HBO’s adaptation is running out of steam.

The Last of Us Season 2 ended on Sunday, March 25, 2025. Episode 7 bookended a divisive season that lost the reverence the first garnered with its true-to-the-game storytelling and deftly executed gut punches. The post-apocalyptic series is done for now, but it doesn’t feel like we actually watched a whole, propulsive season of television, a disappointing realization partly stemming from a baffling creative choice Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann made in Episode 2.

The scene was familiar to anyone who had cried and clenched their way through The Last of Us Part II: a cabin atop snowy peaks, surrogate dad Joel Miller blindsided, and a vengeful Abby Anderson, backed by less-vengeful-but-committed WLF tear-offs. Joel’s death was set up on the small screen with all the expected cues. There I was: gritted teeth and tissues prepared, but then Abby starts monologing about her father, telling all present characters and the audience exactly why she’s here — Joel murdered her dad. To rub salt in the wound, he was the surgeon who was meant to perform the life-ending operation on Ellie to formulate a potential cure using her infection immunity.

Up until this point, detours from Part II had been few and far between; Season 1 had practically been shot-for-shot faithful. Additionally, when the series had opted for something different previously, it hadn’t caused huge ripple effects. Well, folks…

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering… etc.

The critical driving factor in The Last of Us Part II is rage. After helplessly watching Abby crush Joel’s skull, our melancholy grief is only present for a moment. We’re allowed a short period of reflection and sorrow before Ellie and her very lovable love interest, Dina, strike out on their own to serve what they felt was justice. From there on, the peaceful greenery and quiet rumination sprinkled throughout the first game are replaced by a tunnel visioned bloodlust so feverish and justifiable that I barely stopped to breathe, let alone take in the surroundings. Like Ellie, I had just one obvious course of action: revenge.

There’s a sweaty, animalistic need to find Abby, and fast. But Part II was about cyclical violence and bias, so it made the commendable decision to disallow any humanisation of Abby early on; we didn’t know why she killed Joel, just that it had sealed her fate.

We’ve lost that in HBO’s version. Ellie knows about Joel’s actions from the get-go, but starts down this path without wrestling with them, perhaps as a coping mechanism, or because she always knew he was a murderer. Information that felt crucial in The Last of Us Part II is a blip here. Writers shoved it out of the way as fast as possible. The series will almost certainly be saving all the ethical conundrums for later discussion, likely in Season 3 after we’ve gotten better acquainted with Abby, but the creative swerve shot Season 2 in the foot. Put simply, Abby’s admission was clunky and ineffective.

We’ve lost the plot

Knowing Abby’s motivation allows the viewer an early opportunity to begin asking themselves what they would have done in her shoes, and gives us a head start at guessing where all of this is thematically headed. It doesn’t keep me on my toes; it telegraphs. The mystery surrounding Abby, whose apparent senseless violence in Part II was a good reason to pick up a controller to go beefcake hunting, could have fueled the show’s tension. Instead, Ellie comes across as more of a blunt instrument. It’s difficult to see the future benefits of the show’s choice when the present ones feel so lacklustre.

Matching The Last of Us Part II’s tension was always going to be difficult, so it seems the showrunners thought it better to just give up on that element. Or, more worryingly, they wanted to avoid the backlash the original story faced by giving more context to Abby earlier on before they do the expected perspective shift in Season 3.

It’s not until much later in Part II that, through traumatic flashbacks and present-time conversations, we learn Joel (we) gunned down Abby’s father. And before we have all the context, you’re forced to play as Abby — an experiment that led to death threats and digital rioting, because gamers are known for their easy-breezy temperament. But that was the point. You were supposed to be pissed off. Hating Abby made me relate to Ellie. I mourned Joel just as she did. And the original game spent hours conditioning me to kill any faceless obstacle in our way, so what was one more? There was no initial moral complexity to get over, just foot-to-the-floor anger.

That initial adrenaline burst and Ellie’s narrow perspective slowly but surely wear down, until you’ve been somewhat tricked into empathising with Abby. Suddenly, the line’s blurry, and Ellie’s plans are more morally complicated. There are highs and lows, but The Last of Us Part II’s storytelling is emotionally methodical. It presses the right buttons at the right time, playing on the human instinct to defend our own at all costs to draw you in. It relies on us seeing red early on, then wishing all the chaos would just stop by the time you reach the story’s end. Pacy, exhausting, evocative… things the show has managed only in short doses this season, even if the overall results are still good TV.

To be continued

When Season 3 premieres, many viewers will already have strong feelings about Abby. And there won’t be a big twist to drip feed them into constant reevaluation, which was a core part of my gaming experience. Plenty of folks hate-played The Last of Us Part II following Joel’s exit, and there likely would have been many TV fans who would have hate-watched Abby. She would have provided the perfect base, then, for the story to start building its thematic bricks upon. It feels like I’ve been robbed of the gradual enlightenment Part II so effectively used to throw a spanner in the works of my payback plan.

Right now, it’s difficult to understand what Mazin and Druckmann have in mind to replace this missing impetus, but whatever it is, it wasn’t enough to keep Season 2’s batteries fully-charged. All hope isn’t lost, though. Season 2 seems worse than it is simply because of how pitch-perfect its predecessor was. In isolation, The Last of Us is still better than most of what streaming algorithms are feeding me these days. However, comparison is the thief of joy, with The Last of Us Part II and the acclaimed first season making it hard to view things objectively. Ultimately, this creative change likely would never have happened if writers didn’t have plans for what they hoped to achieve by making it. I just hope those plans take us out of third gear for Season 3.