This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 episode 7. With its season 2 finale, The Last of Us, the show takes viewers back to Seattle, delivering an epic final episode that ends Ellie’s (Bella Ramsey) arc of the story, for now, and sets up Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever). Ellie and Dina’s (Isabela Merced) journey has only gotten more and more dangerous with violence between the W.L.F. and Seraphites continuing to ramp up. Now that Jesse (Young Mazino) and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) are in the picture, the stakes are even higher to make sure that everyone makes it back to Jackson alive. But just because more of her chosen family is in danger doesn’t mean that Ellie will give up the hunt for Abby so easily. Here’s everything that goes down in the season 2 finale of The Last of Us. Ellie’s Return The episode begins with Dina and Jesse back in the theater. Jesse is tending to Dina’s wound and realizes he has to push the arrow through her leg to avoid further damage to her arteries. Even though tensions are high, it’s clear that the two still care about each other, even if their feelings are no longer romantic. Not long after Jesse sends Dina off to rest, Ellie returns, and immediately starts looking for Dina. She finds her resting in the dressing room, and the two share a tender moment taking care of each other. Ellie checks on Dina’s wound and Dina starts to dress Ellie’s scrapes and bruises. Dina reassures Ellie that the baby is okay and asks Ellie what happened after they got separated. Ellie tells her that she found Nora, but only got two words from her to indicate where Abby is “whale” and “wheel.”  Ellie also confesses that she left Nora to die and succumb to the Cordyceps infection, and that it was easier to hurt her than she thought it was going to be. Dina tries to reassure Ellie that maybe Nora got what she deserved – Nora was the one who held Ellie down and forced her to watch Joel die after all. But Ellie isn’t so sure. She tells Dina about Salt Lake City and what she learned about that day from Nora, that Abby’s father was among the Fireflies that Joel killed. Dina is surprised by this and seems to be realizing that maybe they aren’t so different from Abby and her crew after all. She tells Ellie that they need to go home. Finding Tommy The next morning, Jesse and Ellie head off into Seattle to try and find Tommy. Jesse asks Ellie what’s up with Dina after she declined a drink the night before and insisted that she can’t die. He guesses that she’s pregnant, and Ellie accidentally confirms it, not realizing that Jesse is just guessing. This makes Jesse’s desire to go back to Jackson even stronger, and tells Ellie that now he can’t die for her revenge quest either. As the rain starts to pour, Ellie and Jesse seek refuge in a parking garage, only to nearly be caught in the crossfire between the W.L.F. and the Seraphites. The W.L.F. chase a young Seraphite into the garage, stripping him down and dragging him off. Ellie wants to intervene, stop the W.L.F. from killing the kid, but Jesse holds her back because he doesn’t want to die for a war they have no stake in.  They make it to Jesse and Tommy’s rendezvous point, a bookstore, but Tommy is nowhere to be found. Ellie picks up a children’s book to give to Dina while they wait and tries to have a heart to heart with Jesse about her and Dina’s feelings for each other. Jesse tells Ellie that he fell for a girl who came through Jackson a while back, but that he let her go to fulfill his duty to Jackson. He emphasizes the fact that he was taught to put other people first, and this sets Ellie off. But their argument is interrupted by chatter on the walkie talkie. The W.L.F. are talking about a sniper that sounds an awful lot like Tommy. The Search for Abby Ellie and Jesse go to higher ground to find a way to where Tommy might be, but Ellie gets distracted when she sees the aquarium in the distance. She sees a ferris wheel and realizes that that is likely what Nora was talking about. Jesse insists that they need to go save Tommy from the W.L.F., but Ellie argues that he’d want her to follow this lead. She becomes singularly focused, pushing Jesse to let her follow this lead. Jesse tells her that he voted no back in Jackson because he could see the selfishness in Ellie’s plan, and that it wasn’t for the good of the community. Ellie fights back, saying that Jesse isn’t morally superior just because he puts others first. He let a kid die earlier because he wasn’t in their community. She tells him that she had to watch her community beaten to death in front of her, and that Jesse would do the same if he was in her shoes. