<i>The Last of Us</i> Season 2 Finale Recap: Storm Warning

At last, Ellie’s revenge mission has reached its apex. In tonight’s finale episode, the scrappy 19-year-old finally encounters Abby again, though not in the way she planned. In fact, not much of her foray to Seattle has gone according to plan, and it’s clearer with each passing scene that Ellie knows she’s in too deep. Still, a sunk cost fallacy prevents her from considering any other path than the one right in front of her: She’s come this far. She has to kill Abby and avenge Joel. To what end? She’s not thinking that far ahead. The end might not even matter. To steal a line from another Pedro Pascal-starring sci-fi franchise, “This is the way.”

The finale opens on Jesse removing the crossbow bolt from Dina’s leg as Ellie returns from hunting down Nora. When Dina awakens to wipe the blood from Ellie’s scratches and bruises, Ellie stares into the middle distance, dazed. “I made her talk,” she admits. “I thought it would be harder to do. But it wasn’t. It was easy.”

Dina posits that Nora got what she deserved. But Ellie isn’t so certain anymore. “Maybe she didn’t,” she says. She then proceeds to tell Dina about what Joel actually did—about the cure that might have been, about all those dead Fireflies, and about Abby’s father.

The admission of such a terrible secret visibly rattles Dina, who, for the first time since they left Jackson, seems to question her faith in Ellie. “We need to go home,” she says. At least in the moment, Ellie seems to agree.

But they can’t leave without Tommy. The next morning, Ellie and Jesse set out to meet Joel’s baby brother at a predetermined rendezvous point, an abandoned bookstore. Their hike over allows them both plenty of time to catch up. Jesse is none too thrilled with his former patrol partner—for the obvious reasons, as well as more complicated ones. He’s inferred from Dina’s behavior that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant with his kid. She refused alcohol to soothe the pain of her leg wound, and she insisted she couldn’t die, not that she didn’t want to die. “I’m gonna be a father,” he tells Ellie. “Which means I can’t die. But, because of you, we’re stuck in a war zone. So how about we skip the apologies and just go find Tommy so I can get us and my kid the fuck out of Seattle?”

This is a decidedly different attitude than the one Jesse presents in the game. In The Last of Us: Part II, Jesse has his issues with Ellie’s occasionally cavalier approach to violence, but he treats her with mutual respect, even affection. They high five after escaping near-death encounters; they joke about the fact that Joel once believed Ellie had a crush on Jesse. He swears he would have come with Ellie and Dina to Seattle had they asked him. “I looked up to Joel,” he says. “What happened to him was messed up. I would’ve come.”

Even when he learns Dina is pregnant, Part II Jesse reacts not with anger but with empathy. “I get why you came out here,” he tells Ellie. “But we gotta take her back.” It’s only when Ellie lies to him about her intentions for finding Tommy that he (temporarily) turns away from her.

By comparison, in the show, Jesse treats Ellie much more like a frustrated, overburdened older brother might a petulant younger sister. When the two find temporary shelter from the downpour in a parking garage, they witness the capture of a Seraphite boy. Ellie tries to run out and help him, but Jesse yanks her back. “I’m not dying out here. Not for any of them. This is not our war,” he insists.

At the bookstore rendezvous point, they discover some soggy old paperbacks and children’s books about monsters (a little on the nose there, HBO)... but no Tommy. Glad for a moment of rest, Jesse sits beneath a mural that reads: “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.” (Again, the messaging here is heavy-handed, to say the least.) He admits he loves Dina, but not the way Ellie does. Still, he’s disappointed in her actions. Years ago, he, too, fell in love with someone: a girl who came through Jackson. But he refused to leave with her. He wouldn’t abandon his community. He didn’t feel like he could abandon his community. “Because I was taught to put other people first,” he finishes.

“Okay, got it. So you’re Saint Jesse of Wyoming, and everyone else is a fucking asshole,” Ellie concludes. I mean, sure.

Before they can get any deeper into this petty squabble, their WLF radios fritz with gunfire, coming from a sniper they can only assume must be Tommy. They race up to the roof to get a better look at the Seattle skyline, from which Ellie spots a Ferris wheel near the far-off aquarium—with a whale emblazoned on the side of the building. “Whale wheel” were the two words Nora managed to get out as Ellie beat her to a bloody pulp last episode. Alas, it dawns on Ellie: Abby is holing up at the aquarium. As she does in the game, Ellie abandons all pretense of rescuing Tommy, and refocuses instead on tracking down Abby. Exasperated, Jesse reveals that he voted “no” during the Jackson referendum on avenging Joel. Why? “Because everything you do, you do for you,” he tells his friend and ally. Ouch.

Ellie might be stung, but she knows a hypocrite when she sees one. “You let a kid die today, Jesse,” she retorts. “Why? Because he wasn’t in your community?” Joel was Ellie’s community. She’s acting as Jesse would in her shoes, or so she’s convinced herself. She’s doing right by her community.

Jesse can’t argue with her any further. “I really hope you make it,” he tells her, and they go their separate ways.

