This Sunday, the second season of The Last of Us will come to an end. At only seven episodes long, the season feels a bit short, but they did pack a lot in. Joel (Pedro Pascal) died early on, killed by a new character named Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is now on a quest to avenge him. It's brought her to post-apocalyptic Seattle, where she's hunting Abby while trying to avoid both hungry zombies and warring human factions.
If you've played The Last of Us Part II video game, you know that, around this point in the story, players stop playing as Ellie and start playing as Abby, seeing how the events in Seattle play out from her perspective. My bet is that the third season, which is already confirmed, will mostly revolve around Abby, which could be a challenge for fans mad that she...y'know...killed the main character. It'll be an interesting season of TV when it airs.
Showrunner Craig Mazin doesn't say explicitly what's in store, but does tell Collider that they're breaking season 3 right now. getting everything ready. "They’re fun challenges because so much of it is trying to figure out, 'Okay, we do have these puzzle pieces. We have these moments and these decisions that we love and want to do, but we can’t get to them the same way we do in the game. We have to move some things around and we have to change some things and alter things and allow our minds to go away from the game in order to come back to it.' But all those decisions get made before I start writing. I don’t like to experiment while I’m writing. The experimenting should happen before. We have a master plan and we understand how everything works. That way, when you see things happening in this episode, you understand they’re connected back to the very first episode. It's a holistic thing."
Season 3, when it comes, will get us better acquainted with the likes of the Washington Liberation Front, aka the Wolves; and the Seraphites, the weird religious types who are fighting each other for control of Seattle. Mostly they've been in the background up to now. "[E]verything has been thought through carefully," Mazin assures fans. "No, you haven’t gotten all the information you deserve. Yes, the information will be coming. We did this all by design."
The rat king is (probably) coming in The Last of Us season 3
That's all in line with the idea that the third season will revolve around Abby, who's a member of the WLF and who gets to know some of the Seraphites very well. Also, remember the recent episode where Ellie went down into a basement of a Seattle hospital where the cordyceps had taken over so thoroughly that corrupted people were breathing infectious spores into the air? Well, there's a basement below that where things are even worse. Abby goes down there in her half of the game. Mazin doesn't explicitly say that the show will follow suit, but he drops some hard-to-miss hints.
"Our whole thing about the spores is that we thought, when we do them, we want to do them because they need to happen with the way the story is functioning," Mazin said. "There is this notion of descent and what is lurking beneath as we go deeper down. They mention B1, B2, and B3. We never hear about B3, so maybe we’ll find out what’s down there next season, but B2 is really bad."
I won't spoil things here, but we will definitely find out what's down there next season; the show would be crazy not to adapt that iconic set piece from the game.
The Last of Us boss wants to end the show with season 4
So will The Last of Us end with season 3? HBO hasn't made anything official, but if Craig Mazin has his way, it'll go another season after that. "I think there’s a decent chance that Season 3 will be longer than Season 2, just because the manner of that narrative and the opportunities it affords us are a little different," he said. "The thing about Joel’s death is that it’s so impactful. It’s such a narrative nuclear bomb that it’s hard to wander away from it. We can’t really take a break and move off to the side and do a Bill and Frank story. I’m not sure that will necessarily be true for Season 3. I think we’ll have a little more room there. But certainly, there’s no way to complete this narrative in a third season. Hopefully, we’ll earn our keep enough to come back and finish it in a fourth. That’s the most likely outcome."
Unfortunately, it'll likely be a while before we're watching season 3; Isabela Merced, who plays Dina, thinks they may start filming in 2026, which means we wouldn't be watching new episodes until 2027 at the earliest. Hopefully they get moving faster than that.
"We always think ahead," Mazin continued. "We thought ahead to Season 3 and Season 4, to try to get as much visibility as we can, so that we don’t end up in a situation where we’re sitting down and getting into details for a season and then going, 'Oh, man, if only we hadn’t had that person say that one line or be in that spot or wear that jacket, this would be so much cooler.' So, we really do try to think things through fundamentally. The challenge for our first season was, how do we tell this big story in a way that’s complete and doable within an amount of time and with the budget we have? And with this season, it was, 'Okay, this source material goes way beyond one season.'"
The Last of Us season 2 may end in a cliffhanger
Maybe we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. The season 2 finale of The Last of Us airs this Sunday night on HBO and HBO Max. Mazin shared one last tease for the road:
"Now, we’re actually in more of a traditional cliffhangery mode, where you’re telling a story, and then you end the season with something that says, 'Whoa, this is going to change a whole bunch of things, and we’ll see you when we get back and pick it up from there.'"
"We ask ourselves a lot of questions and we think about what we ought to do when we think about what the narrative that exists affords us and that we should do. I’m always thinking about, what are the things that only The Last of Us does? Let’s do those as much as we can. And then, you go for it and you make your decisions and mostly just try as best as you can to think about the audience experience and how they’re going to feel when they arrive at the end of something. Hopefully, we set them up to want to return when we come back for the next run."
Hopefully.
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