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The two part ways, and Ellie makes her way to the aquarium on her own, nearly dying by both the stormy weather and a group of zealous Seraphites along the way. But despite all of the dangers she encounters in her path, she makes it to the aquarium, finding not Abby, but Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer) instead. The two are arguing about whether or not to go after Abby, wherever she’s gone, and don’t notice that Ellie’s there until it’s too late. She tries to get them to point to Abby’s location on the map, as Joel has done before, but Owen reaches for a gun under the table. Ellie reacts, shooting him in the neck. The bullet goes through him and nicks Mel’s neck accidentally. Ellie panics, rushing to Mel’s side as she gives Ellie instructions to try and save her unborn child. Ellie is clearly shaken, sitting there holding her knife as Mel bleeds out. Tommy and Jesse eventually rush in, taking in the carnage. Tommy holds Ellie and tries to comfort her while Jesse is visibly shaken, as though he knows that this could be him and Dina if they stay in Seattle much longer. What Are the W.L.F. Planning? Meanwhile, the W.L.F. seem to be using the cover of the rainstorm to plan an assault on the Seraphites. On top of planning this, Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) is also looking for Abby, confessing to Sergeant Park that he’s been planning for her to take over the W.L.F. after him. He seems ready to die for his crusade against the Seraphites and wants someone he can trust to lead the army after his death.  It’s fortuitous for Ellie that Isaac is planning this raid. On her way to the Aquarium, she gets caught by a group of Seraphites that are ready to hang and gut her like a fish, until they hear alarm bells from their village. Anyone who is familiar with The Last of Us Part II knows that this attack on the Seraphites plays a big role in Abby’s story and will likely be featured more in-depth next season. Theater Showdown Jesse, Tommy, and Ellie make it back to the theater in one piece, the W.L.F. and Seraphites presumably too distracted by their conflict to pay them much mind. Tommy and Jesse start planning the journey back to Jackson, agreeing to leave as soon as the rain lets up enough to transport Dina safely. Tommy tries to reassure Ellie that Owen and Mel made their choice when they helped Abby kill Joel, and leaves for the lobby to pack. Ellie still doesn’t seem quite ready to leave Seattle with Abby still out there, but has seemed to finally realize how much danger she’s putting the others in by staying.  She and Jesse have a heart to heart and Ellie actually apologizes to Jesse for leaving him behind. Jesse accepts her apology, saying that he knows that she would “set the world on fire” to save him too. Their heartfelt moment is unfortunately short-lived, as they both hear a violent commotion out in the lobby. They rush through the doors, and Jesse is immediately shot dead. Realizing that Abby has found them, she tosses her gun to the side and puts her hands in the air. She pleads with Abby to let Tommy go, not wanting to watch Abby kill another person she loves. Abby tells Ellie that she wasted the second chance she gave her and the screen cuts to black as we hear a gunshot in the background. We’ll likely have to wait until next season to see who fired the gun and who or what was shot. Seattle Day One: Abby Edition The episode ends by going back in time a few days. We see Abby wake up to news that Isaac wants to meet with her. She walks around what appears to be a W.L.F. base of some sort, and the final shot of the episode includes Abby looking out into an old stadium that has now been fashioned into a home.  In The Last of Us Part II, this is where players pick up Abby’s story again and get to control her as a true protagonist of the game. The game follows her over the course of the same three days that we’ve been following Ellie in Seattle, and her arc and perspective are just as important to this story as Ellie’s are. Abby has been a controversial character in the games, but hopefully viewers will keep an open mind as the show transitions to Abby’s side of the story next season.

