The Last of Us recap: season two, episode seven – well, that was a frustrating finale
This article contains spoilers for the The Last of Us season two. Please do not read unless you have seen episodes one to six.
Typical. For the back half of this season, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) has been hunting high and low for Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in Seattle, desperate to avenge the brutal killing of Joel (Pedro Pascal). But ultimately it was Abby who ambushed Ellie, at exactly the worst possible time. As season-ending cliffhangers go, it certainly served to turbo-charge the suspense. Just who will be left alive after that final panicked gunshot in the theatre lobby?
Even before that emotionally charged confrontation, this finale had been carefully ratcheting up the tension. There were heartbreaking confessions, a close call with disembowelment and at least one deeply regrettable death, all as an ominous tempest rumbled overhead. Do they still name storms in the post-apocalyptic year of 2029? Call this one Storm Metaphor: dark, relentless and getting increasingly violent as the night went on. Let's look at how it all shook out.
Last time we saw Dina (Isabela Merced), she had just taken a Seraphite crossbow bolt to the thigh. Back in the relative refuge of the theatre, Jesse (Young Mazino) scrambles to fix up his ex-girlfriend's wound in true frontier medicine style (splash some alcohol on it, push the arrow out). When Ellie belatedly returns, it is Dina's turn to play nurse, tending to her heavily bruised back. With her shirt off, the usually tough-as-nails Ellie suddenly seemed physically vulnerable. She opens up emotionally, too, telling Dina about hurting Nora (Tati Gabrielle) to get information about Abby's location.
While she managed to extract a couple of cryptic clues (talk of a 'whale' and a 'wheel'), Ellie is now more struck by how quickly she took to torture: 'I thought it would be harder to do.' This soul-baring spills over into finally telling Dina the truth about what Joel did in Salt Lake City, and how Ellie finally figured it all out. It's a lot for poor Dina – pregnant, seriously injured and cooped up in a war zone with both the father of her baby and her new girlfriend – to process.
The next morning Jesse is itching to meet back up with Joel's brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and get the hell out of Seattle. He and Ellie leave the hobbling Dina to barricade herself into the theatre while they strike out for the bookstore rendezvous. En route they witness a skirmish between a lone Seraphite and six aggressive WLF troops, and Ellie is all for wading in, guns blazing, to save the boy. It's impulse-driven compassion, but to the exasperated Jesse it reads like recklessness. The tension between them foreshadows Ellie's fateful decision later in the day.
A quick check-in with the WLF leadership: sombre leader Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and his loyal lieutenant Elise (Hettienne Park) are planning their big assault on the island home of the Seraphites. The storm gathering above seems like a bad omen, but it may provide useful cover for their beach landing operation. Isaac is hung up on the continued absence of Owen (Spencer Lord), Mel (Ariela Barer) and particularly Abby. 'You in love with her or something?' half-jokes Elise, which seems like a risky thing to say to your superior. But we learn that Isaac has chosen Abby as the best of her young generation to lead the WLF and 'secure their future'. As we haven't spent much time with Abby this season, it's some useful context as to how she fits in with the militia.
Back at the bookstore rendezvous, there's no sign of Tommy. But some WLF radio chatter interrupts Jesse and Ellie's frenemy bickering and alerts them to a nearby sniper. As they know the Seraphites don't use guns, they surmise it must be Tommy, and ascend to a decent vantage point to try to spot him. That's when Ellie spots a ferris wheel and guesses that Abby must be holed up in a nearby flooded aquarium. She has a clear-cut choice: help save Tommy or pursue a flimsy lead on Abby for revenge. To Jesse's disgust she chooses the latter.
The storm is really whipping up now. Down at the shore, Ellie sees a fleet of WLF boats pushing through the rain toward their invasion target. She manages to find her own little speedboat, but as she sets course for the aquarium it soon becomes clear she is in over her head – heaving waves tip her out of the boat, onto a beach and into the hands of the Seraphites. We've seen how this cult treats outsiders: hanging them by the neck and disembowelling them with very unhygienic-looking sickles. Despite her protests, Ellie is strung up and about to be sliced open when an alarm horn from their besieged village scatters her attackers. Phew!
This, of course, would be the perfect time to count your blessings and retreat. But Ellie has come too far and invested too much. She completes her journey to the aquarium, taking time out to methodically dry Joel's revolver and bullets. As she advances through the darkened corridors, she hears the voices of Owen and Mel. Soon she is threatening to kill them if they don't tell her where to find Abby. Owen pretends to cooperate but it is just a ruse to get closer to his gun.
