Series Review – The Last of Us Season 2
Creators: Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann
Starring: Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced
Year: 2025
Okay. Deep breath. Let’s talk about this.
Season 1 of The Last of Us was remarkable. The best video game adaptation ever made. A near-perfect translation of an already great game into an even better television show. Episode three — “Long Long Time” with Nick Offerman — might be the best individual episode of television in the last decade.
Season 2 covers the story of Part II. If you’ve played the game you know what that means. If you haven’t. Well. Buckle up.
I’m going to try to discuss this without major spoilers but the nature of this story makes that hard. What I can say is that Season 2 is bleaker. Angrier. More morally complicated. Season 1 was about love found in hopeless places. Season 2 is about what happens after. About the cost of survival. About violence and its consequences.
Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey continue to be perfect. Their dynamic has shifted — Ellie is older, more capable, their relationship more fraught. There are scenes between them this season that hurt in ways I wasn’t prepared for even knowing the game’s story.
Kaitlyn Dever joins as Abby. This is the controversial casting for gamers who have. Strong feelings about Abby. But Dever is incredible. She makes Abby human in a way that even the game sometimes struggled with. By the end of the season you understand her completely even if you can’t forgive her.
Here’s my honest take: the game’s story works better as a game. The interactivity matters. When YOU control Ellie doing terrible things it hits differently than watching her do them. The complicity of the player is part of the point.
The show compensates by giving us more time with characters. More context. More quiet moments between violence. Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann found ways to expand scenes that were rushed in the game. There’s a sequence in episode four that wasn’t in the game at all and it’s one of the season’s highlights.
But. There’s a but.
The pacing is weird. They’re splitting Part II into multiple seasons which means this season doesn’t really have an ending. It stops rather than concludes. That’s frustrating narratively even if I understand why they did it.
And I wonder if general audiences — people who haven’t played the game — will stick with something this dark. The violence this season is. A lot. Meaningful violence but still. You feel every death in a way that’s genuinely disturbing.
The game was better. There. I said it. The Last of Us Part II is a masterpiece and the show, while excellent, is a very good adaptation of a masterpiece rather than a masterpiece in its own right.
But very good adaptations of masterpieces are rare. And this is one of them.
My rating: ★★★★☆
