Some of TV’s most iconic shows ever ended seasons with great, memorable cliffhangers. That includes series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Dallas, Friends, The Simpsons, Game of Thrones, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Severance. But you know what great show doesn’t belong on that list? HBO’s The Last of Us, which ended an otherwise great season with a wholly unsatisfying, wholly frustrating finale. And it did so for an unlikely reason: it stayed true to The Last of Us Part II video game.
HBO
The Last of Us spent its second season building towards a showdown between Abby and Ellie. That was the entire arc of the main character’s story. Then, when we finally got to that shocking moment, the series decided to stop rather than offer any resolution. It left us hanging on the fates of both Tommy and Ellie. That’s inherently frustrating but not inherently bad. All good cliffhangers leave viewers desperately wanting to know what happens next. Only, the very best still offer a type of resolution to their story. As an example, Ross accidentally saying Rachel’s name at the altar revealed he was not really over her, the major question of that season.
The fun and excitement of a great cliffhanger is not that it ends in the middle of a conflict. It’s that it creates a whole new one. “Now that we finally know this, what’s next?” Now that Mr. Burns actually pulled off his horrible plan, who did something about it? Now that the Borg turned Picard into one of them, what will happen to him? The Last of Us did not give us that kind of cliffhanger. It just stopped in the middle of the scene that was supposed (and eventually will) resolve the season’s main story. “Abby points a gun at Ellie” isn’t an ending.
And yet, that’s only partially why the series season two finale is such a disappointing non-conclusion. Before the credits rolled, the series went back to “Day One” in Seattle. That’s when Ellie and Dina arrived in the city. This time we saw Abby overlooking the W.L.F. forces at an abandoned football stadium. Clearly season three is going to show us why she seemingly defected from the militia right before its big invasion of the Seraphites. So not only did the show not give us any kind of resolution, it also told us we won’t even get one when the show returns. Instead we’re going backwards to follow someone who isn’t the main character. The Last of Us is going to instead completely upend its point-of-view to make Abby the center of the show, at least initially.
Naughty Dog
All of this comes straight from the The Last of Us Part II, which also leaves players hanging in the middle of the encounter between Ellie and Abby. In the game, Abby shows up at the theater, attacks Tommy, kills Jesse, and pulls a gun on Ellie. Then, instead of showing what Abby does, the game forces players to go back and play as her. (Which they briefly do at the start of the game before she kills Joel.) This is when they finally learn why she went to Jackson. This sequence is how we find out who Abby is, her relationship with her friends, and why she not only matters but is no more of a villain than Joel or Ellie.
On HBO’s series, that was the first thing we learned about her. That change was made for very good, logical reasons laid out by the series’ showrunners. The butterfly effect of that change has proven to be….less good. When the game goes backwards in that big moment, you know Abby has a connection to the Fireflies Joel murdered in Salt Lake City, but you don’t know her dad was the doctor who was going to (possibly) save mankind.
HBO
Why a mysterious, skilled young woman spent years looking for vengeance against a main character, a person players and viewers both loved, is an infinitely more interesting question than why she quit W.L.F.. Yet HBO is hoping we really care about the answer to that in season three. But does anyone really care that much about W.L.F. and the Scars? They’re interesting, but they’re also just two factions in one city. This kind of turf war is going on everywhere, and the outcome of them all is meaningless. It didn’t matter to the world at large in Kansas City or Boston and it doesn’t matter in Seattle.
Those places only mattered because we cared about Ellie and Joel. For us to care about why Abby left W.L.F. we need to care about her as much as those two. And if we ever hope to care about Abby, we have to spend time with her… which means waiting longer to find out what happened in that theater, the thing we will always care more about than anything else Abby does.
HBO
That’s where HBO’s The Last of Us really screwed up its season two finale by staying true to the video game. In The Last of Us Part II, you leave that theater and go back in time to play as Abby all the same. But you do that for ten hours. It’s ten hours of playing a great game before you return to the present and get a resolution.
HBO’s The Last of Us isn’t even going to start filming season three until 2026. There’s almost no way it debuts before 2027. In case you forgot, it’s 2025. Even if it started filming right now, this isn’t 1995. The show won’t be back after a brief summer hiatus. We have to wait at least two and very possibly three years for the show to come back. When it does, we’ll first watch a totally different story with a totally different main character just to get back to this cliffhanger.
HBO
Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Not just for people willing to wait, but for those who won’t. Some frustrated viewers will simply spoil the scene for themselves. Because unlike gamers who had to get back to this cliffhanger by playing a fun game (for, again, just ten hours), answers are already out there for fans of the show. Knowing they can just look up an answer in ten seconds rather than wait for literal years will be a lot less frustrating.
So many adaptations go wrong when they distance themselves from source material that was so great it was worthy of being adaptated in the first place. But TV—especially modern prestige TV with its interminable gaps between seasons—is not a video game. It’s a totally different medium with a totally different timeline offering a totally different experience. So while The Last of Us stayed faithful to its source material during most of season two, this cliffhanger was one the show shouldn’t have played around with.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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