All that WLF training is for naught: Ellie shoots him dead and Mel takes a bullet to the neck. As Mel begins to bleed out, Ellie realises with horror that she is pregnant and is using her final, gasping breaths to implore her killer to save her baby by improvising a C-section with a knife. Despite her usual gumption, Ellie is completely overwhelmed by the situation and cannot bring herself to do anything.
That's when Tommy and Jesse swoop in and whisk Ellie back to the relative safety of the theatre. She is wrestling with the carnage she has caused but still struggles with the idea of leaving Seattle with her revenge quest incomplete. If she doesn't kill Abby, then what was the point of all the others dying? But the group are determined to return to Jackson, so Joel will remain unavenged. 'Are you able to make your peace with that?' asks Tommy. They vow to leave at first light.
It has certainly been an eventful three days in Seattle. But as Ellie and Jesse patch up their tattered friendship in the auditorium, they hear shouts and shots coming from the lobby. As they burst through the doors, they are greeted by gunplay. Jesse takes the brunt of it, and looks like a goner. Abby has tracked them down and seeing Ellie only seems to enrage her more. 'You,' she hisses. Ellie tries to offer up her life in exchange for sparing the wounded Tommy, but Abby simply doesn't want to hear it: 'I let you live … and you wasted it!' A gunshot cuts to darkness. It's a long enough pause to imagine every horrible potential outcome.
Then we are back with Abby in a cluttered WLF compound. There is the briefest glimpse of Manny (Danny Ramirez), the final accomplice to Joel's murder, who says that Isaac wants to see them. Abby wanders out to reveal she is in a sports stadium repurposed as a settlement. A final caption confirms that this is Seattle Day One, when Ellie and Dina first arrived in the city.
Rewinding the clocks seems to be preparing the ground to tell Abby's side of the story next time. But ending with a focus on a character who has been so elusive throughout season two feels a little frustrating. And who knows how long it will be before we learn exactly what went down in that lobby.
RIP Owen and Mel. If you count poor infected Nora, that means Ellie has crossed out three of the five young WLF members on her kill list. But what were the pair conspiring about when Ellie ambushed them? It feels as though there is a lot more WLF backstory to be revealed in future seasons.
Back in episode three it felt safe to assume Jesse had voted in favour of hunting down and executing Joel's killers. But during one of his various exasperated exchanges with Ellie he revealed he was actually one of the eight council members who voted against the motion.
Jesse also mentioned that while infiltrating the city, he and Tommy had found Ellie's horse, Shimmer – last spotted back in episode four – thankfully safe and well in that hipster record shop.
A third season of The Last of Us was confirmed before season two even launched. But would that be enough to finish adapting all of the second (and so far final) game? Last week co-showrunner Craig Mazin suggested that season three might end up being longer, and that his hopes were pinned on a fourth season to wrap up the story.
What did you think? Did this feel like a satisfying end to season two? What do you hope is explored in the next season? Have your say below, but please avoid spoilers from the game …
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Well before he himself was making any money, and well before he established money as both a presiding subject and a central medium of his work, it was already a preoccupation. In 2017, after five years of YouTube obscurity, he had his first viral hit, a video which now seems, weirdly, both completely at odds with the thrust of his subsequent career, and to contain many of its core themes. It's called I Counted to 100,000!, and it's exactly that: a livestreamed ordeal, lasting about 40 hours, in which the young Donaldson sits in his gaming chair, stares into his crappy webcam, and counts from 1 to 100,000. It clearly struck a chord with viewers, even if very few of them made it more than a few minutes in. Its stupidity and pointlessness was – and this, I would argue, is a hallmark of the Beast oeuvre – of such a scale, and pursued with such obsessive doggedness, that you couldn't help but be impressed. It is, of course, very little fun to watch, even in small doses. Literally nothing happens, apart from Donaldson counting to 100,000. In this sense, it is nothing like his later videos, defined as they are by a near-demented commitment to maximum viewer-stimulation. But it centres around a punishing endurance challenge undertaken for the purpose of amassing clicks – a central idea he has pushed to further extremes, and pumped with increasingly massive amounts of cash, throughout his career. Within a couple of days, the video was racking up tens of thousands of views. His channel began to grow pretty steeply from that point, building on the counting video's success. He did one where he watched the video for fellow YouTuber Jake Paul's truly execrable rap song It's Everyday Bro for 10 straight hours. One where he spent 24 hours immersed up to his armpits in slime. One where he put a bunch of people in a circle and awarded $10,000 to the last person to leave. One where he bought every item in a supermarket. As Donaldson's content grew more popular, he began to attract more and more lucrative sponsorship deals. Early sponsors included Quidd – a now defunct app