The Last of Us Season 2 Review: A Brutal Swing

The Last of Us’ Powerful Second Season Makes Loss Feel Like the End of the World

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There’s a moment early in the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us that cuts to the heart of the series, a brilliant burst of acting that tells us a lot with a little. As Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, is asked why he and his adoptive daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are now barely speaking several years after their cross-country trek to find the Fireflies, Joel looks at us through teary eyes, his lip quivering. “Did you hurt her?” the other person asks, referring to Ellie. Joel shakes his head, and just as it seems he’s about to break and repent for what he did at the end of the previous season, his face suddenly tightens, a steely, unbreakable expression overtaking any shred of doubt. “I saved her.”

It’s intimate scenes like this, where close-cropped camera work combines with affecting performances, that draw us into the sprawling tragedies of The Last of Us’ second season. Because after making us care, it knows how to hit where it hurts, delivering a stretch of television that’s somehow more distressing than the previous run’s cannibals, child murders, fungal zombies, and just about every other terrible thing you could imagine. While comparatively, this adaptation isn’t quite as overwhelmingly grisly as its videogame source material, this works in its favor, as showrunners Craig Mazinn and Neil Druckmann use a scalpel instead of a hammer to get across ruminations on the cost of violent revenge. The result is seven episodes that exploit our love of these characters, leveraging these affections to make us understand why they would go so far to avenge those they’ve lost. Despite a few lingering issues, or perhaps because of them, it’s bound to be a cultural lightning rod.

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This season begins with a reminder of where we left off: Joel just shot his way through Firefly HQ in Salt Lake City, saving his adoptive daughter Ellie at the cost of arguably dooming humanity. Ellie’s immunity to the cordyceps fungal infection made her essential to developing a cure, but the catch was that crafting this vaccine would have killed her in the process. Unable to accept this, Joel murdered everyone involved and then lied to Ellie about it.

After getting this brief reminder, we jump four years into the future. Ellie and Joel have gone back to Jackson, Wyoming, a quaint commune where Joel’s brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) have welcomed them. Here, Ellie has met others her age, like her carefree best friend Dina (Isabela Merced), who she not so secretly has feelings for, and Jesse (Young Mazino), a selfless future leader of the community who helps Ellie train (and used to be dating Dina for extra layers of mess). However, despite living in this idyllic community, Ellie and Joel’s relationship has deteriorated. While they’re both initially cagey about why, it’s easy to suspect that what happened in Salt Lake City may be the cause. Before long though, these internal tensions are dwarfed by external ones, as an attack on Jackson sends these characters down a path toward revenge. Their quest to find those responsible brings them to Seattle, where a paramilitary called the WLF and a religious group known as the Seraphites are engaged in a grisly war.

And while there are plenty of near-death scrambles on this journey, much like the previous season, the relationship between Joel and Ellie is still the bedrock of the series. Pedro Pascal brings warmth and humanity to Joel, deviating slightly from the original character’s gruffness while still maintaining a ruthless instinct regarding those he cares about. As previously alluded to, Pascal is nothing short of sensational, and even if he has a smaller role this time around, he makes the most of his screen time to bring depth to this character. For example, there’s a particular conversation where Pascal’s performance and Mazin, Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Bo Shim’s script led to a line about familial love that landed so hard it caused me to reconsider my stance on the endless debate over if what Joel did at the end of the last season was “right.” Flashbacks (that weren’t in the game) recontextualize his actions and make certain turns that much more devastating.

As for Ellie, Bella Ramsey taps into what defined their character before—sarcasm, impulsiveness, protectiveness towards friends, and a touch of something more concerning—while also channeling an undeniable Joel-ness, as many of his violent tendencies are passed on. The character’s all-consuming drive for revenge becomes more compelling and disturbing as she barrels forward, clearly haunted by her own actions but unable to stop herself as vast grief is suppressed with anger. At times, Ellie seems to question her brutal actions before a darkness comes over her face, capturing how, like Joel, she can’t let love go, even if it destroys everything and everyone else in the process. Overall, it’s a much richer take on the character than the source material’s ultra-murderous rendition, digging into the emotions behind these actions while providing more meaningful conversations than shootouts.

