Episode Review: The Last of Us 2x7 - "Convergence"

Welcome back to the blog readers. It is no secret that I believe The Last of Us (2023-) is the best show on television right now. Everything has been firing on all cylinders for me right now, from the performances to the emotion to the action (where it is). It pains me so that this is the finale for two main reasons: this season was shorter than last season, and we will have to wait another year or two for the third season. For now, what would this finale, titled "Convergence," written by Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin, and directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado? Stick around to find out.

NOTE: I will be using spoilers for my thoughts, so DO NOT read ahead if you have not seen the episode. I also will not be spoiling the video game The Last of Us Part II (2020) on which the season is based.

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You all know how much I love this show and how these creators really get the material they are translating. Despite the online chatter that this season was rushed, incomplete, and not up to the game's standards at all, I saw a complete understanding of the game in this season. Yeah things may have had to be changed around, but it is all in service of telling the best story for television possible. And I believe this finale did that in spades. The spirit of the game is absolutely there and the changes that were made only made the material richer. Bella Ramsey gives an all-time kind of performance and should get them some much-deserved Emmy love. And for the five minutes she was in the episode, Ariela Barer gives a tragic performance of her own.

I first need to talk about the performance of Bella Ramsey as Ellie, but before I do, I need to take a minute to discuss the things this poor person has had to go through. This is not new to them, but since Ellie is the focus of the second season, it is focused more in their direction this time around. The hate Ramsey has been getting is unacceptable in every single way. If you genuinely cannot get behind the performance because you think it is not good, that is completely fine. Not every film or television series is going to be liked by everybody. But to say the most heinous things because Bella Ramsey isn't inherently a supermodel that you can sexualize is disgusting behavior. I see no "outrage" over Isabela Merced's casting as Dina. Or Kaitlyn Dever as Abby. Tati Gabrielle as Nora. Ariela Barer as Mel. Where is the hate for them? Those people are fickle and this show is not for them at all. The looks of someone do not matter to the showrunners. It is solely based on talent, and Ramsey has proven week after week that they have that talent in spades. You forget that they were nominated for an Emmy for the first season. And they will be nominated again, just you wait.

Now I want to talk about Ramey's performance in this episode. Like I said in the previous paragraph, Ramsey has been proving week in and week out that they are more than capable of carrying the torch so confidently lit by Ashley Johnson all those years ago. And it truly is a damn shame that we have to wait who knows how long to be able to see them again. For the first half of this episode, we see them with a stoic look throughout. There is justification for the actions and Ramsey revels in Ellie's thirst for revenge. The highlight scenes for me are when Ellie talks to Dina and later Jesse. She is obsessed with vengeance and she will not stop until she gets it. Ramsey plays this to perfection in both of these scenes. But the real shift happens at the pull of a trigger, and they play off the trauma, the regret, and the guilt so damn well. If their performance in the second, third, or fifth episodes did not warrant the Emmy nomination, it will definitely be for this episode. Ramsey is one of the best young actors we have right now, and I find it crazy they were never classically trained.

Next up I need to talk about the performance of Ariela Barer as Mel. Barer has not really been around in the game for a long time (or had any prominent roles like this), but her first main television role was in Rebel (2021). When she appeared in the first two episodes, I really did not think much of the character. I find it weird that even though her scene is very similar to the game, she can still bring a level of tragedy to the performance that leaves you more scarred than the game did. And just the sheer terror that Barer is able to put into the performance is enough to leave shivers down your spine. And her final moments are just heart-shattering to say the least. I really hope Barer gets to shine more in the third season because she is a star in the making.

I also want to talk about the performance of Young Mazino as Jesse. And sadly, this is the last time I get to talk about his performance because he dead. But in all seriousness, Mazino (who truly has been overlooked in this show thus far) absolutely shines in this episode. There is some much-needed backstory for Jesse that we never got in the game, and Mazino's brutally honest portrayal of the character definitely has you becoming more attracted to the character. And I believe in a way that it makes the eventual fate of this character all the more tragic, considering it plays out exactly how it did in the game. I doubt we will see any of Mazino as Jesse in the third season, but it would definitely be nice to be able to expand on his character a lot more.