We made it, everybody. We’ve reached the end of HBO’s The Last of Us. Wait, sorry, I’m getting word in my earpiece that…we’re only halfway done with it because this show’s going for four seasons. At this point, I’m mostly feeling deflated. Last week’s episode was such a catastrophic bummer that it cemented for me that the show fundamentally misunderstands The Last of Us Part II, the game this season and those that are still yet to come are adapting. But you know how your mother would tell you not to play ball in the house because you might accidentally break the priceless vase on display in the living room? Well, if you’ve already broken the vase, you might as well keep playing ball, so we’ll probably be doing this song and dance into 2029. For now, we’re on the season two finale, which essentially wraps up Ellie’s side of this condensed revenge story and reveals the premise of season three. Most game fans probably assumed this was where the season would end and, if nothing else, it’s still a bold cliffhanger to leave off on.Suggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishSuggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go HigherGuilty as chargedAfter last week’s flashback-heavy episode, we open on Jesse (Young Mazino) tending to wounds the Seraphites have inflicted on Dina (Isabela Merced), which means we get a real heinous scene of him doing some amateur surgeon’s work to remove the arrow she took to the knee. He douses it in alcohol and offers her a sip to dull the pain, but she staunchly refuses without explaining why. They made Jesse an asshole in this show, but he’s still a smart guy. The gears start turning in his head about why she might turn down a swig right now. Nevertheless, he takes that motherfucker out with no anesthetic, booze, or supportive bedside girlfriend to help Dina through it.Speaking of the absent girlfriend, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) finally returns to their theater base of operations. Now that she’s back, all her concern is on Dina, but Jesse is still wondering where the hell she’s been this whole time. Dina is resting backstage, and even though we only see these details for a few minutes, I once again want to shout out the set designers who recreated this little safe haven, which is covered in old show posters and graffiti from bands and artists that performed there before the cordyceps took over. I’m sure Joel would have loved to have seen it.Dina stirs awake and Ellie checks her wound. Jesse’s effort to wrap the injury leaves a lot to be desired, but it should heal in time. Ellie asks if the baby’s alright, and Dina says it’s okay.“How do you know?” Ellie asks.“I just do,” Dina replies.The one who is not okay in the room is Ellie, who is bleeding through the back of her shirt. Dina helps her undress and starts to clean the scratches on her back. As she does, she asks what happened while they were separated. Ellie says she found Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and she knew where Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) was, but only said two words: “Whale” and “Wheel.” Ellie says she doesn’t know what it meant. It could have been nonsense. She was infected, and it was already starting to affect her cognitive state.“I made her talk,” Ellie whispers. “I thought it would be harder to do, but it wasn’t. It was easy. I just kept hurting her.”Image: HBODina asks if Ellie killed her, but she says she just “left her,” meaning that somewhere in this timeline, Nora is wandering the depths of a Seattle hospital with broken legs and an infected mind. I thought the show couldn’t possibly concoct a worse fate for her than what happens in the game, but they found a way. It takes commitment to put down a character like showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have done for Nora across both video games and television. Personally, I think when you already know that people are wary of the way you treat one of the few Black women in your franchise as if she doesn’t deserve the same dignity as everyone else, maybe you should do better by her when given a second chance, rather than worse. But that’s just me. I’m not the one being paid a bunch of money to butcher this story on HBO Max every Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern. So what do I know?Maybe this is just part of the contrived sadism the show has attached to Ellie. She thinks violence is easy and it comes naturally to her, so I guess she would beat a woman nearly to death until the fungal infection made her lose her mind. Meanwhile the game version is so traumatized by what she’s done in this moment, she’s practically speechless by the time she reaches the theater. God, I knew this shit was going to happen. Mazin has repeatedly insisted that Ellie is an inherently violent individual, something he’s communicated both in interviews and by having Catherine O’Hara’s Gail, the therapist who tells you what the story is about, say that she’s always been a sadist, probably. Now, when we get to moments like the post-Nora debrief which used to convey that Ellie is Not