Spoiler Alert: Spoilers comply with for the Season 2 finale of The Final of UsWe spent what felt like an eternity ready for The Final of Us to return, and now, lower than two months later, it’s gone once more. This Sunday noticed the discharge of the second season finale, and it actually ended with a bang, with its ultimate moments set virtually precisely midway by means of the online game The Final of Us Half II.
Showrunner Craig Mazin just lately hinted that the present would possibly want a fourth season to faithfully adapt your entire plot. Whereas we’re skeptical of that notion, what’s clear is that the third season will look completely different. It’s making a giant structural gambit that can probably polarize followers (and this comes after the present has already shaken up the established order by killing Joel). However whether or not that pays off or not, the season finale closed out this 12 months’s arc successfully and has us desperate to see what occurs subsequent.
Ellie’s Revenge Quest Ends With a Bang
On Ellie’s third day in Seattle, tensions inside Ellie’s staff attain a breaking level. Dina is recovering from her wounds, whereas Ellie learns that Abby is hiding out within the native aquarium. She chooses to pursue and kill her, even upon studying that Tommy wants assist preventing off the WLF, and this leads Jesse to desert her.
After being captured by the Seraphites (in a sequence that admittedly seems like filler), Ellie escapes and makes it to the aquarium. She encounters Owen and Mel, promising to allow them to reside in the event that they direct her to Abby. Owen as a substitute pulls a gun, main Ellie to shoot him useless, whereas Mel bleeds out after a stray bullet grazes her neck.
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This additionally results in possibly one of many present’s most upsetting sequences to this point, as Ellie realizes that Mel is pregnant. As Mel passes, she begs Ellie to avoid wasting her little one, however she doesn’t perceive the right medical process, and the unborn child dies with its mom. The trauma of this encounter appears to lastly break Ellie out of her bloodlust, as when Tommy arrives shortly after, she’s far more open to his suggestion to return to Jackson, having realized her quest for revenge has solely induced her additional ache.
However upon returning to the theater and mending fences with Jesse, Abby arrives and takes Tommy hostage, believing he killed her mates. She shoots Jesse useless in one other surprising dying, main Ellie to beg for Tommy’s life, admitting she’s the responsible get together. Recognizing Ellie from three months earlier than, a bloodthirsty Abby snarls, “I allow you to reside,” and she or he fires the gun because the display screen cuts to black.
‘The Final of Us’ Season 3 Will Closely Characteristic Abby
However this isn’t the tip of it: the finale’s closing moments flash again to “day one” in Seattle, as Abby awakens within the WLF hideout. The trail ahead for the third season instantly grew to become clear. In a proper gambit paying homage to Rashomon, the present will retell the occasions during the last three days in Seattle, this time from the attitude of the WLF, and extra particularly, Abby.
This structural alternative was an enormous a part of what made The Final of Us Half II so impactful as a sport. In depicting Joel’s homicide so early, Neil Druckmann supposed to make the participant need revenge, earlier than forcing them out of Ellie’s perspective and making them look extra objectively on the penalties of her bloodlust. Some followers in current weeks have argued that this season’s revenge plot has felt too one-sided, and that each the WLF and the Seraphites have been underdeveloped, however that’s arguably the purpose: Season 3 will give us their perspective in full.
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It’s no accident that Abby turns into considerably extra sympathetic within the sport’s latter half, as we see her slowly begin to query the WLF’s struggle towards the Seraphites. That is all earlier than she watches her solely mates slowly get killed one after the other. Already, the present hasn’t shied away from the truth that Ellie’s revenge quest is bringing her to some extent of no return, however getting Abby’s half of the story forces us to query who the true villain is, or if there may be even one. In a poetic accident, regardless of not understanding what drove Joel to such murderous lengths that he grew to become the villain in another person’s story, now she’s gone by means of the very same journey.
Admittedly, the episode ends so abruptly that the story merely feels incomplete, and thus it’s not fairly as satisfying an ending as the primary season finale. However it additionally feels surprisingly purposeful in ending abruptly, and greater than something, it teases an thrilling (if probably polarizing) path ahead for the collection, and one that can really feel completely different from something we’ve seen prior from The Final of Us. We’ll probably have one other lengthy wait, however we will’t be extra excited. The Final of Us is streaming on Max.