An Action-Packed But Badly Rushed Finale

Season 2 of HBO’s The Last Of Us ended with a bang tonight. In fact, it ended exactly where I thought it would end, mirroring a crucial turning point in the video game upon which the series is based. Spoilers ahead.

That moment is, of course, when Abby shows up at the theater and shoots Jesse before turning her gun on Ellie and firing – with a nice little cut-to-black to leave viewers on the edge of their seat. It’s a great cliffhanger, but the show is so impatient, so utterly unwilling to let viewers sit with a black screen, that it drops a big spoiler for Season 3 right after.

Instead of just ending on that horrific moment, the show then cuts to Abby several days earlier. We see her going about her business and then get a wide shot of the sprawling WLF facility and the words Seattle Day 1 appear. The show’s creators are spelling it out for us. We’re about to start Abby’s story. This is where Season 3 is headed. For people like me who have already played the game, this is no surprise. For viewers new to this story, now they know what to expect.

This is in keeping with many of the other odd choices this season, like spelling out Abby’s motivation during Joel’s murder scene, or moving the porch scene – the final scene from the game – up to last week’s flashback episode. Showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin clearly do not trust audiences to be patient or to work things out on their own. The season has traded both subtlety and ambiguity for clear explanations spelled out and spoon-fed. It’s a real shame. The story is much weaker for it. Of course, a little teaser for next season isn’t the end of the world, but how much more powerful would the end of this episode and this season be if we actually cut to black without wavering?

Other observations:

• I’m having a hard time with the Isaac scene. It’s another example of the show telling us stuff instead of showing us stuff. Isaac tells his second-in-command that Abby is supposed to take over and lead if they fall in the upcoming battle with the Scars. She seems annoyed by this. I’m annoyed that the writers think we need to be told that Abby is this important to Isaac, instead of saving that revelation for Season 3 when we’re obviously getting Abby’s story anyways. A scene with Isaac asking where Abby is would have been just fine, showing how she’s gone AWOL on the eve of this big assault. But adding in the “she’s meant to lead” stuff is so on-the-nose. Enough with the exposition!
• I like that Ellie got swept off to Scar Island. If I recall correctly, this was originally supposed to be in the game but was cut. It’s been awhile, so correct me if I’m wrong there. What I don’t like about this scene is that she’s captured and they’re just about to hang and disembowel her (how exactly do Scars convert people if they just hang and disembowel anyone they come across instantly?) when some alarms go off and they realize their village is under attack. They let Ellie go and run off. It’s just like when Jesse showed up to save Ellie and Dina. These “just in the nick of time” moments are so cheap and lazy. Just have Ellie observe and not get caught, or have her do something clever to get away. Saved by the bell only works as a teen sitcom from the 90s.
• The scene with Owen and Mel was pretty good. I have to comment on the differences from the game. Apologies to readers who always get mad when I do this, but it’s really interesting to see what they changed. In the game, before Ellie gets to the pair, she is attacked by Abby’s dog. She ends up stabbing it to death. It’s pretty gruesome and they left it out entirely here. I don’t think that’s a smart choice, because by this point we’re supposed to see Ellie as this unstoppable raging force of nature, cutting through anything in her path. The “cutting” part is also important. Ellie stabs a lot of people in the game. When she confronts Owen and Mel, Owen goes for her gun and she shoots him, but when Mel grapples with her, she ends up stabbing her directly in the throat. It’s a vicious kill – not a stray bullet nicking an artery. I did, however, like that Mel had some lines in the show before she died, pleading with Ellie to cut her baby out before she died. That was heavy.

Something is still off for me, however. It’s really a mixture of tone and pacing. Ellie has been so light and breezy for so much of this season, even after Joel’s death, that when she gets to moments like this it’s hard to buy her as a vengeful angel of death. Even here, telling Owen and Mel to point at the map like Joel did last season, she feels more nervous than resolute. Both versions of Ellie promised not to kill the pair if they told her where Abby was, but the TV version only accidentally kills Mel, who doesn’t even move or attack at all. Time and again, TV Ellie feels weirdly neutered by the writing, her motivations and characterization oddly muddled and inconsistent.

Beyond this, I thought the episode mostly worked. The conversations between Ellie and Jesse were well done, especially since they mend bridges only moments before he’s shot to death quite shockingly by Abby. Abby’s disbelief was really palpable also. “I let you live!” she says, unbelievingly. You stupid little girl, I let you live and now look at what you’ve gone and made me do. I guess when you get into the revenge business, be sure to read the fine print. Both Ellie and Abby’s choices are costing them a lot more than they realized. Owen, Mel and Nora are dead. Jesse is dead. We don’t know the fates of Tommy, Dina or Ellie heading into Season 3. And since this is going to be four seasons now, we really don’t know when we’ll learn what happened, especially since Season 3 will be jumping back in time a few days to show Abby’s timeline (and likely some flashbacks with her before all this as well).

A pretty mixed season overall, with some genuinely great moments including the riveting battle for Jackson, the museum scene, Ellie’s guitar playing, the infected in the subway and so forth. But very puzzling storytelling choices as well that diminish many of these characters, making Joel and Ellie feel less realized as people and less nuanced as characters, giving Dina and Ellie such a weird cheery vibe (when Dina isn’t mothering Ellie) and so forth. The sense of urgency was really missing all season, and Ellie just isn’t convincing me that revenge is all that important to her, except for when she remembers she’s looking for Abby from time to time and goes off impulsively. The game certainly wasn’t without some big, glaring problems but the show hasn’t made any of those better. In a lot of ways, it’s just removed the best parts of the story in its unwillingness to trust viewers’ intelligence.

Scattered Thoughts

• The boat scene was pretty silly. First of all, we have no indication that Ellie has ever even been in a boat, let alone driven one herself. But even if we just assume she’s had some time out on the lake in Wyoming, that storm would sink an experienced sailor. Yet somehow she makes it to Scar island, manages to escape, and then finds the perfectly intact boat no problem. It’s a dramatic action sequence but it’s not terribly plausible.
• A key moment from the game was left out of the Owen/Mel scene. The map that Ellie uses in the game was her map. It had the theater marked. When she leaves the scene of slaughter, she accidentally leaves the map behind. This plays a part in what comes later. In the show version, it’s their map rather than Ellie’s. I’m not sure if they’re intentionally changing that or if this was a slip-up.
• They really rushed the build-up to that scene, by the way. The aquarium is a major set-piece in the game. One of its most memorable locations. I wish we’d gotten to spend more time there. All of Seattle feels rushed and disconnected. There is really no sense of tension building up or dread or any of the stuff that made these sequences work in the game.
• It occurs to me that an entire episode could have been devoted to Ellie’s capture at the hands of the Seraphites. Think back to Season 1 when Ellie is captured by the cannibals. If that season had taken the approach this season has taken to storytelling, she would have been captured for all of two minutes before some gunfire in the distance drew her captors away, leaving her to run free. Instead, we got an entire self-contained story of wickedness and desperate escape. This season just doesn’t let us spend any time with any of its most interesting moments, rendering them cheap and ineffective in the process. Why even have the Scars capture Ellie at this point? Just get her to the aquarium and let that scene play out more deliberately.

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