Cut Out For This Shit, the framing instead becomes “Ellie likes violence and feels bad about how much she likes violence.”Before The Last of Us Part II came out, a lot of Naughty Dog’s promotion for the game was kind of vague and even deceptive in an effort to keep its biggest twists under wraps, and some of the messaging it used to talk about the game’s themes have irrevocably set a precedent for how the game’s story is talked about years later. When the game was first revealed in 2016, the studio said the story would be “about hate,” which paints a much more destructive and myopic picture of Ellie’s journey than the one driven by love and grief she actually experiences through the course of the game.One of the most annoying things about being a Last of Us fan is that its creators love to talk about the series in ways that erase its emotional complexity, making it sound more cynical and underhanded when the actual story it’s telling is anything but. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people reductively parroting notions that The Last of Us Part II is just about “hate” and “guilting the player” for taking part in horrifying actions when they literally have no choice but to do so, rather than cracking the text open and dissecting that nuance. Mazin’s openly-expressed belief that Ellie is an intrinsically bloodthirsty person similarly bleeds into how a lot of the public perceives her as a character, seeing her as a violent ruffian rather than a grieving daughter who was only ever taught to express her pain by inflicting it on those who made her feel it in the first place. Discussing these games as a fan means having to fight against these notions, but they’re born from a game built on subtext, and thus willingly opens itself to those interpretations.Its willingness to dwell in ambiguity only makes it a more fascinating text to unpack, or it would, if we lived in a world where discussing video games wasn’t a volatile experience in which you constantly run the risk of being targeted for performative online dunks, or running up against rabid console tribalism. Now, the Last of Us show has decided to lean into the most boring interpretation of what this story is about without an ounce of subtlety, nuance, or even sympathy for Ellie’s plight. She is a sadist who does terrible things not simply because she’s grieving her father figure, but because this is just who she is. Mazin has deemed it so, and here we are, and this vision of her will no doubt weave itself into the fabric of how we talk about Ellie Williams, even in the game.This story only has any thematic weight if Ellie’s violent outbursts are rooted in pain, not pleasure. Yeah, what we’re seeing in the show is her acting from a mix of those things but, in the game at least, the most affecting moments of Ellie’s Seattle revenge tour happen when she has to confront how she is not built for acts of violent excess in the same way Joel was. She never has been. Back in Part I, she was sick to her stomach when she committed her first kill to save Joel, and the entire point of Part II was that we see her cut off parts of herself to do what she feels she must, only to find that she’s unable to recognize herself when it’s all over. In the show, she is instead mesmerized by carnage, only to decide she doesn’t like that she feels that way, actually. But all this self-reflection is fleeting, because she’s only killed one person on her list, and there’s a lot more work to do. How many Joels is Nora’s life worth to Ellie? One-fifth?While Ellie is wrestling with these feelings, Dina is about to see things with more clarity than ever. At first, she says that Nora may have deserved this fate worse than death, to which Ellie says “Maybe she didn’t,” before telling her girlfriend everything. She tearfully recounts Joel’s massacre of the Fireflies at the base in Salt Lake City, how the group was going to use her immunity to create a cure, and how Joel killed Abby’s father to save her. Dina puts it all together and asks Ellie if she knew who Abby’s group was. She says she didn’t, but she did know what Joel did. Dina sits with that for a moment, then flatly says the group needs to go home.So I guess this is how the show gets Dina, who’s been pretty revenge-hungry thus far, back onto the track she’s on in the games. Without spoiling scenes in the late game for the uninitiated, some major points of conflict at the end of Part II require her to be less on-board with Ellie’s vendetta, so the fact that she’s been egging her girlfriend on to track down Abby was an odd choice. I wasn’t sure how the show would handle it down the line, but it seems the way HBO’s show has course-corrected