The Last of Us Season 2 Swaps Shock Value For Plot Contrivance

The Last of Us Season 2 is currently airing, and Episode 2 just dropped last week. Major spoilers for that episode and The Last of Us Part II game are about to follow. If you haven’t seen/played it yet, I’d strongly recommend you stop reading here and come back later. Everything following the subheading and image below will be spoiler-filled.

The Moment Finally Happens

With that said, the big moment finally happened. The moment they murdered Joel on screen. Brutally and violently, Abby takes Joel’s life in front of Ellie, leaving her alive and allowing her to go on a revenge quest to avenge her surrogate father. It is one of the most divisive story moments in gaming, and now it has made its way onto prestige television.

Now, I’m definitely not a Last of Us Part II apologist. If it were up to me, the story should have ended with the first game. That haunting final scene, where Ellie asks Joel to swear he was telling the truth about the Fireflies, and Joel lies to her face, is perfect. It wrapped everything up with beautiful ambiguity, raw emotion, and satisfying thematic closure. It simply did not need a sequel.

Why the First Game Worked

That iconic ending cemented Joel and Ellie’s relationship as something deeply flawed, yet heartbreakingly believable. It was messy, tragic, and felt so human. To justify a follow-up, Part II needed to do something truly special. Unfortunately, it did not.

The original worked not just because of its plot (which was basically just an escort mission), but because of the nuanced characters, the layered writing, and the authentic love that developed between Joel and Ellie. The sequel strips things down to a bare-bones message: revenge is a cycle, forgiveness is the answer, and violence leads nowhere.

Not Exactly the Most Original Plot Basis

That idea is fine in theory (if a bit basic and uninspired), but the worst thing is that I did not think Naughty Dog was even successful in pulling it off. There was no point during the game where I came anywhere close to forgiving Abby, not even at the end when Ellie chooses to let her live. I still wanted Ellie to take her life in vengeance. Abby never earned any redemption from me; I disliked her from start to finish, and because of that, the game’s core theme did not land.

The narrative forces the player to walk in her shoes, attempting to make you feel her grief and understand her pain, but it never gave me a compelling reason to empathize with her. Instead, I felt manipulated, pushed into sympathy by a story that told me how to feel instead of letting me arrive there on my own. This was especially obvious in the way that the game used dogs.

The Last of Us Season 2 vs TLOU Part 2: Handling Joel’s Death

What is interesting is that I actually did not take issue with the contrived way Abby manages to kill Joel in the game. Yes, it is VERY convenient, but because the game hides her motives and background, the coincidence does not feel quite so glaring. You meet Abby, you play as her briefly, but you have no real clue why she wants to kill Joel yet. It is all left pretty vague. And that vagueness helped mask the implausible way in which things unfold.

In The Last of Us Season 2, things are handled differently. The show attempts to pre-emptively soften the blow by giving us more context. We learn early on that Joel killed Abby’s father in the Firefly hospital during a flashback that doesn’t appear until much later in the game. Abby’s monologue while she kills Joel is longer and way more detailed than it was in the game. Abby’s motivation is crystal clear before Joel’s murder even happens, and that choice only serves to hang a light on some very lazy writing.

Is Lazy Plot Contrivance Better Than Facing Backlash from Shock Value?

Take the moment in the show where Owen tells the group that it is virtually impossible to get to Joel in Jackson. The town is too well-defended, and he plans to tell Abby that it is not happening. But before he gets the chance, Joel literally saves Abby’s life from a horde of infected. And then, he conveniently follows her back to the chalet where her group is hiding. The opportunity falls into her lap, and she kills him.

In the game, this same sequence plays out, but because we do not know Abby’s plan or her history yet, the coincidence is less obvious. In the show, because all of that is explained up front, the writing feels much lazier. It is not just a coincidence; it is a million-to-one plot convenience. The exact character she is hunting just so happens to stumble across her in the middle of nowhere, to the extent that it almost feels like a parody.

Is The Last of Us Season 2 Getting a Pass?

If this kind of contrived coincidence showed up in a CW show or a Marvel movie, it would be crucified by critics. The internet would be flooded with memes mocking it. But because this is HBO’s The Last of Us, it gets a pass. Whether this show is more highbrow than the superhero slop being churned out by Disney does not matter; all art deserves to be criticised equally when it stumbles.

This decision to lay Abby’s motives bare from the get-go in lieu of obscuring them turns a moment of shocking brutality into an affair that feels particularly telegraphed; and not just to those of who played the game. It strips away a great deal of tension, replaces surprise with inevitability, and shines a spotlight on one of the plot’s most glaring weaknesses.

Are We Seeing Diminishing Returns From The Last of Us Season 2?

The Last of Us Season 2 is visually stunning and full of powerful performances, just like the game. But that does not change the fact that it is re-treading the same plot points that made Part II so divisive. By sticking so closely to the source material, the show inherits its biggest problem: this unbelievable coincidence that jumpstarts the entire plot.

Joel’s death should have felt devastating and earned. Instead, it feels engineered. And in trying to give it more emotional weight, the show actually shines a light on just how flimsy the setup really is.

The Last of Us is still a landmark franchise. But unless it can move past these narrative crutches and embrace the nuance and subtlety that made the first game iconic, it risks undermining everything that made the original so unforgettable.

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