The Last of Us season 2: Mark Kermode’s TV review. Fungi, feelings, and a golf club to the soul.
In the warm spring of 2025, just when you thought your PTSD from The Last of Us Season 1 had mellowed to a manageable thrum, HBO dropped Season 2 on our fragile hearts like a sack of infected mushrooms. Yes, the post-pandemic misery-fest based on Naughty Dog’s celebrated video game franchise is back, and this time it’s personal. Very personal. Golf-club-to-the-head personal.
Picking up five years after Joel’s ethically murky hospital massacre-cum-rescue operation, Season 2 transports us back to Jackson, Wyoming, where Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are trying their best to cosplay as emotionally functional human beings. Spoiler: it doesn’t go well. Of course, it was never going to go well. This is The Last of Us, not Little House on the Prairie with Zombies.
Ellie is older now, harder, more world-weary—but still wielding her deadpan humour and guitar like dual weapons. Joel, meanwhile, is quieter, guiltier, and possibly even more haunted than last season, which is impressive considering he already looked like he hadn’t slept since the Cordyceps hit the fan in 2003.
The show wastes no time in reminding us that actions have consequences—especially actions like killing an entire hospital full of doctors, nurses and hopeful Fireflies. Enter Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), daughter of the slain surgeon, who, quite understandably, would like a word (and a swing) with Joel. The resulting reunion is… messy. Emotionally. Viscerally. Osteologically.
Season 2 adapts the polarising The Last of Us Part II game with surgical precision and a heavy emotional scalpel. It’s a bleaker, bloodier tale, exploring not just revenge, but the cost of becoming what you hate to avenge what you love. Think Hamlet with spores and military-grade trauma.
The supporting cast is excellent. Isabela Merced brings warmth and spark to Dina, Ellie’s love interest, while Young Mazino’s Jesse exudes stoic charm. Gabriel Luna’s Tommy remains the group’s moral compass—even if it’s a bit rusty. And there’s a cavalcade of WLF (Washington Liberation Front) types you’ll get to know—many of whom you’ll like just in time to regret it.
The directing line-up includes returnees Craig Mazin and Peter Hoar alongside new hands like Kate Herron (Loki) and Mark Mylod (Succession), which helps explain why every episode feels like it’s trying to emotionally flatten you in a slightly different cinematic flavour. The tone vacillates between heart-wrenching, pulse-pounding, and outright cruel. It’s a series that is not afraid to show the rot inside, both fungal and human.
Is it perfect? No. The pacing is occasionally off, particularly as the season sets up for what will clearly be a third act spread over Season 3 (because HBO loves a multi-season agony arc). But even its uneven bits feel deliberate—this is a world where the resolution is murky, and the journey is all jagged edges and moral bruises.
The action is brutal, the production design once again jaw-dropping (shout out to British Columbia for making post-collapse America look gorgeously grim), and the writing never once talks down to its audience. Gustavo Santaolalla’s returning score weaves its melancholy magic over everything like a ghostly lullaby hummed by someone sharpening a machete.
Viewers responded in kind—5.3 million tuned in on premiere night, a 13% increase from Season 1, proving that audiences love a good cry in the apocalypse. And let’s be honest, here at SFcrowsnest, we do too.
So grab your emotional support mushroom plushie and prepare to once again feel everything—and then some. Because if this season teaches us anything, it’s that the real horror isn’t the monsters outside, it’s the choices inside. And the golf clubs. Always the golf clubs.
Roll on Season 3. We’re not OK… and that’s OK.
