The Last of Us

Bloody, packed with bombshells and brimming with tragedy, it takes all that was best about series one and cranks it up to the absolute maximum.

The post-pandemic hellscape still has all its familiar scares and soul-searching, now with some bona fide bombshells thrown in. There are moments that will leave your jaw falling into your popcorn like few other shows.

More than ever, we see the best and worst of our heroes, with the writers beautifully showing their morality in every shade of grey.

Moving and devastating in equal doses, The Last Of Us remains post-apocalyptic television at its peak. At almost every turn, it delivers. Pray to the video-game-adaptation gods that Season 3 sticks the landing.

If the first season of The Last of Us proved that this was the best video game adaptation ever, Season 2 reinforces that further while also creating one of 2025's best seasons of TV.

Understanding its subject on both an intellectual and emotional level, it’s a viscerally conflicted monster—and continues, in this second season, to be the finest video game adaptation ever.

It might be a heartless (but brilliantly emotional) post-apocalyptic series about the inhumanity within us all, but the poignant series continues to be a trenchant exploration of holding on to those we love in a hopeless place.

In addition to O’Hara’s thorny, well-honed performance, Pascal’s aching stares and Ramsey’s innocent glimmer are deployed to perfection and developed as scrupulously as the scripts. “The Last of Us” remains a rush to watch, as overwhelming as a tidal wave and piercing as the coldest water.

A late-season confrontation between a major character and a new mysterious threat is especially clumsy and ultimately unnecessary. But these minor deficiencies are washed away by the gigantic wave of emotion propelling the plot. .... Trust that this show’s devotion to its characters’ humanity makes the horrors hit harder.

The show excels as both an intimate character study — this year’s most affecting theme: how each generation of parents screws up but tries to incrementally improve on how they were parented — and an action-packed adventure.

We don’t get as many moments between Joel and Ellie as we did in season 1, and it’s a bit of a loss for the show, since they’re the emotional heart and soul of the series. What we do get of Joel and Ellie together, though, is poignant and gripping and the best of what “The Last of Us” can be. Despite that fissure, the show’s return gets a boost from new characters entering the fray.

It’s a season that asks viewers to interrogate the cost of tough decisions, a masterful study in ripple effects from Joel losing his daughter in the prologue to how that influenced his commitment to saving Ellie. Being a hero for one person can make you a villain for another. That’s a tough thing to render, and for viewers to consider. But “The Last of Us” succeeded as a game franchise because it trusted the emotional intelligence of gamers, and the show does the same for TV viewers.

"The Last of Us" Season 2 is just very, very good; the showrunners know exactly what they're doing here, and every single performer involved understood their own assignments. Over just seven episodes, we get a new, full story about these characters we love. Just one thing: have tissues ready.

The Last of Us’ second season combines bludgeoning violence with precise emotional stabs as emotive acting, thoughtful dialogue, and deft camera work come together to convey every subtle shift in these characters—basically, it does a much better job than the game of putting us in these people’s headspaces. It’s not for the faint of heart, but this punishing journey is worth embarking on.

Rest assured, your expectations will get met in Season 2. So just let it unfold naturally and savor how it stands out from the pack of dystopian fiction by so depicting how actions have moral consequences and have the power to change us forever.

The violence and horror of this season are extreme, absent any glimmer of light down that long, Stygian tunnel. .... But that shouldn't detract from the genuine pleasures here either — the acting, the superlative craftsmanship, even the spectacular Canadian Rockies. You could do worse. You will rarely do better.

Season 2 is in many respects a tougher and more upsetting season than the first. The cast, especially Pascal and Ramsey, does superb work, but what made Joel and Ellie easy to like and root for in the first season starts to erode here, another consequence of Joel's actions in Salt Lake City. That makes Season 2 more difficult but also more complex and provocative.

The few times the season stumbles is when it resembles the game at its most basic level — not unlike the emotional distance of watching someone else play through "Part II" on YouTube. At its best, however, it proves why this game was worth adapting to another medium in the first place. So how do you improve on what came before? By doing exactly what "The Last of Us" season 2 does.

Even this batch’s narratively weaker moments (the last installment of the season is its shakiest) feel like a treat to take in thanks to the show’s stunning cinematography, score, production value, and direction by the likes of Druckmann, Succession‘s Mark Mylod, and Loki‘s Kate Herron.

If the season has one specific flaw, it’s that some non-chronological storytelling ends up detracting from the narrative momentum. .... All elements of the production are as sharp as before, with the production design in particular really working overtime to capture not just the new community of Jackson, but the remains of the now-dead world from before.

It’s a faithful yet reflective adaptation, carving out new character beats that not only give the excellent duo of Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey additional moments to shine, but further complicates some of the questions raised by the game.

This season has a narrower scope than the first, without the standalone, digressive episodes that were some of the original run’s best. It’s all about Ellie becoming her own person, which happily means a lot more of Ramsey’s wonderfully punchy portrayal of a damaged young soul fighting for autonomy.

