As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a fan of The Last of Us Part II. Its take on revenge and the cycle of violence was one of the most one-note, morally pretentious, and condescending narratives I’ve ever seen. I get what the game was trying to do, but the execution felt like it came from some edgy, self-important Reddit troll holed up in a basement. The game was so obsessed with being relentlessly dark and miserable that it ended up fumbling its entire narrative. It constantly contradicted its own themes, condemning Ellie for her violence while pulling every emotional string to get us to sympathize with Abby for doing the exact same thing, vilifying Joel for his actions at the end of the first game without any real nuance, and so on. On top of that, the story was riddled with narrative shortcuts and lazy contrivances that broke any sense of internal logic. None of the characters felt like actual people but were just tools to move the plot forward, as the examples below show.
Major Spoilers Ahead.
One of the biggest missteps the second game made was condemning Joel for what he did at the end of the first game. Neil Druckmann (the creator) can say all he wants about a cure being possible, but I’m not buying it. I get that the ending was supposed to be this hypothetical “trolley problem,” but he completely failed to suspend my disbelief when it came to the Fireflies magically creating a cure from Ellie’s dead brain. What doctor in their right mind would kill the only immune person? No actual doctor would do that as they’d keep her alive and run every test imaginable. Joel did what any parent would do: he protected his child. He wasn’t about to just stand there and let his adopted daughter be killed for some half-baked hope. But instead of keeping that ambiguity, the second game stripped it away and used it as the foundation for its narrative, a narrative that was hellbent on vilifying Joel. The writing makes it obvious, too, because not a single character ever really reflects on what Joel did or why he did it.
In her entire year of being angry at Joel, Ellie never once tried to actually process what happened at the end of Part I, that Joel killed the Fireflies because they were about to murder her without her consent, all in the name of some long-shot cure. She never questioned the fact that a cure was never guaranteed to begin with. The doctors didn’t even bother to run basic tests. No bloodwork, no spinal tap, nothing a real doctor would even think to do first. And even if they had found a cure, what would it even do? Stop you from turning after being bitten? That still doesn’t stop you from getting ripped apart. Cure those already infected? Doubtful. And let’s be real, how would the Fireflies even mass-produce a vaccine, and would you actually trust them to distribute it fairly? Or would they just hoard it and use it as leverage to gain power? Yeah, we know the answer to that one. Ellie’s smart, which makes it all the more frustrating that, in an entire year of stewing in resentment, she never tried to understand Joel’s side or even ask him why he did what he did. Instead, the game uses her blind anger to justify condemning Joel, despite the fact that he did nothing wrong.
The same problem shows up with Abby. She spends five years obsessing over getting revenge on Joel, and in all that time, she never once stops to consider why he killed her father. She knew her dad was trying to make a cure and that all his previous attempts had failed. She also knew that, in pursuit of that so-called cure, they were planning to kill an innocent child. A child whose father wasn’t just going to sit back and let a bunch of underqualified scientists and armed terrorists murder his daughter for nothing. The fact that Abby never puts two and two together, never once realizes that her own father would’ve done the exact same thing in Joel’s position, is just ridiculous. If this had all taken place within six months, fine. Emotions would still be raw, and grief can cloud judgment. But five years? That’s not character-driven writing, that’s just a complete misunderstanding of how grief and time actually work..
And for a game that’s supposedly about the cycle of violence, you sure end up killing a lot of people. All throughout, you’re mowing down hundreds of NPCs, many of them not even infected, just to complete objectives. And no matter how many you kill or how brutal you get, there are zero consequences. The gameplay and the narrative don’t react to your actions at all. That disconnect between the game’s structure and its themes completely undermines what it’s trying to say. On one hand, it’s preaching that violence is wrong, but on the other, it’s shoving you into endless kill-or-be-killed scenarios. Games like the Red Dead Redemption series tackle similar themes, violence, morality, consequence, but with way more nuance and, more importantly, actual consequences for how you play. Choose to be honorable, and the world responds. Choose to be ruthless, and it changes accordingly. The Last of Us Part II, though? It just wants to have its cake and eat it too.
So with all that said and believe me, that barely scratches the surface of my issues with the game, I went into this second season not really knowing what to expect. Given how shaky the foundation of The Last of Us Part II already was, I was hoping the writers might at least take the opportunity to fix some of the narrative cracks. And to be fair, they did manage to patch up a few of the smaller issues. But what did they end up creating for this entire season? Somehow, it’s even worse. Say what you will about the game, it at least it had a vision. This adaptation has none. Just lazy, watered-down storytelling that feels completely afraid of its own source material.
