The Last of Us season 2 failed Ellie in service of safe TV

Without interactivity, the Ellie Williams that players know from the Last of Us games was never going to be the same person as the character who appeared on a television screen on Sunday nights. But by the time season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us reached its finale, it became evident that the TV version of the games’ immune teen protagonist isn’t just an alternate interpretation. Ellie’s character from the games has been butchered, and the show is worse for it.

Despite a long list of differences between the games and Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s screen adaptation, there was reason to be hopeful at first. In season 1, The Last of Us made a convincing case for an Ellie mired in teenage rebellion. The TV version of Ellie (played by Bella Ramsey) was comparatively defiant and immature, but that framing was believable for someone who was only 14 when the show began. And I didn’t entirely mind that the adaptation veered from the game version of Ellie, because some of the changes were positive. For instance, the show made space for Ellie’s sexuality from the beginning, whereas fans of the game might not have realized that Ellie was gay until the downloadable content for the base 2013 game arrived a year after launch.

In The Last of Us Part 2, Ellie’s character arc takes a sharp turn. Years after the events of the first game, we meet a hardened version of the character who has been molded in the image of Joel, her mentor and father figure. She shows flashes of tenderness, especially when the game introduces her romance with Dina, a fellow survivor. But the combination of the horrific events she’s faced, including Joel’s death, leaves players with a stoic Ellie. If she emotes, it’s with a razing anger that’s only tempered by her obsession with revenge. Meticulous and above all capable, game-Ellie is a killer.

Season 2 of the show, by contrast, offers a take on Ellie that’s infantilizing at best, and neutered at worst. She comes off as childish and naïve, particularly in the way she handles her relationships. She’s certainly capable of murder — her tolerance for violence is probably unusually high for her Jackson, Wyoming community. But where other people try to be reasonable and careful, plotting out how to survive in a dangerous situation, Ellie is ruled by impulse. She will put everyone in danger just to stave off her own boredom, and she picks fights for no reason.

Arguably, there’s something brazen about the idea of a single person trying to go up against an entire army of people who are all surrounded by zombies, as the second game depicts. But Ellie is Joel’s daughter, at least in spirit. Joel was the type of man who could mow down an entire hospital full of soldiers, even after starting that chapter of the game unarmed. When Ellie takes risks in the games, they’re calculated. There’s no guarantee she’ll succeed when she decides to hunt down Joel’s killer, Abby. But the possibility feels tangible enough to justify her setting off on her own to take on an entire faction of militants.

Ellie in season 2 of the show, on the other hand, bumbles her way to Seattle. She has close calls left and right, but they don’t come off as the realities of living in a hostile world, so much as a lack of foresight and ability. At one point near the end of the season, Ellie once again goes off on her own to track down Abby, and immediately almost dies. Dina seems like a more competent soldier than Ellie: Dina can triangulate positions on a map and plan routes, but the show presents Ellie as her boneheaded tag-along.

This direction for Ellie’s character is particularly nonsensical when her backstory in the show is that she was being trained to be a FEDRA leader. It’s confusing that Ellie isn’t the brawn of the operation to find Abby: If anything, she’s the mission’s biggest liability. The moments where she and Dina get into deep trouble are always because of a decision Ellie made. In one instance in season 2, Ellie pushes to enter a location she knows is infested by zombies, and — surprise! — is immediately overtaken by a slew of abnormally smart undead. The fumbles are so pervasive that the very premise of the story — Ellie trying to get revenge for Joel’s death, despite unfavorable odds — becomes completely unbelievable.

In place of the cold-blooded assassin we control in the games, the show leaves us with a paternalistic depiction of Ellie. The show spends a lot of time focusing on Dina’s pregnancy, and entire scenes that do not happen in the game are devoted to moments like watching Ellie pick out a book for the baby. That could have been a wholesome shift, but the show’s writing doesn’t pull it off. The scene where Ellie exclaims that she’s going to be a father, for example, isn’t touching: The performance is awkward.

Later, when Ellie accidentally shoots Abby’s friend Mel, the character dies begging Ellie to save her baby with an emergency C-section. In the games, Ellie does not realize Mel is pregnant until after she dies. The tweak makes for a darker scene, but in service of telling a regressive story where both women are more focused on whether Mel’s baby can be saved than on Mel’s life — a case of women being whittled down to their biological functions.

Possibly, Mazin and Neil Druckmann encouraged these narrative changes in the service of establishing more overt familial themes. The show spends time depicting Joel’s childhood abuse and his relationship with his father, and when he dies, Ellie has to consider how to carry on her father figure’s legacy. But there’s no way around the fact that Joel’s legacy is violence. This is why Ellie is basically an assassin in the games, and why she is motivated to hunt down Abby in the first place. The main thing Joel taught Ellie is the effectiveness of force and the importance of being ruthless, even at the expense of your own happiness.

Ellie in the games barely seems to care about Dina’s baby, though, which might be jarring for audiences predisposed to be judgmental about the way mothers raise their children. While the show seems preoccupied with babies and motherhood, it doesn’t present parenthood as a pathway for Ellie to develop as an adult. If anything, her newfound concern for building a family when she repeatedly shows little concern for anyone’s safety comes off as naive and cliché.

In interviews, Mazin and Druckmann justify the changes to Ellie’s character in ways that categorically underestimate her, despite everything we see her do in the games. For instance, in the show, Ellie kills both Mel and Owen largely by accident. In the games, the deaths are intentional enough that the player is presented with a quick time event that requires mashing a button to ensure Ellie slices through Mel’s neck. Why make the change? According to Mazin, it’s because Ellie taking on both Mel and Owen isn’t realistic.

“You look at Bella and you look at [Owen actor] Spencer Lord, he’s 6’4″ and just incredibly imposing,” Mazin told The Hollywood Reporter. “A physical struggle wasn’t going to go well, and [Ellie is] not there to kill them. She just wants to kill Abby.”

The more Mazin describes the thought process behind the ways the show diverges from the games, the more it seems like the writers did not understand Ellie as a character. And that fundamental misunderstanding can’t beget a compelling interpretation that deviates from the source material. In Mazin’s podcast breakdown of the season 2 finale, he said “Abby is seemingly not like Ellie, in that Abby is incredibly competent.” Except the entirety of The Last of Us Part 2 is all about Ellie’s terrifying propensity for violence. At one point, the game even flips perspective and forces players to try and escape Ellie’s wrath. It’s one of the most difficult and scary portions of the game.

Personally, I didn’t need Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us to be the exact person portrayed in the games. What would be the point? Thanks to the remasters, some of us have played the games twice already; if anything, a different take on Ellie is a welcome idea for a series that’s bordering on oversaturation.

At the 2025 Dice Summit, Druckmann shared a conversation he had with series co-star Pedro Pascal, who was getting frustrated with Druckmann’s directing on the show. As Druckmann recalls, Pascal asked him, “Do you like art?”

After the finale, it’s tempting to read Pascal’s question as an indictment of the season as a whole. The direction of the show comes off as though Mazin and Druckmann were afraid to trust that their audience would be receptive to a woman who is a cold-blooded killer. It wouldn’t be believable. But their idea of making palatable TV seems to require them turning their protagonist into a childish amateur, and in doing so, the show betrays the original story.