This article contains spoilers for the video game The Last of Us Part 2 and, as a result, potential spoilers for The Last of Us Season 2 and beyond.
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The Last of Us Season 2 is nearly upon us, but let’s be honest: it likely won’t end up culminating in a very satisfying ending for viewers. The Last of Us is a very sacred story for gamers and is widely regarded as one of the best in gaming. The second game, The Last of Us Part 2, is much more divisive but still held highly by its fans. Despite this, it’s also a lot less straightforward than the first game. It’s extremely non-linear with lots of flashbacks that provide critical context to events in the narrative, but are only inserted into the story at specific times for maximum impact. Similarly, its structure is also designed to intentionally upset the player in some ways.
The first season of The Last of Us was likely a lot less of a challenge as the first game’s story is pretty straightforward. While there were changes made in the show, it is generally pretty faithful to the source material. The second game is much more complex and its story is structured in a way that largely only makes sense for a video game. That doesn’t mean it’s unadaptable whatsoever; it just requires a lot of very precise storytelling changes. For instance, it doesn’t really make sense for a TV show to divide itself the way The Last of Us Part 2 does. In a game, you can’t frequently cut back and forth between two different characters/stories without it being extremely disruptive and disorienting.
Although Ellie and Abby’s stories happen parallel to each other, they are extremely different from each other. One is a revenge quest, and the other is a story of a woman helping a pair of children escape from a cult, to put it simply. In a TV show, however, it is a bit easier to cut between the characters within the same episode. TV shows typically have A-plots and B-plots that allow you to jump in and out of multiple stories at any given time. At the time of writing, we don’t know exactly how showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin plan to structure the TV series, but it’s likely going to cause some annoyances for fans one way or another.
The biggest thing I keep thinking about is where The Last of Us Season 2 will choose to end its story. It’s a mere seven episodes, two fewer than the first season, which also had an hour-and-a-half-long pilot and a 75-minute episode centered around Bill and Frank. We already know Season 2 will not adapt the entirety of the second game and it’s been suggested The Last of Us will run for two more seasons, which will cover the rest of the sequel game. Some have speculated that the second season may choose to spend more time with Joel and, as a result, his confrontation with Abby will come much later than it does in the game. Personally, I don’t see that happening. The trailers and set photos have shown scenes set in Seattle, indicating Ellie and Dina set out on their adventure during this season.
No matter where The Last of Us Season 2 chooses to end itself, it’s going to leave viewers frustrated. There were two years between seasons one and two, and there will likely be a similar gap between two and three. If it concludes at Joel’s climactic moment, it will anger viewers to no end. That’s too brutal of a moment to leave people hanging on and would possibly turn fans away from returning in Season 3. If it wraps up before Ellie and Abby come face to face again, it will feel unfulfilling and abrupt. Based on the trailers, it seems like we will see all three days of Ellie’s time in Seattle as her showdown with Nora is teased, which is one of the last big things she does before fighting Abby.
The most likely spot for Season 2 to end is when Abby and Ellie come to blows at the theater. However, there’s still a discrepancy here. In the game, Ellie’s section ends on a cliffhanger where Abby shoots and kills Jesse and has Tommy at gunpoint. The story then essentially resets and shows Abby’s point of view since Ellie’s arrival in Seattle. Once again, ending it here is unfulfilling as the entire story builds to this moment. Telling viewers to wait a couple of years before they see how it resolves is just infuriating. It’s a moment that already caused a lot of annoyance in the game, and that was just because it delayed the resolution by a handful of hours.
Season 2 could also end after Ellie is beaten by Abby, but then that raises questions about how much story is left to tell in the following two seasons. Ellie spends some time on a farm with Dina, which doesn’t take up that much runtime in the game, and then sets out to kill Abby in California. That’s another episode or two at a minimum once again.
Perhaps the cliffhanger for Season 2 is Ellie finding out what Joel did in Season 1. It’s still not a great ending because it’s likely in a flashback, meaning we already know how it resolves. It’s a cliffhanger that we’ve already stopped hanging from within this very season.
Then again, maybe there’s a way to find a stopping point somewhere in Abby’s storyline. It’s hard to imagine that The Last of Us is going to split Ellie and Abby’s stories into two individual seasons, as that would mean one season would barely feature Ellie, if at all. So, if they tell both stories simultaneously, maybe there’s a point where both stories can thematically intersect that would be satisfying, but I don’t really have any idea where that would be based on the game.
No matter where The Last of Us Season 2 ends, it’s likely going to be on a hefty cliffhanger that will leave audiences in unbearable suspense. This isn’t to say the show will be bad or that the ending will be some disgrace, but it’s hard to imagine it pleasing people who don’t play the game as they’ll be waiting years to find out what comes next in a story that wasn’t initially designed for that kind of a break.
The only imaginable way this can work well is if Druckmann and Mazin take some dramatic turn with The Last of Us’ story, which isn’t totally out of the question. The duo took some notable liberties with Season 1, though the overarching story and ending were kept intact. Either way, it’s clear the creators have their work cut out for them with adapting this already incredibly challenging story.
