The Last of Us season 2 episode 7 recap: the finale
HBO hasn't spilled this much blood in a long time.
IF YOU’RE A longtime HBO viewer, you know that the entertainment giant digs a bloody season finale almost as much as it loves changing the name of its streaming platform. But I have to say: The Last of Us season 2 finale, which premiered this Sunday night, puts The White Lotus‘s shootout in Thailand and some of the gnarliest moments in The Pitt (hello, girl with the fork in her nose!) to shame.
Those who played the source material—2020’s The Last of Us Part II—already knew of Jesse’s fate at the hands of an enraged Abby, sure. After spending so much time with Jesse this episode, it’s especially painful to watch, whether or not you knew it was coming. Then, there’s Mel’s death, which nearly feels impossible to comprehend, let alone watch. Ellie confronts Owen and Mel (we’ll surely see much more of these two in season 3, but we’ll cover that at the end); in the middle of the standoff, Owen pulls his gun on Ellie. She instinctively fires her gun, killing them both. To her horror, Mel is pregnant—and she wants Ellie to save the baby by any means necessary. Ellie fails.
If you want to unpack each moment in more depth, Esquire spoke to both Young Mazino and Ariela Barer—who play Jesse and Mel, respectively. As you can imagine, they have quite a lot to say about the finale, as well a few stories from shooting their fatal scenes. I’ll refer to both pieces later on, but you can read Mazino’s interview here, and Barer’s chat here.
So, join me in remembering Mel and Jesse—or, as Ellie would say, Saint Jesse of Wyoming—and let’s move to this week’s recap.
The Last of Us season 2 finale sees even more heartbreak for Ellie.
Justice for Shimmer!
You know who I was hoping to see more of this season? Ellie’s horse, Shimmer. In the video game, you spend much more time with the trusty steed, but here—as Jesse rightfully points out!—Ellie essentially locks Shimmer away and forgets about her. Shimmer is more than a password, Ellie!
With that off my chest: After a brutal opening scene where Jesse saves Dina’s leg by driving an iron straight through it, Ellie finally comes clean to Dina about… everything. Ellie tells her about finding and torturing Nora, to which Dina quips, “Maybe she got what she deserved.” Then, Ellie tells the story of Salt Lake City. “[The Fireflies] were gonna use me to make a cure,” Ellie says. “But it meant that I would’ve died. And Joel found out. And he killed everyone in the hospital. Everyone. He killed Abby’s father. He was a doctor, and Joel shot him in the head. To save me.”
The understandably horrified Dina utters the five most intelligent words I’ve heard from any character on The Last of Us this season: “We need to go home.”
Shocking absolutely none of us at home, they do not head back to Jackson. The next morning, Jesse and Ellie hit the streets of Seattle one last time to meet with Tommy. Along the way, they have a much-needed chat about the throuple situation emerging between themselves and Dina. “I’m not stupid and I’m not blind,” Jesse says. “Ellie, I see the way you two look at each other. It’s different now. Yeah, and I bet she even tells you things she wouldn’t tell me. Like how she’s pregnant.”
Here, Jesse hurls the truth bombs that Ellie has so desperately needed to hear this season—mainly, that everything is not about her. Jesse is about to be a father, too! But instead of truly hearing him out, and realizing that Dina’s unborn baby should take priority over her increasingly dangerous revenge mission, she continuously fights and resists him.
Later on, Jesse and Ellie take shelter at a library—and things really go sideways between them. He clarifies that he’s not pining after Dina anymore: “Yes, I love her. But not the way you do,” he says. Then, he shares that he fell madly in love with a girl from a group that traveled through Jackson; he wanted to go with them, but couldn’t bring himself to leave Jackson. Why? Because he was taught to put other people first. And this is what Ellie takes from Jesse’s open-hearted admission: “Got it. So, you’re Saint Jesse of Wyoming and everyone else is a fucking asshole.”
By the way, in our interview with Mazino, we asked him about this moment specifically: “Yeah, it’s nice to have that moment to explain a lot about Jesse,” he said. “It explains the aloofness, and he kind of uses that to make a point. I mean, staying with the community instead of running off to Mexico is such a Jesse thing to do, but he uses that moment to be like, ‘Ellie, do you see what it takes to do the right thing?’ Ultimately, it doesn’t work. He sees that she’s lost in the sauce and there’s no convincing her. But that’s the moment where he’s like, ‘I really hope you make it.'”
Well, Ellie is so lost in the sauce, in fact, that—when Jesse later admits that he voted against her revenge trip as part of the Jackson council—she splits with him and chases after Abby at the aquarium. It makes me fear the person Ellie is slowly becoming—selfish, bloodthirsty, and singularly focused to a fault. Sadly, it sounds a lot like Joel at his lowest moments.