was by having her condemn Joel’s actions. Dina had her own relationship with the old man in the show, so I imagine that in a later season she’ll interrogate how she feels about him in light of this new information, but having her more or less get off the ride when she learns what Joel has done sets up a contrast between her and Ellie that I’m curious to see how the show handles.The shame of it, though, is that this is just one more thing that undermines one of the core foundations of the source material, and I have to get at least one more jab in on this topic before we end the season. In The Last of Us Part II, when you look at what is actually expressed in dialogue, you see that characters are often lacking important information about each other. This lack of communication is an important part of its storytelling, but the show is instead having characters tell everyone everything. In Part II, Joel and Ellie don’t know who Abby’s father was. It’s strongly implied that no one other than Joel, Ellie, and Tommy knew about what happened in Salt Lake City, not even Dina. The more the show bridges these gaps of communication, the more senseless this entire tit-for-tat feels. To be clear, it was senseless in the game, but it was in a tragic, “these people are so blinded by their emotions that they can’t fathom another path forward” sort of way. This time around, everyone knows exactly what’s happening and chooses to partake in violence anyway. We don’t have any mystery or lack of communication to fall back on as a we struggle to understand why the characters keep making these self-destructive decisions. Everyone is just knowingly the worst version of themselves this time around, and I guess Mazin thinks that’s the point, which is the kind of boring interpretation that makes the show such an inferior version of this story.Family mattersWe now begin our third day in Seattle. Ellie and Jesse are packing up to get going in the theater lobby. The plan is to find Tommy (Gabriel Luna) somewhere in the city and then head back to Jackson. However, Jesse is a lot less talkative this morning. Dina limps into the lobby, and after a brief scolding for being on her feet, she gives Ellie a bracelet for good luck.“I’m not sure it’s been working for you,” Ellie jokes.“I’m alive,” Dina replies.Jesse is clearly uncomfortable watching his ex (or are they technically still together now? I’m not sure) give Ellie a prized possession, and says he can go alone if Dina wants Ellie to stay. Ellie says they’ll be safer together. Jesse relents and says they should be back by sundown. The tension is radiating off him, but the pair leaves Dina in the safety of the theater.Image: HBOEllie and Jesse awkwardly walk through the remains of Seattle. She finally breaks the silence by asking how he found Ellie and Dina’s theater base. He recounts his two days of tracking, giving a shoutout to the horse Shimmer who’s still vibing in the record store the girls left her at, but he’s clearly pissed. Ellie assumes it’s because he and Tommy had to cross state lines to come find them, but no, there’s something else on his mind. Why do Ellie and Dina look at each other differently? Why did Dina turn down a free drink for the first time in her life? He’s putting it all together. Dina and Ellie are no longer just gals being pals, and his (now ex?) girlfriend is pregnant.“None of this has to change things between us,” Ellie says.“Everything changing doesn’t have to change things?” Jesse asks. “Well, how about this for something new: I’m gonna be a father, which means I can’t die. But because of you, we’re stuck in a warzone. So how about we skip the apologies and just go find Tommy so I can get us and my kid the fuck out of Seattle?”Wow, okay. Judgey, much? I mean, you’re right, Jesse. This is a no good, very bad situation, and Ellie has put your kid in danger and won’t even tell you she was torturing a woman last night. But god, I miss kindhearted Jesse. I miss Ellie’s golden retriever best friend who, when finding out Dina was pregnant, firmly but gently told Ellie it was time to get the fuck out of Seattle. Now that the show has created a messy cheating love triangle out of these three, I’m once again reflecting on how The Last of Us Part II could have very easily made this storyline a dramatic, angry one, and instead it was one of the brighter spots in a dark tale. Meanwhile, in the show, the whole thing feels like it’s regressed to a rote and predictable earlier draft of the story that’s much less refreshing and compelling than the one we already know. Justice for Jesse. This is character assassination of the goodest boy in all of Jackson. Well, actually, that’s