Though one brief sequence was new, the second season finale of HBO’s “The Last of Us” maintained its fidelity to the game, and in doing so teased the massive change to the status quo coming with the upcoming third season.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “THE LAST OF US” 2×07 “CONVERGENCE”
The second season appears to end where many players of “The Last of Us Part II” game expected it to – with the confrontation in the cinema between Abby and Ellie, complete with the sharp cut to black and gunshot noise.
Speaking with Polygon, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann said this always felt like the natural end-point for the season. Other things were considered, but nothing stuck.
However that’s not exactly the end as the lingering black fades into Abby waking up in a stadium converted into the WLF’s home base, while a title card that reads ‘Seattle: Day One’.
The scene signals next season’s shift of narrative focus to reflect the back half of the game. If Joel was the audience’s point-of-view of the first season and Ellie the second, Abby will be the third, with a good chunk of next season recounting those three days from her perspective.
According to THR, the show’s creators have declined to explicitly confirm this during interviews, but Mazin pretty much does as he explains that the team is happy to shake up the rules on how a narrative can unfold on television in the way the game shook up narrative rules in gaming:
“I don’t think television is supposed to work like this. We’re clearly breaking quite a few rules, and I love that. And I love it because that is the point. This is not something we’re doing as a gimmick.
The point of this story – and this is looked at from so many different angles in so many different ways – is that the entire concept of protagonist is flawed. The entire concept of villain is flawed. Our way of processing the world through heroes and villains is a mistake.
It ends up creating these barriers between people that shouldn’t be there. It ends up giving ourselves justifications and conveniences for bad behavior, and it ends up allowing us to judge others summarily for things that we don’t quite understand the motivation behind it.
We know this is a challenging thing to keep track of emotionally. We understand people are going to be provoked. But part of this story is about examining why we’re so comfortable with following one person’s point of view about everything.”
More than any other episode this season the finale had many elements only teased or briefly touched upon which will come much more into play next season. From Tommy’s sniper attack on the marina, to the WLF’s village raid.
The aquarium will be a much more crucial location (all those bloody bandages mean something), background scenery such as the flooded streets and the collapsed construction crane come into play, as will stuff teased in earlier episodes (hello Level B3).
Mazin tells the outlet that next season will “have a lot more flexibility [to tell side stories]”. One of the most obvious choices would be a lengthy flashback centered around Tommy (Gabriel Luna):
“Maybe a side trip to do Joel and Tommy terrorizing the countryside, we’ll never know. I wouldn’t have guessed we’d have a short story about Joel’s dad before we wrote the season. [Tommy’s] been in war, and we also know that for some time, he and Joel were doing some pretty bad things. So there is the potential of seeing this other side of Tommy, and that is now about him delivering on his understood promise to his brother.”
Mazin adds that even with the perspective shift, “we haven’t even seen the last of a lot of people who are currently dead in the story”. Either way it’s expected several stars who hogged the limelight this year, like Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced, will get reduced roles in the next run – at least up until the narrative catches up again with the night of ‘Seattle: Day 3’.
Merced recently indicated to Variety that at least some of the third season’s filming will take place next year, but she may only be referring to her scenes, not the whole production.
The two-year gap between the first and second seasons was exacerbated by the writer’s strike—that’s not expected to be an issue this time around. On the flipside, the third season is expected to have more episodes and larger set pieces than this year. Thus, don’t expect a premiere until late 2026 or early 2027.