Let’s give it up for Isabela Merced’s performance as Dina this season.
It’s going down at Costco
On a lighter note: It’s cracking me up that the W.L.F. base in this episode is located in an old Costco. Anyone who has ever visited a Costco on a weekend knows damn well that the place is a war zone, so kudos to showrunner Craig Mazin for the accuracy there.
We’re privy to a conversation between Isaac Dixon and Elise Park, where they debate the cost benefits of buying toilet paper in bul—er, Abby’s whereabouts. We learn that Abby and her crew essentially disappeared overnight, right before what we can only assume is a massive showdown between the W.L.F. and the Seraphites. In this chat, we learn a little bit about Abby’s importance to W.L.F.—Isaac not only values her as a solider, but as the potential heir to the whole damn operation.
“By the time the sun comes up tomorrow, there’s a very good chance you’ll be dead,” Isaac bluntly tells Elise. “There’s an even better chance I’ll be dead. So then, what happens to that entire fucking army out there, who despite their badass name, are very much sheep? Who leads them? Who secures our future? It was supposed to be her.”
“I let you live. And you wasted it.”
Meanwhile, Ellie is locked in some sort of twisted daze that is not unlike Joel when he stormed through the Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City. She steals a boat, fights her way through a biblical storm, and even a tattletale Seraphite kiddo who nearly gets her guts ripped out! Eventually, Ellie miraculously reaches the Seattle Aquarium, where Owen and Mel are bickering about something before she storms inside. Owen tries to negotiate with Ellie, reminding her, “I’m the one who kept you alive, right?” Ellie insists that they’ll die if they don’t reveal Abby’s whereabouts—and this is when Owen tries and fails to catch her by surprise with his gun.
What follows is just absolutely heartbreaking: Not so long after Ellie learns that she’ll become a parent herself, she kills a woman and her baby. The moment is brilliantly, achingly played by Barer and Bella Ramsey. “As her mind starts to go, she starts using medical language,” Barer told us of the moment when Mel tries to walk Ellie through a last-ditch effort to save her child’s life. “What we discussed was: First her vision goes, but she can hear, and in her mind she’s on the operating table with her doctor friends who she trusts. There’s a part of her that’s half there, half not, like her consciousness is slipping. She’s saying things like ‘Thank you’ and ‘You’re doing good.’ That is who Mel is—she’s someone who is going to care for the people around her and forgive people. She dies thinking that she saved her baby.”
It seems like we’ll see much more of Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac Dixon in season 3.
We hardly have a moment to process the scene, because Tommy finds Ellie, offers some solace (“They were part of it. They made their choices. That’s all there is to it.”), and whisks her back to the theater. Back at their home base, Ellie and Jesse briefly make up. “If I were out there somewhere you would’ve set the world on fire to save me,” Jesse says. Then, they hear a skirmish in the next room, run to investigate it, and Abby kills Jesse on sight.
Abby instantly recognizes Ellie with a knowing, “You.” Ellie begs for Abby to take her life and let Tommy and Dina go. “I let you live. And you wasted it,” Abby says, then fires her gun—and we’re hit with a Sopranos-esque cut to black.
Back to Seattle, Day one
The next thing we see is Abby waking up from a nap. Isaac wants to see her, apparently, so she walks through the hallways of the place we soon learn is a football stadium. She walks outside and looks at the field, which W.L.F. clearly converted into a farm, complete with greenhouses and agricultural trucks. A familiar title card returns: “SEATTLE DAY ONE.”
Obviously, we never learn exactly what’s going on with Abby after she kills Joel—or during this entire season, for that matter. We only know that Nora is dead, Owen and Mel were bickering in the aquarium before their deaths, Abby found them, then stormed the movie theater. Judging by season 2’s parting shot, season 3 is shaping up to be particularly Abby-centric. Looking back, Mazin clearly only showed us one half of the picture by design. I won’t dive too into the video game of it all, but The Last of Us Part II does something similar—the player follows Ellie up until Abby kills Jesse, then it rewinds to tell us Abby’s story up until that point. The goal? To show us that maybe Ellie and Abby aren’t too different after all.
It’s bold of Mazin remain so faithful to the source material that we may see an entire season from just Abby’s point of view. If it means that Kaitlyn Dever can finally flex her talents in this role—season 2 saw far too little of her performance—I’m all for it.
Until then, it’s been a pleasure watching this season with you all. Stay safe out there, fellow survivors.
This story originally appeared on Esquire US.