for collecting 'digital brand stickers' – Electronic Arts and Xbox. His content began to visibly improve around 2019; the videos had higher production values, and multi-camera setups – clearly the result of an expanding operation, and a creator who was acquiring skills and resources. His stunts got notably more costly, though by no means less stupid (see, for instance, the awe-inspiringly dumb I Filled My Brother's House With Slime & Bought Him a New One, in which Donaldson fills his brother's house with slime and buys him a new one), and he began to give away ever larger sums of money. By 2021, according to Forbes, he was YouTube's highest earner, bringing in an estimated $54m that year. Some of MrBeast's most successful videos feature Donaldson himself – presumably because they involve situations that would invite legal and/or moral catastrophe if the video involved anyone else. There's one where he spends 50 hours in solitary confinement. (It's called, as you might well have guessed, I Spent 50 Hours in Solitary Confinement.) There's one where he is buried alive, also for 50 hours. (I'm not even checking here, and I can basically guarantee you that it's called I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.) Then there's a whole other category of endurance challenge videos that involve other people, and in almost all cases these involve the awarding of truly prodigious amounts of money. There's one where contestants compete to win a year, rent free, in a luxury home, by seeing who can keep their hand on the luxury home for the longest, enduring ever more fiendish mental and physical challenges in order to do so. And then there's $10,000 Every Day You Survive in a Grocery Store. If you want to get a sense of what MrBeast is all about – of the sheer scale, and the joyful stupidity, of his whole project – this is a good one to watch. The setup is basically as follows: Donaldson buys an entire Safeway supermarket, one of those grandly comprehensive US establishments that sells everything from inflatable swimming pools to home entertainment systems. He then gives a young man named Alex – introduced as 'this random guy' – 10 grand for every day he spends living in the store, wheeling in a grocery cart full of cash and presenting it to him as long as he doesn't set foot outside the door. The video, like a surprising amount of MrBeast's work, amounts to a kind of postmodernist recreation of Robinson Crusoe. Alex, this random-guy subject of terminal-stage US capitalism, is stranded in a supermarket where all of his basic needs, and no small number of less basic ones, are catered for by the contents of the shelves. His one obligation is that, every day, he must gather $10,000 worth of items from the store – stuff he doesn't need: electronics, nappies, pet food and so forth – and exchange them for the cash. This is both an acute pain in the ass, and the one thing that prevents him from going insane with boredom. He builds a sort of ad hoc dwelling for himself in a corner of the store dedicated to camping supplies, using shelving units as walls, and packages of kitchen roll as a mattress. He finds a large inflatable garden pool in storage, rigs up a hose, fills it with water over a couple of days. But there are deepening extremes of experience to be contended with: boredom, isolation, sadness and guilt about being away from his family. The real turning point comes when Alex accidentally lances the inflatable garden pool with a forklift he's using to gather his daily $10k-worth of exchange items, and floods the entire supermarket with water, which he must then spend his days splashing about in. Eventually, he seems to barely care about the money at all; he seems, by the end, almost to resent it. The video's most interesting moment is one that's given barely any space to breathe. (Nothing, in MrBeast, is ever given space to breathe, because breathing is boring.) It's Alex, 44 days in, half-mad with loneliness and surrounded by the drenched detritus of consumerism, greeting the arrival of his daily 10 grand in a shopping cart – this time piloted into the store not by Donaldson or one of his sidemen, but by a remote-controlled robot – with a dejected 'thanks for the money'. Thanks for the money. A person with a different, less algorithmically determined sensibility might have made of that moment something more central. I kept having some version of this thought, watching MrBeast videos: that their animating ideas, and the content generated by them, could easily provide the material for works of conceptual art. There's a moment, for instance, in the competition show Beast Games that struck me as something close to avant garde. Donaldson lays out a million dollars in cash in a big pile, and instructs each of the 10 remaining contestants to come out of their little houses one by one, and to choose how much money they want to take from the pile. If every player takes $100,000, they all get an equal amount of the money. The first player does exactly this. The second player deviates (though not dramatically) by taking $223,000. The third player, a middle-aged guy named JC, is a whole other story. Despite having established himself as a pretty standup fellow, just seeing that much money piled up in front of him and there for the literal taking makes JC realise that he could pay off all his debt, and significantly improve his children's lives. He decides to take precisely $650,000 – basically the entire pile, aside from the $27,000 pittance he elects to leave for the next contestant. He's not a straightforward villain, though, and