The Last of Us Season 2 finale is a frustrating letdown. Heres why.

There’s no sense beating around the bush: The Last of Us‘ Season 2 finale is a major disappointment.

After seven episodes of game-changing deaths, heartbreaking flashbacks, and the occasional half-hearted gesture to the conflict between the Washington Liberation Front and Seraphites, Season 2 wraps up with a baffling cliffhanger that’s meant to stoke excitement for Season 3. But in reality, it’s a misunderstanding of how best to translate The Last of Us Part II to TV.

The Last of Us Season 2’s Abby cliffhanger won’t work with years between seasons.

Kaitlyn Dever in “The Last of Us.”
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO

Season 2 ends with Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) crashing the theater where Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) have been hiding out since arriving in Seattle. There, she kills Jesse (Young Mazino) and wounds Tommy (Gabriel Luna), then turns her gun on Ellie. As she fires, The Last of Us cuts to black and rewinds the clock. When next we see Abby, it’s days earlier. More specifically, it’s “Seattle Day One,” when Ellie and Dina arrive in the city. That means Season 3 will cover those three days from Abby’s point of view, showing us what she’s been up to since she disappeared from the show after murdering Joel (Pedro Pascal) all the way back in episode 2.

That sequence of events, including the perspective shift, plays out pretty similarly between the TV show and the video game. (Although Abby’s sections opens with a flashback to her time with her father in the Fireflies, which the show has already explored in Season 2’s first two episodes.) There’s one key difference between mediums, though. In the game, the switch happens right away, immediately forcing you into Abby’s shoes and encouraging you to empathize with her as you play along. In the show, the switch is teased as something to look forward to. But given how long TV takes to make now — we waited over two years between Seasons 1 and 2 of The Last of Us — it’s likely we won’t be seeing Abby’s storyline for another two years.

That long time between seasons means The Last of Us is asking a lot of its audience, including the fact that we’re meant to wait all this time to pick up with a character whose biggest role in the story so far has been killing one of the show’s beloved leads. The perspective change in the game challenges players’ sense of allegiance, and no doubt that’s what the show aims to accomplish as well. But part of the effectiveness of that turnaround comes down to how it happens instantly. Players keep going because they immediately get that choice (and because they want to find out what happens to Ellie in the theater). With a likely two-year wait between seasons, who’s to say audience members won’t tap out entirely? The show is stifling its own momentum, even as it hopes to build it.

The Last of Us Season 2 should have also covered Abby’s storyline.

Kaitlyn Dever in “The Last of Us.”
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO

Well before Season 2 aired, showrunner Craig Mazin announced that it would only cover half of the events of The Last of Us Part II. That announcement basically told people who are familiar with the game exactly where the season would end. However, just because the cliffhanger isn’t a surprise doesn’t mean it works in the context of the show — especially following some of the adaptation choices The Last of Us Season 2 has made throughout.

Season 2 kicked off by revealing one of the game’s biggest questions right off the bat: Who is Abby, and why did she kill Joel? In the game, we learn her reasoning after the change in point of view, and the revelation is an immediate step in our journey to empathize with her. In the show, the early knowledge humanizes Abby right off the bat, but the series does nothing else to build on that. After spending so much time with Abby in episode 1 and especially 2, her absence in the rest of the season feels less like an intriguing mystery and more like the show stalling for time until we get to Season 3.

Adding to that feeling are Season 2’s peeks inside the inner workings of the WLF, like Isaac’s (Jeffrey Wright) torture of a Seraphite, or the finale’s hints at the WLF invasion of the Seraphite island. These are all puzzle pieces that will surely come together in Season 3, but for now, none of these scenes connect because we don’t have an emotional anchor in this world yet. As an outsider, Ellie can’t be that anchor. It has to be Abby, and she’s missing. Plus, if the show really wanted to keep us rooted in Ellie’s perspective, why even include Isaac in this season in the first place? As great as Wright is, his scenes feel disjointed here, with no payoff beyond the show saying, “Trust us, we can land this plane.”

The thing is, I do mostly trust The Last of Us to stick the landing on future seasons, but the fact that that later, hypothetical conclusion comes at the cost of current seasons is troubling. Now, the obvious fix would be to have one long season covering The Last of Us Part II. Think about how much this cliffhanger would have rocked as a mid-season finale with a wait of a few weeks between episodes, as opposed to a wait of a few years. But instead, The Last of Us falls prey to larger problems within the TV landscape, like a fear of long seasons and a tendency to push key narrative beats down the road in favor of overstretching the source material.

The Last of Us Season 2 finale is the House of the Dragon Season 2 finale all over again.

Bella Ramsey in “The Last of Us.”
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO

The last time I felt so frustrated about a season finale was House of the Dragon‘s Season 2 finale — yet another example of an HBO tentpole show that desperately needed more episodes in order tell a complete season-long arc.

Like The Last of Us, House of the Dragon Season 2 ended on a cliffhanger that screamed, “Cool resolutions are coming next season, we promise!” (Shout out to the Battle of the Gullet.) But why not take more time, and more episodes, to flesh these resolutions out in the seasons where they’d make the most sense, instead of sending them down the road? The simplest answer is that more seasons means more money, at the cost of the quality of the show itself.

This mentality of hoarding material for later seasons also comes with the side effect of shorter seasons. It’s ludicrous that The Last of Us, one of the biggest shows on TV right now, is running a seven-episode-long season. That’s barely enough time to dig into the meat of Ellie’s arc in The Last of Us Part II. By the end of the season, it feels like she’s only just arrived in Seattle, and yet we’ve gotten so little from it! In fact, it’s telling that the most impactful episode following Ellie’s exit from Jackson centers not on her time in Seattle, but on her past with Joel. That entire flashback episode is full of key moments that get ample time to breathe, like Ellie and Joel’s museum visit, or their final discussion on Joel’s porch.

By contrast, Ellie’s present-day quest for vengeance has been compressed into an oddly paced, unsatisfying journey. The letdown of the Season 2 finale is the cherry on top of an underwhelming season that could have been so much more if it had just had more room to fully explore its story. If The Last of Us is going to learn from its mistakes in Season 3, it’ll have to stop playing for time. But with showrunner Craig Mazin telling Collider the series will need a fourth season to complete its narrative, I’m not holding my breath.

The Last of Us Season 2 is now streaming on HBO Max.