The Last Of Us Season 2 Review – The worst show of the year?

The Review Geek

26-05-2025

Season 1 Season 2
Episode Guide
Episode 1 -| Review Score – 3/5
Episode 2 -| Review Score – 3/5
Episode 3 -| Review Score – 3/5
Episode 4 -| Review Score – 2.5/5
Episode 5 -| Review Score – 2/5
Episode 6 -| Review Score – 3.5/5
Episode 7 -| Review Score – 2/5
The Last Of Us 2 is one of the most divisive and hotly contested games of all time. When it dropped back in 2020, critics loved it. It was touted as one of the greatest games of all time, with many outlets giving it top marks and praising every aspect of the title. There were some outliers (ourselves included here!) that didn't share that same sentiment, and the user reaction tells a very different story.
To this day, the game remains a hotbed of discussion, torn into factions between those who love and those who loathe the title – and it's easy to see why. It's hard not to discuss spoilers when talking about The Last of Us part 2 so for that reason, this review will include spoilers, most notably about one character's death in episode 2, and the general plot direction of The Last Of Us Part 2 videogame. You have been warned!
The biggest talking point of The Last of Us 2 comes from Joel's death. Our titular character from the first game, who made a tough choice to save Ellie from the Fireflies, is unceremoniously killed off within the first hours of the game. It's a brutal, savage affair, with an angry, vengeance-fuelled woman called Abby destroying this beloved character with a golf club. The same woman who we spend a good 10-12 hours playing as in the game.
The other half sees you playing as Ellie, hunting down Abby's group and looking to exact revenge no matter the cost. The game flits back and forth between Ellie and Abby, and [laying as Joel's killer is not a particularly pleasant experience. The game uses every psychological trick in the book to railroad you into feeling empathy toward her and growing disdain for Ellie.
Abby has the better combat options, more explosive guns and she can destroy Infected with her own bare hands. It's just generally a more pleasant experience to play as Abby – and that's by design. It all feeds into the psychological aspect of nudging players into a good experience with Abby, and it extends into visceral QTE sections too.
At one point Ellie is forced to kill a dog that jumps at you with a hit of a button. However, we soon learn that this is Abby's dog and a few hours later we're playing catch with said dog during a flashback. These tricks pop up a lot in the game, and it's something that the videogame medium can get away with a lot more effectively.
There's also the situation involving the game's pacing, which is pretty bad at times, and the overall message about how revenge is bad, the cycle of violence only leads to more violence and how forgiveness is the most important virtue of all are all very surface level. That's before mentioning how this revelation contradicts the fact you've just spent hours mowing down thousands of unnamed goons.
Whatever way you slice it, adapting this game was never going to be an easy feat and with HBO in the driver's seat, they had an opportunity here to try and polish up this game into a narrative that was more palatable for a larger audience. And boy, have they dropped the ball.
The Last Of Us season 2 doesn't just adapt the bad parts of the story, it completely recontextualizes parts of it and adds extra elements that undermine the entire point of the game. There are so many little changes along the way that destroy the integrity and structure of this narrative, that by the time you finish the seventh and final episode, you'll be scratching your head, wondering how this season managed to drop the ball so badly.
This season adapts half the videogame, essentially just stopping midway through the story, ready for the third season to pick up in the near future. The seven episodes here follow Joel, Ellie and the others in the commune as they prepare for the next chapter in their lives.
Things between Ellie and Joel are not good though. Their relationship is on the rocks after Ellie suspects Joel lied to her about the Firefly fiasco at the end of season 1. She's moved out the house, she's becoming a teenager now and she's branching out in her own direction.
This drama from the Salt Lake City lab, where Joel killed a bunch of surgeons and took off with Ellie out of Firefly HQ, has serious ramifications for the story. One of those doctors happens to be the dad of a young girl called Abby. Blinded by rage, she takes her friends and hunts down Joel, determined to get her revenge.
This then leads into a quest for vengeance, where Joel is unceremoniously killed in episode 2 and Ellie sets out to exact her revenge on Abby and her group as a consequence of this. All the while, the city of Jackson faces a horde of Infected that threaten to tear everything down. Episode 2 is decently paced and a definite high point of the season, although subtle changes like Tommy cowering from an Infected and Dina rather than Tommy up with Joel during the climax at the cabin are the beginning of big cracks forming in this narrative.
It's here where the story then shifts across to Ellie's perspective for most of the season that follows. It's also where more changes are compounded – and not for the better. Unlike in the game, the show depicts a good chunk of time passing before Ellie sets out. This softens ger raw emotion as a result. She's still determined to track down Abby but her character is much less dark and gritty, with a distinct lack of urgency. She and Dina set out together and throughout the next series of episodes, the pair joke and laugh about, making tons of noise and forgetting how the Infected work in this world.
