The Last of Us Season 2 finale took a leaf from the House of the Dragon book of cliffhangers, ending on a brutal, mid-scene blackout coupled with a flashback that raises more questions than it does answers.
So what exactly happened at the end with Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey)? Who fired and who’s dead? And what’s with the final “Day One” subtitle? We’ve broken it all down below.
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What happens at the end of The Last of Us Season 2 finale?
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
After a tumultuous three-day journey across Seattle, Ellie finally tracks down Abby’s crew to a seaside aquarium where she kills Mel (Ariela Barer) and Owen (Spencer Lord). Here, she’s reunited with Tommy (Gabriel Luna), with Jesse (Young Mazino) in tow. Back at Ellie and Dina’s (Isabela Merced) makeshift cinema base, Ellie makes amends with Jesse before they’re interrupted by sounds of a struggle in the lobby.
The pair rush through and Jesse is immediately shot by Abby, who’s tracked them down somehow. It’s the first time Ellie has seen Abby since she murdered Joel (Pedro Pascal) in the mountain lodge near Jackson, months ago. Making it clear she knows her friends are dead, Abby stands over an injured Tommy with her gun drawn, threatening to “kill him too” unless Ellie drops her weapon and comes out of hiding.
“I let you live,” Abby says after she’s realised who Ellie is. “I let you live. And you wasted it.”
Abby raises her gun and the camera cuts to Ellie saying, “No, no, no!” before we hear a gunshot at the exact moment the screen cuts to black.
The episode doesn’t end there, though. In the final few minutes we travel back three days earlier to “Seattle: Day One”, following Abby as she’s summoned by Washington Liberation Front (WLF) member and former Firefly Manny (Danny Ramirez) to go and see WLF leader Isaac (Jeffrey Wright). Abby walks down a corridor and emerges on a balcony overlooking the inside of a bustling stadium settlement that is clearly the WLF base in Seattle.
Did Abby shoot Ellie?
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
This is the big question. We don’t have much evidence to go on, either, as the gunshot happens exactly as the scene ends. But if we zoom out and use some guesswork, it seems very unlikely that Ellie is going to die at this point. The show has already lost one huge character in Season 2 — it’s hardly likely to kill off its other lead so soon after, right?
If that’s the case, though, then what’s with the gunshot? Well, crucially, there is one character in the group that we don’t see in the final confrontation with Abby: Dina (Isabela Merced). We know she’s in the cinema and will have heard the struggle and the first gunshot — so if we had to guess, we’d say the final gunshot is more likely to be her coming to Ellie’s rescue and shooting at Abby. But we’ll have to wait for Season 3 to know for sure.
What might be another question for Season 3 is how the hell did Abby know a) her friends (including her partner) were dead, b) who killed them, and c) exactly where the person who killed her friends was going to be at that very moment?
Is Jesse dead?
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
From the look on Jesse’s face immediately after he’s shot, and the fact that he doesn’t get back up, we can assume that Jesse is probably dead at the end of Season 2 unless he was really lucky. Knowing he’s about to become a father, Jesse, the character who tried so hard not to die in the season finale, might have been killed in an instant.
What’s with the Abby flashback?
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
We’ve seen this technique before with the Joel flashback at the end of episode 5, which then led into the longer flashback in episode 6. It’s The Last of Us‘ way of signalling a time or perspective shift, and it likely means that Season 3 will start back in Seattle Day One with Abby, showing us what she was getting up to while Ellie and Dina were first arriving in the city.
There’s still a big question mark over what Abby and her crew were planning when Ellie threw a spanner in the works in the finale, so this flashback will likely answer that question.
What happened with the Washington Liberation Front and the Seraphites?
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
In the finale, we get glimpses of the WLF’s impending attack on their rivals, the Seraphites, but we don’t actually see it happen. Early in the episode, we see Isaac laying out the plans in his tent, and later on the Seraphite island, where Ellie unfortunately ends up, our protagonist is saved by the sound of alarms coming from what is described as the Seraphite village. What exactly is going on here?
New episodes of The Last of Us Season 2 premiere on HBO and HBO Max Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
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