the apparent contradiction of his total resolution and his convulsed conscience makes for compelling, and in fact powerfully weird, viewing. The moment I'm primarily thinking of here is the image of JC, sitting on his prison-like bed in his house (really just a bare cell) surrounded by bags of cash cartoonishly bursting with bills, and looking like a man whose life has been destroyed by some unseen demonic force – as perhaps, in a manner of speaking, it has. And that's a thing that is rarely said about Donaldson's whole project. This is a guy who grew up immersed in both evangelical protestantism and the YouTube clickbait economy, and whose earthly works have about them some strange, and I am guessing unconscious, quality of the theological. A man weeping in moral torment over bags of money; another so bored, depressed and isolated that he can barely raise his eyes to yet another shopping cart full of cash. These are the products of what I have come to think of as Donaldson in full Mephistopheles mode. 'Look what these creatures of flesh and blood will do for cash,' he seems constantly on the verge of intoning, as he observes his subjects like so many mazed rats. In the opening episode of Beast Games, Donaldson stands on a tower overlooking the purpose-built Beast City, and watches hundreds of contestants below as they stream into the little world of his creation. They look 'literally like ants', he observes with a kind of childlike glee. And what are we, his viewers, if not ants ourselves, our swarming densities governed by unseen algorithms? That childlike aspect of Donaldson's whole operation turns out to be central. It is simultaneously the thing that makes him most unsettling, and the thing that makes him sort of impossible to dislike. When I say that I think he is some kind of genius, I'm partly talking about this quality of childishness to his work. I'm thinking, that is, of something Baudelaire once wrote: that 'genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood's capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated'. Donaldson – who is still, let's remember, only 27 years old – has become upsettingly rich and successful by doing this one particular thing that he started doing at the age of 13. He started making YouTube videos as a little boy, and he never wanted to do anything else. 'When I was 11,' as he put it during a recent interview, 'I just said, 'I'm going to be a YouTuber or I'm going to die trying.'' In the years since, he has done nothing but pursue that 11-year-old's dream, with insanely lucrative results. His entire career – by which I mean not just the YouTube videos and TV shows, but also the chocolate bars and the energy drinks and the hamburgers and the ready-made kids' lunches and even the philanthropic endeavours – amounts to an integrated multi-platform work of content, a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk as conceived by a preteen boy. Just as to count to 100,000 is to pursue a supremely childish impulse with a demented determination, the more elaborately and expensively produced content Donaldson has made in recent years arises out of a similarly childish curiosity. What would it be like to be buried alive? How weird would it be to eat the world's largest pizza slice? What would happen if you put a Lamborghini in a gigantic hydraulic press? Would you sit in a bathtub full of snakes if I gave your mom $10,000? What if I filled my brother's house with slime? What if I got a cereal bowl the size of a Jacuzzi and filled it with Fruit Loops and milk? Would you rather be trapped in the world's coldest room or the world's hottest room? If you have ever spent any time in the company of an 11-year-old boy, you will recognise the cast of mind that continually throws up such questions. At the level of form, he is no great innovator: he simply understands what works, and repeats it more and more successfully and expensively. Beast Games, for instance, is a revisiting of, and expansion of, his wildly successful video $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!, which is itself so thoroughly 'inspired' by the wildly successful Korean Netflix show of that title as to flirt with copyright infringement. Squid Game itself is hardly original, drawing heavily as it does on Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. And all of the above, of course, are outcroppings of reality TV, perhaps the most significant mass-entertainment form of the last 30 years, a form that birthed not just YouTubers like MrBeast, but also the US president and therefore, arguably, the present global political order. Last year, a 36-page onboarding document entitled How to Succeed at MrBeast Production was leaked by one of the company's employees, who now number in the hundreds, and who are mostly based in its 63,000 sq ft HQ in Greenville, NC. The document is written in the sloppily demotic mode of the videos' narration, and is clearly the work of Donaldson himself. He is keen to get across that virality is not some freak occurrence, but a craft that can be mastered, and taught. 'I spent five years of my life locked in a room studying virality on YouTube,' he writes. 'And the result of those probably 20,000 to 30,000 hours of studying is I'd say I have a good grasp on what makes YouTube videos do well.' Which is not to say that the MrBeast formula is easy to replicate. There are numerous off-brand MrBeasts out there on YouTube. You've got the Dangie Bros, Matthew Beem, the Stokes Twins, Eric 'Airrack' Decker, and Morgan 'Morgs' Hudson, along with countless purveyors of the sort of elaborate and expensive stunts – turning houses into fish tanks, building theme parks inside houses, and so on and so forth – known in the biz as 'junklord' content. But they all conspicuously lack both Donaldson's peculiar charm and his intricate mastery of form. When you watch a MrBeast video, you are watching the result of a deep and meticulous engagement with YouTube's audience-retention data. 