we're shifting to Abby in season 3 — with a season 4 already teased by the creators. Referring to their bosses at HBO, Druckmann said, "They understand that this show is going to be a different show every season, which is a tricky thing to do when you're a hit show. You keep asking people, 'I know you love this. We're taking it away and giving you this now.' And then hopefully they go, 'Oh! Well you know what? We actually really like this.' ... We're giving you this now because that's how the story works."