Speaking of forgetting, the first season made a conscious choice to explain to us how the Cordyceps infection works. In the game, spores would infect you so hazmat suits and covering up were a necessity. This was changed for the show because they wanted you to see the actors' faces. However, season 2 completely forgets about this and has a pretty significant scene, taken beat for beat from the game, where a character dies from the spores. It's just one example of how poor the writing is in this season, where the writers can't even keep track of their own lore changes.
The middle slew of episodes are a tough watch because of this. The early chapters in season 2 make a big deal about a subplot involving smart Infected and showing them working together. We see them ambush Ellie and Dina, we also see them working together to attack Jackson. It's great stuff and ratchets up the tension but then the second half of the season just completely abandons this plotline. In fact, they're turned into an afterthought most of the time.
There's a lot more walking and talking here, and while that in itself would be fine, it's made painfully dull by the fact Dina and Ellie have zero chemistry together. The biggest culprit of that though stems from Bella Ramsey's portrayal of Ellie. It's nothing short of a disaster and one of the biggest miscasts in Hollywood history. It's hard to put into words how bad her performance is but when you compare some of her scenes against Ashley Johnson's excellent performance in the game, it's embarrassing how little range Ramsey has.
The only saving grace here is that Kaitlyn Dever's portrayal of Abby is fantastic. She doesn't get many lines this season but damn, she's a great actress. She absolutely wipes the floor with Ramsey in the moments she does get and at least with her as the focal point in season 3, we may get some good acting to go with the story. It's actually pretty crazy because they manage to do here what the games failed to do – make you want Ellie to fail. Whether this character has been self-sabotaged or not is up for debate but it's a particular problem when this is the actress you're resting your entire show's narrative arc on.
The revenge mission itself not only suffers from these constant jokes and Marvel-esque humour that's infected everything, but it also muddies the waters significantly when it comes to core motivations.
In the game, Ellie had so much conviction and urgency that you knew she was in control of every situation. In the show however, Ellie is constantly questioning her own actions, driven forward by Dina planning and guiding her, or being chewed out by Jesse to get her back in the game. You never get the feel of this Ellie actually being the one leading this pack, and that's a big problem.
The show does attempt to add more depth to the conflict though, expanding out the city of Seattle with an ongoing feud. On the one hand we have the WLF, a rebel militia group and the faction Abby is a part of. They're caught in a bitter feud with the Seraphites, a religious entity known colloquially as the Scars, who are operating out in the woods. The conflict spills over into Ellie's mission several times, but it's never done in a way where we get significant danger or tension for our protagonist.
The pacing of this season is absolutely dreadful too, with many episodes padded out with meaningless scenes including Ellie singing 'Take On Me' and banging drums… in the middle of an amplified theatre, in a city with soldiers on the look-out and Infected lurking about. That's before mentioning the meandering walk-and-talk scenes, which I've covered already, Ellie's constant incompetence in combat situations, and a finale that just flatlines into ending.
A cliffhanger ending itself is fine when done effectively, but after such a meandering season, we now have to wait 2 years before we get more of this story. The problem with that is it's going to give viewers a lot of time to chew over and digest what they've seen – and I have a feeling a lot of those people are going to leave with a bad taste in their mouths.
When it comes to the visual design and production of this season though, The Last of Us is still a pretty show, albeit not to the same level as the first part. Seeing this post-apocalyptic version of Seattle is great, and some of the sets are genuinely beautiful to look at. The camera work is generally quite good across the board too and there are a couple of very nice tracking shots here, especially when it mirrors some of the great Directing seen in the game.
Seeing a forest lit up with torchlight is eerily intoxicating, and contrasts nicely with the frozen and snowy version of Jackson we see early on. These are but two examples and the series is littered with many scenes like this.
Overall though, The Last of Us season 2 is not just a bad adaptation of source material, it's just a bad season of TV full stop. Terrible pacing is meshed in with bad dialogue, which is only compounded further by terrible acting and a distinct lack of chemistry on-screen. The smart Infected storyline goes nowhere, while contrived writing is mixed with a jarring tone that can't quite decide if it wants to be a quirky road trip or a genuine exploration of anger and grief.
Somehow, The Last of Us season 2 has united a divisive fanbase into agreeing on one fact – this is not a good adaptation. Whether season 3 can actually turn things around or not is still up for debate but it'll need to pull off something special to come back from this car crash of a season.