The decision that will probably doom this show was the choice to stick with the same controversial narrative structure from The Last of Us Part II. If you didn’t already know, that structure was heavily criticized for its awful pacing and clunky storytelling. In the game, you play as Ellie for about 15 hours, covering three days in Seattle, collecting weapons, supplies, the whole grind. Then the story slams the brakes, rewinds the clock, and makes you replay those same three days from Abby’s perspective, starting from scratch. In TV terms, that means season two focuses on Ellie, while season three will shift to Abby. And unfortunately, that same broken pacing has carried over, only now it’s somehow worse.
The show rushes through Ellie’s entire arc in just seven episodes, which isn’t nearly enough time for a story like this to breathe. It’s one of the main reasons why Ellie feels so aimless and lacks any real urgency this season. Sure, splitting the story across two seasons might help with pacing on paper, but with a rumored two-year wait until we even see Abby’s side and with a good chunk of the audience already wanting Abby’s head on a spike, I’m not convinced people will stick around. A lot of viewers jumped ship when Joel died. Even more are going to walk when Abby becomes the lead.
Just like in the game, you really feel the narrative void left behind by Joel. The moment Abby brutally murders him, the story basically flatlines. It stops being character-driven and starts being theme-driven and not in a good way. Killing off the best character in the game/show will always come with risks, but here, it hits even harder. I don’t know if it’s bad writing, bad direction, or both, but Bella Ramsey just doesn’t hold the screen this season. They simply don’t have the presence Pedro Pascal had. As a co-lead, Bella was fine, passable, even. But now that they’re front and center, the cracks are impossible to ignore. Their performance feels hollow and totally carried by the rest of the ensemble.
Sure, a few years have passed between seasons, but Ellie feels like she’s regressed, emotionally and mentally. She’s immature, shortsighted, unprepared, and worst of all, childish. There’s none of the raw intensity or threat Ellie had in the game. Bella’s portrayal is mostly blank, stiff, and emotionally checked out, outside of a few over-the-top outbursts. This doesn’t feel like someone hellbent on a suicide mission to avenge the death of her father figure. It feels like a moody teenager on a romantic road trip straight out of a bad YA drama. And the writers’ desperate attempt to make Ellie more “likable” has completely backfired.
Furthermore, half the show wants to be a gritty, serious drama about surviving the apocalypse and the other half feels like a cheesy romcom. When The Last of Us leans into the serious drama, it’s actually pretty damn compelling. Watching the characters claw their way out of infected swarms, barely hanging on, that’s the show at its best. Any scene involving infected mobs or stalkers is firing on all cylinders from a filmmaking standpoint: tense, visceral, and well-crafted. But the moment the show shifts its focus back to the characters, it completely falls apart. Ellie and Dina’s relationship feels like it’s ripped straight out of a romcom, and neither of them feels grounded in the brutal world the show wants us to take seriously. This is supposed to be a story about the cycle of violence, about how revenge can hollow you out and lead to your own destruction and yet that entire theme is shockingly absent. I went in hoping the series would tackle that idea with more nuance than the game’s one-note, moralizing take, but instead, it feels like they just gave up on exploring it at all. Where’s the body count Ellie leaves behind on her way to Abby? In the game, she wipes out hundreds of people. In the show? Maybe five. The show feels terrified to engage with its own thematic core and that’s baffling. Because the theme wasn’t the problem in the game; it was the way it was executed. Instead of offering a more layered or introspective take, the series just waters it all down and hands us the same tired message: “Revenge is bad.” No depth. No exploration. Just a hollow echo of what it could have been.
All in all, season two of The Last of Us wasn’t just disappointing, it was a mess. I expected it to be divisive, sure, but I didn’t expect it to be bad. The writers clearly knew the game sparked controversy, which made me hopeful they’d refine the narrative and fix its flaws. Instead, what we got was a watered-down, half-committed adaptation that seems scared of its own story. Layer in the weak writing that fumbles basic storytelling, uneven performances, clunky pacing, and a complete lack of narrative cohesion, and what you’re left with is a deeply underwhelming season of television. A few scattered high points can’t salvage the whole thing. And with the next season supposedly two years away, centered on a character many viewers already resent, I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience checks out entirely.
My Rating: C-
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