Now we have to talk about the story of this episode because it is definitely going to inform a lot of the events of the following seasons of the series. We start where we left off in the fifth episode, where Jesse and Dina have made it back to the theater after being attacked by the Seraphites. Dina still has the arrow in her leg and Jesse uses alcohol to make it easier, but she refuses to drink it due to being pregnant. Jesse is able to get the arrow out of her knee, but is alarmed when she will not drink the alcohol. Ellie makes it back to the theater later on after torturing Nora, and after getting her back cleaned by Dina, she later confides in her the reason they are in Seattle in the first place. Ellie tells her it was easy for her to torture Nora and that she ultimately did not kill her, allowing the infection to take over her body. Dina is unnerved by the whole situation and wants to return to Jackson, and Jesse later agrees to this.

The next morning, Day Three, Ellie and Jesse leave the theater to try to find Tommy so they can return home. She tells Jesse that Nora only mentioned two words before becoming infected: wheel and whale. Jesse is able to ascertain that Ellie is hiding something and the way she acts around Dina is different. He determines that Dina is pregnant and Ellie confirms this. Jesse then tells Ellie that he now is going to be a father and does not want Dina or his unborn child to be anywhere near this war between the WLF and the Seraphites. Meanwhile, Isaac and the WLF are preparing for an attack on "Scar Island" and Isaac is wondering where Abby and her crew are. After Park tells him that Mel and Owen went missing, he confides in her that Abby is supposed to lead the WLF because he believes he is going to die tonight and that she is the best of them.

On the way to a bookstore that Tommy is using as a hideout, Ellie and Jesse narrowly avoid a WLF ambush of a young Seraphite boy. Ellie tries to go after the WLF soldiers, but Jesse stops her and the soldiers wind up taking the boy away. Ellie is upset with Jesse, and when they make it to the bookstore, he reveals to her that he is a community-minded person. So much so in fact that he loved a woman who was traveling from Alberta to Mexico and he refused to go with her because Tommy believes he is the future of Jackson and did not want to let them down. Ellie scolds Jesse over being a "nice person," and the conversation turned argument devolves into WLF radios picking up chatter of a sniper. Realizing it is Tommy, the two make it to the top floor of a building where they try to get a scope of the land.

Ellie sees an aquarium and a Ferris wheel and realizes that Nora was talking about it, and tells Jesse that this is where Abby is. Jesse refuses to go with her because she does everything for selfish reasons, also revealing he voted no at the town hall because of this. He brings up the community again, and Ellie tells him that she was forced to watch her community get beaten to death. She elects to go alone. When night falls, Ellie prepares to steal a boat to ride to the aquarium but the WLF, led by Isaac, pick up two people on the dock and prepare to ride to Seraphite Island to launch their attack. When they leave, Ellie takes the boat and begins her trek, but she is capsized by a wave. She washes up on the island and is captured by Seraphites that begin the "ritual" of cutting out her intestines. The WLF attack begins and the Seraphites are forced to abandon Ellie and she makes her way to the aquarium.

Once there, she stumbles on a mess of a scene but she also sees Mel and Owen discussing Abby. Ellie confronts the two and they realize what is happening. Ellie tells them to point to Abby's location on the map one at a time to live (a move Joel would always do). Owen volunteers to do it but goes for a gun. Ellie shoots him in the neck as self-defense but both her and Mel realize the bullet struck Mel's jugular too. Mel, in her dying breath, reveals she is pregnant and asks Ellie to give her an emergency C-section to save the baby. Shocked and stunned, Ellie does not do this as Mel dies from her wounds. She finds Tommy and Jesse made their way to the aquarium and bring a traumatized Ellie back to the theater.

Later on, Tommy prepares for the four to go back to Jackson, while Ellie and Jesse are talking. Jesse asks Ellie if she is ready to go home, and Ellie says even though she is upset Abby gets to live, she will have to make peace with the fact that she is still alive and her friends are dead. Jesse also reveals he went back on his own accord to save Ellie and that he knew she would burn the world down to save him if he were in trouble. They then hear a commotion in the concourse and run up to the door. As soon as they burst through the door, Jesse is shot dead and Ellie ducks for cover. A voice tells her to discard her weapon, and Ellie does it and stands up to find Abby pointing a gun at Tommy. Ellie tries to beg for Tommy's life and reveals it was not him who killed her friends (as she assumed), but her, and she was only looking for her. Ellie tells her she knows why she killed Joel and it was because of her. She is the one Abby wants, and Aby rebukes her by saying she let her live and she wasted it with a gunshot breaking out as the screen cuts to black. In a flashback, Manny wakes Abby as the two have been summoned by Isaac and Abby looks out over the WLF base, which is in a former sports stadium.