Abby’s job. Sorry, sorry. That’s actually not for another 35 minutes.As the two move further into the city, they see more art praising the Seraphite prophet on the buildings, but she looks notably different than in images we’ve seen previously. This art depicts a Black woman, whereas others have typically portrayed the prophet as white. Ellie wonders aloud if there’s “more than one of her.” Jesse says it’s possible, but ushers her forward as rain starts pouring down. I’m curious what the show might be doing here, as this is a divergence from Part II. Could the Seraphites be a kind of polytheistic group in the show that follows multiple prophets? Could they believe the Prophet was reincarnated into a different woman at some point? All we can do is theorize, but we haven’t seen much of the Seraphites this season so we don’t have much to go on. Which is by design, and feels pretty in-line with Part II, which didn’t tell you much about the group during Ellie’s three days in Seattle. We’ll pick this thread back up next season, I’m sure.The pair takes shelter but before they can catch their breath, they hear the popping sound of gunfire nearby as a W.L.F. squad corners a lone Seraphite. Ellie and Jesse watch in horror as the wolves strip and drag him away. Just as Ellie nearly gets out from cover to intervene, Jesse pulls her back. Once the coast is clear, Ellie walks away in a huff. As Jesse follows, he points out that they were outnumbered and would have lost that fight.“He was a fucking kid!” Ellie shouts.“Ellie, these people [are] shooting each other, lynching each other, ripping each other’s guts out,” Jesse says. “Even the kids? I’m not dying out here. Not for any of them. This is not our war.”Who the fuck is this man? I touched on it in episode five, but what is with this show putting all of Ellie’s unlikable traits on other characters so she keeps getting to be the hero? Jesse turns from a selfless guardian into a selfish asshole who will watch a kid get tortured to save himself while Ellie is suddenly very concerned about a war that, in the game, she seemed largely indifferent to. It’s as if The Last of Us’ second season is so concerned with us liking Ellie and feeling like we can root for her that it’s lost sight of anything else.So Jesse gets to be the belligerent asshole and Dina gets to be the revenge-driven one in the relationship. Ellie? She’s just bee-bopping through spouting cool space facts, and so when she tortures Nora, it feels like tonal whiplash. I don’t recognize Jesse. Most of the time, I don’t recognize Ellie. But really, the more I watch this show, the more I hardly recognize anyone, and I don’t have any faith in the series to figure these characters and their relationships out, even if it’s going to go on for two more seasons.Will the circle be unbroken?We shift away from the Jackson crew to check in on Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), who we haven’t seen in a few episodes. Sergeant Park (Hettienne Park) updates the W.L.F. boss that the incoming storm will get worse as the day goes on, but even so, the group is still preparing some kind of operation. She also lets him know the rank and file is a little nervous about whatever’s going on, but Isaac’s only concerned about one person: Abby. From the sound of it, she and most of her crew have all disappeared over the past few days. We’ve seen what happened to Nora, Manny is still around, but Owen and Mel are gone without a trace. Again, Isaac isn’t concerned with them. He’s nervous that they’re going into whatever operation they’re planning without Abby. Park is clearly exhausted by this lane of thinking and asks why he cares so much about the girl.Image: HBOShe starts off asking why one “great” soldier is so important when they have an army, and then gets into a weird aside where she exasperatedly asks Isaac if he’s harboring feelings for the girl when he’s at least 30 years her senior. I don’t know if this line is supposed to be a joke, but it’s not funny, even though Isaac laughs at it. She acknowledges it’s an out-of-pocket question, but says he “wouldn’t be the first old man” to make decisions based on such inappropriate impulses. As much as it’s a stupid thing for Park to say, it’s also a stupid thing for the writers room to nonchalantly whip out in a humorous fashion given The Last of Us’ history of old men preying on young women with the character of David. Why write this non-joke into your script if you don’t want viewers to possibly view his fixation on Abby as potentially untoward? Isaac’s following speech focuses on the preservation of his militia, in a very similar way to how David’s preoccupation with Ellie in season one was born from the cannibal’s warped views on longevity, and if you’re not trying to make this direct connection, why even gesture at it? Yeah, I don’t imagine anyone considered the optics of this obviously flippant, throwaway line, but Christ, if you’re that desperate for a joke or moment to cut the tension, this was the best you could come up with? Amateur shit.Isaac sits Park down and tells her why he cares so much about one soldier. He says there’s a very strong chance that the W.L.F. leadership will be dead by tomorrow morning. If that happens, who can lead the militia in their stead? He wanted it to be Abby. It was “supposed” to be her.