'The cool thing about YouTube,' as Donaldson writes in the memo, 'is they give us super-detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second we lose a viewer.' The first minute is typically where the majority of viewer loss happens, and this is why, in the opening seconds of a MrBeast video, you feel as though someone has filled your skull with popping candy and is beating you about the head and face with a foam bat. The first minute, in other words, is all about hype, the point of which is to ensure that the viewer makes it through that statistically perilous stretch of the clip. There are no slow builds. Everything you see in a MrBeast video is about preventing you from clicking away. His work reflects and intensifies what the internet has done to culture more generally, and to our brains. If boredom, as Walter Benjamin wrote, is 'the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience' – if boredom is a crucial spur to activity, to the capacity to surprise oneself with one's thoughts and impulses – then one consequence of the last decade or so of technological and cultural change has been the total destruction of that dream bird's natural habitat, cleared for the strip-mining of the dopamine that drives the attention economy. Donaldson's forays into philanthropy – or philanthropy-themed YouTube content – have, in recent years, caused sporadic outbreaks of public controversy. The earliest of these was called Giving a Random Homeless Man $10,000: a simple video, featuring none of the hallmark hyperactive editing or blaring narration. Donaldson just walks up to a homeless man in Greenville, and gives him an envelope containing $10,000. The video was not a massive success by MrBeast standards, but it got a strong enough positive reaction to suggest that using the channel's earnings to give away large sums of money was a way of both doing something positive and producing more – and more lucrative – content. There followed a series of videos in which Donaldson enacted vaguely absurdist forms of philanthropy – picking up an Uber customer in a brand new Lamborghini, say, and then just giving it to him. Despite the slightly troubling way in which they made a spectacle of entirely arbitrary largesse – of Donaldson himself as part gameshow host, part trickster god, indulging in a little light wealth redistribution for the folks at home – the videos were hard to dislike. They were hard to dislike for the same reason Donaldson himself is hard to dislike: they were driven by a childlike, ungainly benevolence. In 2023, this run of philanthropic content culminated in a video entitled 1,000 Blind People See for the First Time, in which Donaldson paid for 1,000 people to be given a very straightforward medical treatment curing them of severe visual impairment. The video wasn't controversial because Donaldson paid no attention to the structural injustice of these people not having been provided with this basic procedure by their government (the video makes clear that blind people from all over the world were cured, though it focuses pretty much exclusively on Americans). The controversy centred almost entirely around the way in which the curing of 1,000 blind people was approached as raw material for light entertainment. The thing I personally find most troubling about the video is the jarring opposition of its style and content. The whole thing is characterised by a manic, attention-hustling showmanship, and a refusal to grant viewers a moment's respite in which we might contemplate the experience of the cured or the wider social implications. As with something like I Survived the 5 Deadliest Places on Earth, it bypasses any kind of narrative setup and goes straight for the emotional payoff. We learn almost nothing about any of the people whose blindness is cured, other than that they once were blind but now they see. We can be confident that they are poor – why else would their condition have remained untreated? – but we are left to intuit this. In most cases, we are not even given their names. Of course, there are only so many formerly blind people you can watch being given the gift of sight before it starts getting a little samey. But Donaldson has, of course, anticipated this problem, and the video keeps your dopamine transmitters operating at full capacity. Moments after the bandages have been removed from one woman's face, the first sight she is met with is Donaldson standing before her in surgical scrubs, presenting her with an open briefcase containing $10,000. Another patient, who we learn had to leave his job as a cashier because he couldn't see the money he was handling, has his bandages removed, and is told to read an eye chart; it says 'YOU JUST WON $10,000'. At the bottom of the screen, there is a counter that flips upward with the rising number of cured. It is, essentially, a score counter, as though Donaldson were keeping track of the points he's racking up in a video game. And this seems to me to gesture towards what is troubling about the 1,000 Blind People video in particular, and Donaldson's project more generally: the way in which his content treats people – contestants in his competitions, beneficiaries of his philanthropy – as mere elements in a larger game he is playing, the object of which is maximum viewer-stimulation, maximum attention, maximum numbers. 