While Ellie’s teenage petulance may make some viewers as irritated with her as her surrogate dad, the season offers ample opportunity to explore both the origins and the cost of Ellie’s abrasiveness, and Ramsey’s performance takes us inside Ellie’s skin without softening her armor-plated exterior.

“The Last of Us” does not provide many new reasons to watch in Season 2. But it still offers a consistently reliable one: Ramsey’s hard, nervy, wonderfully impertinent performance as Ellie. The 19-year-old character is not as fresh and funny as the 14-year-old was, but Ramsey continues to cleave through the well-made melodrama and get to something real.

Players of the game will spend this series waiting for the heartbreaking, game-changing plot twist that I won’t spoil here. For now, it’s worth basking in the safety of the compound – Joel and Ellie might be going through a rough patch, but that’s nothing compared to what faces them in the forthcoming episodes.

Showrunner Craig Mazin (and Neil Druckmann, the architect of the game, who co-creates this adaptation) have done a fine job translating for the screen. The world has ended over and over, on screens big and small, but it has rarely been as plausible – or compelling – as the barbaric wasteland of Last of Us’s second season.

The second season cannot match the world-building revelations of the first. There is still plenty to see and learn. .... Some questions are answered almost immediately, while others are left to linger for an unusual number of beats. But as previously noted, the real narrative of this season is about consequences, and by extension, choices, which makes it far more inward-focused than the first.

The new focus makes for an even grimmer version of a show that could already be a difficult watch, but allows Ramsey in particular to evolve their protagonist from a wise-cracking kid to a deeply scarred young adult.

There are issues around the margins: texture about the surrounding world that doesn’t get enough detail, for instance, and the introduction of Abby, who does not yet have time to become as rounded and complex as Ellie or Joel. .... But in season two, The Last of Us is proof that a zombie story can be even better and more devastating, more nuanced about its moral conundrums and more thoughtful about the aftermath, when no one’s firing up a flamethrower.

It’s commendable how Season 2 of The Last of Us tries to advance the narrative in a fresh way, but it’s not entirely successful. And the deep sadness that permeates the entire show stubbornly remains. I can say I admire a lot of the craftsmanship that goes into making The Last of Us.

Here's where reactions to the latest narrative will likely diverge between fans of the game and viewers unfamiliar with its recent plotlines. The former should be pleased by the show’s general fidelity to what they know; us non-players are in for some savage, devastating shocks. Either way, prepare to be hooked.

Ramsey homes in on how learning to live with that duality eats away at Ellie, and how a straight line can be drawn between Joel’s teachings and all the good and bad that the girl does. And it’s that insight, coupled with the nuance breathed into even the season’s smallest characters, many of whom inspect their lives with the quiet hope that the better angels within them keep the roiling hatred creeping in at the margins from swallowing their world whole, that keeps The Last of Us from succumbing to wall-to-wall misanthropy.

There's a lot of set-up that will be paid off in the future, which saps some of the season's later moments of its stakes as it moves beyond Jackson and into the wider world. Season 2 is strongest when it focuses on Ellie's journey.

Season 2 of HBO’s Naughty Dog adaptation is not bad television, far from it. It’s incredibly well-made, often looks gorgeous, and is packed full of stellar performances. But the storytelling devices and choices made in terms of pace and placement for key events bump up against what works, ultimately not delivering the striking effect this story’s undeniable shocking events should.

The season ends on a frustrating note. .... Mostly, though, it’s the lack of Ellie and Joel that keeps the season, while still strong overall, from hitting the heights of that first year.

I can’t say I was ever less than entertained. Even the material about those strange and unexplained factions contained enough harrowing or unsettling elements, or else passed by quickly enough, to keep me engaged. But I did find myself missing the rich lyricism of that previous chapter, the sprawling humanity of it, the devastating finality of it.

Season 2 has one major story thread stretched over the seven installments. That's not inherently a bad choice, but in this instance the overarching story feels both overlong and underwhelming as tiny pieces of the narrative are introduced without being fully explained.

Though Season 2 gives these individual dynamics more room to breathe, it ends up feeling smaller than its predecessor over all. A subplot involving Ellie’s crush on the flatly written Dina (Isabela Merced) soon descends into melodrama, and the narrative detours and beguiling world-building that once lent the show such poignancy and unpredictability are replaced by a relentless hammering-home of rudimentary lessons about the perils of revenge.

It’s all a bit auto-dystopia, even sluggish. Still, in the last series, a brilliantly evocative third episode featuring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett got the engines sparking. I’m keeping the faith that the mushroom apocalypse will deliver again.

“The Last of Us” tenderly unpacks the way that need for purpose becomes a problem, but this isn’t a perfect season. It doesn’t really feel like a season; so much remains shadowy, undeveloped or underexplained that the finale feels like it stops more than it concludes.

Suspense and intrigue abound, but the new run of episodes feels too much like a mere dystopian survival adventure. Much of the grace, nuance, and texture of The Last of Us’s first go-round is missing.

The Last of Us Season 2 is a mixed bag, full of gorgeous craftsmanship, from riveting turns from celebrity guest stars to carefully-concocted faux fungus. However, it ultimately feels a bit unsure of its own reason for being.