“Well she’s fucked off, Isaac,” Park says as she leaves. “So maybe it wasn’t.”We go back to the Jackson crew as Ellie and Jesse reach the rendezvous point in a bookstore, and Tommy isn’t here. The place is in bad shape like most places are in this city, but Ellie gravitates to the children’s books section. She picks up an old Sesame Street book, the Grover classic The Monster at the End of This Book, and picks it up for the bun in the oven as Jesse says she picked a good one. As the quiet creeps in on the two, Ellie tries to break the silence by clarifying what happened, but Jesse says they have enough problems for the moment, so he wants to bury the issue.He says he loves Dina, but not in the same way Ellie does. He remembers a group that passed through Jackson, and how there was a girl he fell hard for. She asked him to leave with her to Mexico, but he declined because he’d found purpose and community in Jackson, and he was taught to put others first. People look to him to become the “next Maria” and lead the town, and he couldn’t abandon them for a girl he’d known for two weeks, even if she made him feel things he’d never felt before.Ellie immediately sees through this story. It’s not about him pointing out how he’s felt love and knows that he and Dina aren’t the real deal; it’s about how she’s putting her own needs and wants ahead of everyone else’s.“Okay, got it,” Ellie says. “So you’re Saint Jesse of Wyoming, and everyone else is a fucking asshole.”“You can make fun of me all you want,” Jesse responds. “But let me ask you this, Ellie: If I go with that girl to Mexico, who saves your ass in Seattle?”Before she can reply, they hear W.L.F. radio chatter about a sniper taking out a squad and assume it’s gotta be Tommy. The two head out to higher ground to get a better look, and Ellie sees a Ferris wheel in the distance. She finally puts Nora’s final words together: Abby is in the aquarium at the edge of the city. Immediately, her focus shifts away from Tommy as she starts trying to figure out how to reach Abby’s apparent hiding spot. Jesse is confused and says that Tommy’s got the W.L.F. pinned down in the opposite direction. Ellie starts coming up with justifications for her plan. They don’t know if that’s actually Tommy. If it is him, he’s got the group pinned down. Either way, he would want her to go after Abby to avenge Joel. Ellie doesn’t understand why Jesse is so against this. He voted to go after Abby’s crew back in Jackson, right?Image: HBONo, actually. He didn’t. He believed this vendetta was selfish and “wasn’t in the best interest of the community.” That sets Ellie off.“Fuck the community!” she screams. “All you do is talk about the fucking community, you hypocrite. You think you’re good and I’m bad? You let a kid die today, Jesse. Because why? He wasn’t in your community? Let me tell you about my community. My community was beaten to death in front of me while I was forced to fucking watch. So don’t look at me like you’re better than me, or like you’d do anything differently if you were in my shoes, because you’re not, and you wouldn’t.”Jesse takes a beat, then tells Ellie he hopes she makes it to the aquarium as he leaves. While this scene does exemplify the show’s typicalal “no subtext allowed” approach to writing that I find so irksome, the storyline of Ellie feeling ostracized by the people of Jackson while constantly being told that she must make compromises for them even as they are incapable of extending the same to her is one of the few embellishments The Last of Us makes that resonates with me. It’s easy to write off Ellie’s revenge tour as a selfish crusade that puts everyone else in harm’s way, but when she’s also one of the few out queer people in a town that mostly coddles bigotry and she’s being constantly belittled and kept from doing things she wants to do like working on the patrol team, why would she feel any kinship to this community? Now, when she’s so close to her goal that she can almost taste it, Jesse wants her to consider the