'At their core, the premise of most MrBeast videos is that numbers with lots of zeros are impressive,' as the US writer Max Read put it in an excellent essay exploring the controversy around the blindness video. 'One blind person seeing for the first time isn't cool. You know what's cool? One thousand blind people seeing for the first time.' Donaldson's acts of charity are bestowed, randomly, upon people who are themselves explicitly presented as 'random'; their lurid arbitrariness illuminates the arbitrariness of charity per se. (Just £1 could cure this child of this condition; but why this child, in this place, and why this condition?) As far as he's come from posting Minecraft playthroughs, consuming his work still feels, in some sense, like watching a guy play video games. Even the videos in which he himself is not a central protagonist, where huge numbers of people compete against each other for even huger amounts of money, it's as though Donaldson is designing and playing some kind of strategy game. He constructs a world, and a set of rules to govern it; he populates it with semi-autonomous people – mostly anonymous and interchangeable – and watches the unfolding consequences of their moral and strategic choices. Donaldson is not himself a political figure. He doesn't tend to weigh in on party-political questions, or express much interest in them. But there is a politics to his content. It reflects a world in which people are isolated and helpless, subjects of vast and inhuman economic mechanisms. People spending months alone in supermarkets; standing in large circles for as long as they can endure it; competing for private islands, houses, deliverance from their personal financial torments. People in states of gruelling seclusion; people in vast and impersonal crowds, pitted against one another in a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all. Loneliness, survival, isolation, and the divine intervention of an unimaginably wealthy and famous man: there is a politics to all this, all right, and it is the politics of our time. In its themes and preoccupations, its insistent motifs of financial precarity and arbitrary deliverance – its Lamborghinis and its private islands and its vast pyramids of cash – the oeuvre of MrBeast is like nothing so much as the dream of an entire culture. Donaldson might not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Patriots' decision on Stefon Diggs revealed after viral video of NFL star handling bag of unknown substance
The New England Patriots reportedly have no plans to cut Stefon Diggs in the wake of a viral video which showed the wide receiver handling a bag containing an unknown substance while on a yacht surrounded by scantily-clad women. Diggs was seen shirtless on the boat, chatting with three women who were all dressed in bikinis and called him 'daddy.' That is despite his girlfriend, rap star Cardi B, also partying aboard the boat. After the video flooded social media, reports emerged that the Patriots could release the receiver just a couple of months after signing him on a three-year, $69million contract. But on Monday, Diggs returned to practice with New England and NFL Network reports that the Patriots are determined to keep the receiver. Though OTAs are optional, Ian Rapoport of NFL Network claimed: 'Stefon Diggs showing up today felt about as mandatory as it could be.' Diggs signed with the Patriots after a year with the Texans. He suffered a season-ending ACL injury back in October but was back on the field on Monday. Stefon Diggs is here. — Christopher Price (@cpriceglobe) June 2, 2025 'He's a very good player, they intend to pay him a lot of money - they haven't yet - especially after he passed the physical from his ACL recovery,' Rapoport continued. 'This is a player they want to keep, want to be making plays for them - that's why they signed him in free agency to such fanfare. 'He just has to be better and this was a step in the right direction for Diggs and certainly something the Patriots welcomed.' Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel addressed the video last week but refused to reveal whether Diggs - a four-time Pro Bowler - would be sanctioned. 'It's something we're aware of and obviously we want to make great decisions on and off the field,' Vrabel said. 'Any conversations that I've had with Stefon will remain between him and I and the club.' After the video went viral, an insider told the Daily Mail that Cardi B 'doesn't want her man flirting with any ladies... she is mad at him.' But Diggs appeared in good spirits when he attended Patriots OTAs on Monday, telling reporters as he took to the field: 'Nice to see y'all' Ahead of his return, Diggs posted a cryptic message on social media, sharing a series of snaps from recent weeks alongside the caption: 'To the month of May, I appreciate you none the less… gotta stay focused.' Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, meanwhile, did not seem overly concerned with Diggs' recent absence. 'It's a voluntary part of the year, we know that,' he told reporters. 'I don't know if we've ever had perfect attendance.' He continued: 'As a coach, selfishly, you'd love it when they're all here, because you feel like you've got them all in the classroom and all on the field and the rest of it. 'He's here today, and we're excited to have an opportunity to work with the guys that are out here and available to us.'