As Ellie cuts through the detritus of a bombed and waterlogged Seattle to reach the aquarium, the WLF top brass are preoccupied with their own vendettas. We watch as the sergeant from episode 5, Elise Park, informs Isaac that the storm is only going to grow. Her soldiers are set for the coming battle, even if the “rank and file are a little scared.” Isaac doesn’t blame them. But he’s too distracted to ruminate on his own fears. “Any word on Abby?” he asks.

We’ve heard a lot about Abby since episode 2, but we’ve yet to see her in Washington. Apparently, Joel’s killer is MIA, which is bad news for Isaac, who—surprise, surprise—had considered her the next him. In the (increasingly likely) event of his death, Abby would step up to lead the WLF. “Who secures our future?” he asks Elise. “It was supposed to be her.”

This is a hint to viewers that Abby hasn’t been sitting around watching old Curtis and Viper DVDs while Ellie and Dina have ripped a hole through the city. Abby’s had her own story arc taking place during this same time period, and while we can’t yet know what’s happened, we know it’s changed her relationship with her fellow soldiers. And that matters, because as Isaac laments Abby’s shifting loyalties, the WLF are converging on the nearby Seraphite island base. The same base where Ellie washes ashore when her boat is shipwrecked. But thanks to the WLF’s impending military operation, Ellie narrowly escapes disembowelment by the Scars. They flee into the forest as the Wolves ambush the island, and Ellie sprints back to her boat, hightailing it, at last, to the aquarium.

There, she finds some bloodied surgical tools—a story tease we’ll have to wait for season 3 to fulfill—and a path of wet footprints leading directly to where Owen and Mel stand, arguing about (who else?) Abby. Ellie sneaks up on them and trains her gun on Owen’s head, then pulls an old tactic of Joel’s out of her back pocket. She demands Owen and Mel both circle Abby’s location on a map; if their circles don’t match up, Ellie will kill them both.

Mel is willing to give up Abby if it means saving their unborn child. But Owen is not so eager to forsake his ex-girlfriend. As he appears to reach for the map on the table, he instead lunges for his pistol. Ellie’s reaction is immediate, practically subconscious. She fires, hitting Owen right at the base of his throat. He collapses immediately, dead within seconds.

But the bullet unintentionally passes through Owen and grazes Mel’s own throat, which starts gushing blood as she unzips her jacket to reveal her pregnant belly. Ellie, who knew nothing of Mel’s condition, is horrified. Mel begs Ellie to cut the baby out with a knife before she dies (and the fetus with her), but Ellie is too scared, too traumatized, and too helpless to act quickly. She can only sit and watch, sobbing, as all three of them—Owen, Mel, and their unborn child—succumb to their injuries.

It’s a gruesome, dismal scene, one that clearly alarms Tommy and Jesse when they arrive to rescue Ellie. They escort her back to the theater, where they enjoy a brief period of peace before they begin their route home. Ellie thanks Jesse for coming back for her, for being “a good person.” He finally admits to a sort of truce between them: “If I were out there somewhere, lost and in trouble, you would set the world on fire to save me.”

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, their reconciliation is short-lived. They hear Tommy struggling out in the theater lobby, and as they burst through the doors to save him, someone—but, really, who else could it be?—shoots him in the head. Jesse’s death is as shocking and immediate as it was in the game. There’s no time to anticipate it, and even less time to grieve it.

Finally, we see Abby again. She’s a little worse for wear since her time in Jackson: Bruises bloom on her neck, and her braid sits in a limp, wet twist. She points her gun down at Tommy while Ellie pleads for her to let him live. It’s her Abby wants, right? She killed Mel and Owen. Joel murdered Abby’s father because of her. Abby can’t believe it’s come to this. “We let you live,” she says, adjusting her aim to rest, instead, on Ellie. “And you wasted it.”

A gun shot cracks through the air, but the screen cuts to black before we can see where it lands. Instead, The Last of Us transports us back in time, reintroducing us to the Abby of three days prior. We watch her awaken inside the WLF compound in the fictional SoundView Stadium, based on the real-life NFL football arena Lumen Field. There, the Wolves have built a self-sustaining community almost eerily (and, you can bet, intentionally) like Jackson. As Abby surveys this small kingdom, a lower third informs us we have arrived back at Seattle Day One.

So, what does that mean for our battle-scarred survivors? It implies that, next season, Kaitlyn Dever will take center stage as our lead protagonist, with Ellie’s story temporarily sidelined in favor of Abby’s perspective. That’s the same narrative strategy the Part II game employed so artfully, though not without tremendous controversy, and I suspect the fan reaction to this choice will be similarly split when season 3 rolls around. But, unlike players of the game, fans of the show will have the luxury of some time to process. In the game, the leap between Ellie’s perspective and Abby’s is immediate, with no time to adjust unless you’re keen to pause for a bathroom break. In the case of the HBO adaptation, viewers have months before season 3 delivers Abby’s side of the saga.

Grieve Jesse’s death—and process Ellie’s choices—while you can. It’s only going to get more complicated from here.