There is so much juicy content that we can get into with this week's finale, and I want to start on this little note. This involves Ellie and Dina's first conversation in this episode. In this conversation, Ellie opens up to Dina about her reasoning to want to go to Seattle and bearing it all out there. She admits what Joel did, she admits she knew, and she admits she found it easy to torture Nora for the information she wound up getting. This plays into what we see later in this episode and what we will see in future seasons of this series. We can clearly see that Dina is getting more and more upset with Ellie and her quest for revenge, and we can see that quest for revenge being turned into an obsession for Ellie, something the showrunners were talking about in the little behind-the-scenes video that played after the episode. If you know the game, you know that bad things are ahead for the relationship of Ellie and Dina.

I next want to talk about the idea that Jesse gets some more backstory in the show than he did in the game. The reason for this I think is similar to the reasoning I have had for other things as well. When we are playing a video game from someone's perspective such as Arthur Morgan (and later John Marston) in my favorite game of all time Red Dead Redemption II (2018), we are locked into that character's point of view so we never get backstory for any of the side characters. A television series is very liberating because you can get behind a lot of characters and support them without being locked in to the narrative from one perspective. And I think seeing Jesse's backstory was a brilliant stroke of genius because it adds to the depths of all our characters. It creates a whole world and is better backstory than the game ever did. I hope we see more of that in the third season because we deserve it.

Next up I want to talk about the differences between Jesse and Ellie's worldviews for a brief moment. When we first meet Jesse, we see someone who just feels expendable to the story but turns out to be a pretty crucial character to the narrative. And the aforementioned backstory we got of him makes the character out to be somewhat of a holier-than-thou figure that truly puts others before himself, hence why he voted no at the town hall to send people to Seattle. But Ellie is basically the total opposite of Jesse, in that she was molded by Joel and she really meant it when she told Jesse that her community was killed while she was forced to watch. She is ready to burn the world down to go to bat for the people she loves and you will be damned to stand in her way. This is the difference between the two, and I think it all comes down to love.

I want to spend some time now talking about the big decision that Ellie makes near the end of this episode and how far she realizes she has fallen on her quest for revenge. This was a prevalent topic in the game and the scene almost plays out the exact same. Ellie's killing of Mel and Owen makes her realize she has gone too far in her bloodlust, and having Mel be pregnant is absolutely something you had to do to bring it all back around for her as a character. She has spent too long obsessing over Abby and her friends, and in the process she has begun pushing people like Dina away. I alluded to the fact that there will be a breaking point for Dina, and she will reach it whenever the climax of Part II is visited in this series. Ellie will truly see how far gone she has become when her quest for revenge reaches its climax and it truly will break your heart. I know it will break mine.

And finally, I want to talk about the highly-controversial end of the episode. The scene plays out basically beat-for-beat how it does in the game, and it still has the same dramatic effect. This is the true convergence in the episode's title, and it basically has turned into looking in a mirror for Ellie. She sees someone in Abby that has been affected by that same cycle of violence that she was. It will not see the light of day now, but Ellie will come to realize they are more alike than she, or any of us, had thought. Ellie is too blinded by revenge for Abby to be able to see her as anything more than the endgame of her bloodlust, and Abby now sees Ellie as being in her way to get justice for her friends. When we get into next season, and the context we are going to get in terms of the other perspective, it is absolutely going to infuriate some people, but I think it is brilliant because Ellie and Abby are basically the same person, and getting to see Abby's point of view next season (Catherine O'Hara called the third season the "Abby story") is going to recontextualize exactly what I am talking about. Even though I still do not like the ending of the second game, I have been able to better appreciate the overall messaging of it.

The Last of Us ends a strong second season on a very high note, leaving us on a cliffhanger for the ages and wanting us to salivate at the thought of getting more of this series. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.