Rot and Rain: A Season of Decay in The Last of Us

The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us (2023-2025), a show based on the post-apocalyptic video game franchise, is a brutal, polarizing, and emotionally gutting follow-up to the series’ beloved first season. While Season One captured audiences with its tender, slow-burning depiction of love and survival, Season Two shifts its thematic focus to the corrosive consequences of vengeance. The result is a season that is more fragmented, more daring, and, at times, more devastatingly honest than the first. It’s a risk, one that not all fans will embrace, and perhaps HBO’s boldest narrative gamble in years.

The season opens in the relatively peaceful Jackson, Wyoming, where main characters Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Joel (Pedro Pascal) have spent the last five years building a semblance of normalcy. There’s a sense of warmth and routine in these early scenes, with the community offering refuge and Joel making a quiet effort to mend his relationship with Ellie after the events at Salt Lake City in the previous season. That comfort, however, is short-lived. By the end of the second episode, Joel is murdered by a young woman named Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in a scene that’s as shocking in its speed as it is in its cruelty. His death is not at all heroic—it is just the sickening crack of a golf club and the stunned silence of those left behind.

From here, the story fractures. Ellie, consumed by grief and rage, sets off on a mission to hunt down everyone involved in Joel’s murder. She’s joined by her partner Dina (Isabela Merced), and together they navigate a ruined Seattle, now occupied by militant factions and religious cults, chasing ghosts through alleys soaked in rain and blood. At first, the season’s structure feels familiar, similar to the first: another journey across a decaying world. But halfway through, the show makes its most divisive move: it rewinds the clock and retells the first episodes of Season Two from Abby’s perspective. Viewers are forced to spend hours with the woman who killed Joel, to understand her motivations, her losses, her guilt, and her humanity. It’s a jarring shift in empathy, and a brilliant one. The show does not ask you to forgive her; rather, it demands that you understand her, and that’s far more unsettling.

What makes this setup work is the exceptional cinematography. The camera doesn’t linger unless necessary, often making us watch violence in a raw, uncomfortable way instead of dressing it up with flashy effects. Seattle is rendered as a city drowning in its own collapse, every frame weighted with tension. In Season Two of The Last of Us, this visual intensity is palpable, from the suffocating stillness in the mall flashback, where Riley (Storm Reid) and Ellie’s joy is undercut by our dread of what’s coming, to the dimly lit standoff between Ellie and a WLF patrol, where shadows and silence stretch the suspense to a breaking point. The rain becomes a recurring motif; sometimes cleansing, often oppressive. Scenes like Ellie torturing Nora (Tati Gabrielle) in the bowels of a hospital bathed in red emergency lights, or Abby sprinting through burning buildings during a siege, are memorable not just because of what happens, but how they’re shot. Even quieter moments, like Ellie alone at the farmhouse strumming a guitar in silence, or Abby gazing across the flooded remains of Seattle, feel soaked with grief. Each shot is deliberate, saturated with mood, and unafraid to hold us in discomfort.

Across the board, the acting is extraordinary. Ramsey’s portrayal of Ellie in this season is darker, harder, and more volatile than in Season One. One striking example is the scene where Ellie interrogates a prisoner for information about Abby—her voice shaking with rage, her face streaked with blood, and her hands trembling not from fear but from barely restrained fury. There’s no trace of the vulnerable teenager from Season One; Ramsey shows us someone consumed by grief and vengeance, no longer searching for survival but retribution. Ramsey refuses to make Ellie likable; they make her real. Ellie’s descent into obsession is painful to watch precisely because it feels so earned. Dever’s performance as Abby stands out because she makes the character feel deeply complex and layered. Initially painted as a cold-blooded killer, Dever peels back layers of loss, guilt, and reluctant hope with astonishing precision. By the time Abby’s arc intersects with Ellie’s in the final episodes, the audience is no longer sure who they want to survive because they have followed both characters as protagonists. That moral unease is exactly what the show intends to convey.

Season Two’s ambitions occasionally get in the way of its momentum. The dual timelines, while thematically rich, slow the pacing, and not every character introduced in Abby’s half of the narrative is given the time they deserve. Some of the tension that made Season One so accessible—the slow bonding of Joel and Ellie, the spread of the mutated fungus—is lost in a season that is far more introspective and less tidy in its storytelling. Season Two isn’t a thematic and stylistic continuation of the first season, which can be alienating. But to fault the show for this is to misunderstand what it’s trying to do. Season Two isn’t about continuing a journey—it’s about dealing with Season One’s aftermath.

Season Two is a darker mirror of its predecessor. Where the first season asked what love is worth, seen most clearly in Joel’s choice to save Ellie at the cost of humanity’s cure, the second season asks what it costs. That cost is measured in bodies, relationships, and the erosion of identity. Ellie’s love for Joel becomes the engine of her vengeance, driving her to commit acts that leave her physically and emotionally unrecognizable. For Abby, her love for her father and her comrades motivates her own cycle of violence, only to realize too late that revenge doesn't restore what was lost. It’s less resolving, which makes it courageous. Television rarely dares to make its protagonists this morally compromised, or to let audiences sit in the discomfort of their choices. The fact that The Last of Us unflinchingly does so is remarkable.

Looking ahead, Season Three faces the challenge of building the characters back up from the wreckage. More than anything, it needs to deliver clarity on Ellie’s identity, her future, and whether the cycle of violence that has consumed so much of her life can finally be broken.

The Last of Us Season Two is emotionally messy, narratively ambitious, and often profoundly uncomfortable in the way it forces viewers to sit with grief, vengeance, and moral ambiguity. But in a landscape where so much media is engineered to please, this season’s refusal to offer comfortable answers is a powerful statement. This season doesn’t simply pick up where the last left off. It forces its characters, and its audience, into a confrontation with everything they’ve lost and everything they’ve become. In the end, The Last of Us Season Two doesn’t ask to be loved. It asks to be considered.