Thankfully, Ellie’s grim path is also lightened somewhat by her travel partner Dina, played charismatically by Isabela Merced, who finds excellent screen chemistry with her counterpart. While Joel and Ellie’s bond remains essential, Ellie and Dina’s is just as important to this season, and their burgeoning relationship is a welcome respite from all of the fungal zombies and unhinged paramilitaries that come their way. In one scene, the camera gently frames the pair under string lights in a moment of intimacy and longing. In another, Dina watches Ellie play the guitar with a mixture of aching love and admiration as Merced makes us feel the full brunt of her character’s feelings. We eventually get insight into Dina’s complicated relationship with her own sexuality in a frank and touching conversation that sets up a moving relationship between the two. And while Ellie and Dina’s journey to Seattle may not be as snappy or suited towards episodic storytelling as Ellie and Joel’s cross-country road trip, the pacing doesn’t sag because it justifies almost every scene.

Another element that helps move things along is the tense set pieces involving everyone’s favorite cordyceps-infested corpses. At one point, there’s a mesmerizing siege sequence that undoubtedly ate up a large chunk of HBO’s budget, while at other times, the stakes are much more claustrophobic as characters squirm through tight spaces with monsters nipping at their heels. If things weren’t frightening enough before, the infected continue to evolve in unsettling ways, providing fresh scares while further underlining how deeply stupid it is for these people to endlessly fight each other while their common enemy grows stronger.

But while its character drama is riveting, the performances are excellent, the set design and costuming are great, the fight scenes are tense, and the twists are sharp, this latest season still isn’t flawless. For starters, there’s the casting of Kaitlyn Dever as Abby, the nominal villain of this arc. It’s not that her portrayal is lacking—she captures the pangs of grief and hatred that drive the character. It’s really just a “Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher” situation where Dever can’t embody the intimidating physicality of her in-game counterpart, who is positively jacked. I imagine this will only bother those who played the source material, but it’s still worth mentioning.

A greater issue, one shared by the previous season, is the show’s simplistic political allegories: how virtually every society we meet outside of Jackson is either authoritarian, revolutionaries who then become authoritarians after beating the old authoritarians, unhinged cults, or cannibals. While the characters are treated with a great degree of nuance and care on a micro level, the larger social structures that make up this world are stooped in a drab and cynical worldview that cooperation is doomed to fail due to inherent human cruelty or something, which at best comes off like a contrived reason for this world to remain miserable and at worst reveals an underlying aimless and rudimentary nihilism.

Similarly, a sense of doomed cyclical violence is at the forefront of the conflict between the two Seattle factions, the Wolves and the Seraphites. While there are attempts at introducing nuance to both sides which I’m sure will be praised by some for bringing complexity to these circumstances, like the game, the depiction squares awkwardly with the real-world events it’s arguably drawing from, as explored in an excellent essay by former Vice Editor Emanuel Maiberg (spoiler warning for those who haven’t played the game, this article dives into events that haven’t been adapted yet).

Essentially, what it boils down to is while there is a great deal of care and multiplicity afforded to our central characters and why they’re willing to do what they do, that same humanizing tendency disappears whenever we leave our core group—Joel’s “protect your own” ethos is almost constantly justified by the world around him in a way that feels repetitive. While these elements are more peripheral this season, they’ll become even more pronounced when the next run of episodes adapts the rest of The Last of Us Part II.

But even if this series’ depiction of these larger groups remains flat, its central characters are so well-portrayed that it largely compensates for these shortcomings. In fact, the contrast between a cruel and indifferent outside world and the close bonds these people share makes their eventual fates that much more brutal, as a rare good thing is spoiled. The resulting grief and rage feel that much more understandable as these people drown in their worst impulses, haunted by horrific goodbyes. There is a rawness to it all that’s tough to stomach but even harder to look away from.

Even as someone with mixed feelings about the game it’s based on, The Last of Us’ second season combines bludgeoning violence with precise emotional stabs as emotive acting, thoughtful dialogue, and deft camera work come together to convey every subtle shift in these characters—basically, it does a much better job than the game of putting us in these people’s headspaces. It’s not for the faint of heart, but this punishing journey is worth embarking on.

The Last of Us Season 2 premieres Sunday, April 13 on HBO and Max.

Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.

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The Last of Us’ Powerful Second Season Makes Loss Feel Like the End of the World