people of Jackson? Why should she do that? They’re hundreds of miles away, and the only people who came to save her and Dina were the ones who already cared about her. Ellie’s disillusionment with her neighbors is one of the few additions to the story that The Last of Us manages to pull off.Ellie reaches the harbor from which she can use a boat to reach the aquarium and finds several Wolves meeting up on vessels heading somewhere off the coast. Isaac is here leading the charge, but it’s unclear where they’re going or what they’re doing. Game fans have the advantage of knowing what’s going on, but the W.L.F. storyline feels underbaked in this season, which is one of the real issues with the show dividing the game’s storyline into multiple seasons. During this section of the game, you get a sense that there’s an untold story happening in the background, and you can learn more about it through notes you can find in the environment and ambient dialogue from enemies. The show doesn’t have those same storytelling tools, so I wouldn’t be surprised if newcomers felt a little disoriented every time we hopped over to Isaac.Once the W.L.F. forces make their way wherever they’re going, Ellie finds one of the spare boats and starts to make her way to the aquarium. The storm is hitting hard, though, and the tide is not on her side. A giant tidal wave knocks her out of the boat and into the sea. (Good thing you learned how to swim, queen.) As she washes up onto the shore, Ellie hears Seraphites whistling as a group of them descends upon her. She’s too weak to get onto her feet and run, so the cultists grab her and carry her to a noose hanging from a tree in the woods. She screams that she’s not a Wolf and that she’s not from here, but they don’t listen. As they wrap the noose around her neck and start to hoist her upward, a horn sounds off in the distance. The lead Scar says to leave her, their village is in danger, so I guess that’s what the W.L.F. operation is targeting? This concludes our latest little exposition detour, as Ellie gets right back into the boat to the aquarium.Image: HBOShe manages to reach the building and finds a broken window through which to enter. Inside, she finds several makeshift beds. Whatever Abby’s doing here, she’s not alone. As Ellie makes her way deeper into the aquarium, she finds a ton of medical supplies, including bloody bandages and surgical equipment. Was Abby injured? Is that why she’s been missing in action as the W.L.F. undergoes a huge, all-hands-on-deck mission? Who’s to say?Quick sidenote: When Ellie infiltrates the aquarium in the game, she’s attacked by a guard dog named Alice. The W.L.F. used trained canines in their war against the Seraphites, but that element has been notably absent from the show. Between this and sparing Shimmer from her explosive fate, The Last of Us has been toning down the animal murder.Ellie keeps walking through the desolate aquarium and eventually finds fresh footsteps. She follows them and soon finds their source: Abby’s friends Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). The two are arguing about something, though it’s not clear what. Owen wants to go somewhere behind enemy lines, even in the midst of the battle Isaac has just initiated. He says he doesn’t have a choice because “it’s Abby.” Mel says he does have a choice and so does she, and the Abby of it all is why she’s not going along with whatever the plan is. Owen says he’ll do it on his own, and if Mel’s still here when they get back, she can “keep going with [them].” Either way, Owen’s leaving. Mel let’s out a hearty “fuck you, Owen” before realizing that Ellie is there. Sure seems like there’s a whole other story that’s been going on while we’ve been hanging out with Ellie, huh? I wonder if we’ll ever get any further insight into whatever this is. Perhaps in a season entirely dedicated to the other side of what’s going on in Seattle? Maybe in a couple years it might premiere on HBO Max (or whatever it’s called by then)? That would be something!Ellie holds the two at gunpoint and tells them to put their hands up. When she asks where Abby is, Owen realizes who she is and points out that he was the one who kept her alive. Ellie isn’t swayed by this, so he says they don’t know where Abby went. But, of course, they were just talking about her, so Ellie knows that’s not true. She spots a map on the table and decides to pull out an old Joel Miller standard: She tells Mel to bring her the map and point to where Abby is, saying that next she’s going to ask Owen the same question, and the answers had better match. Owen looks at Mel and says that Ellie will kill them either way, so there’s no reason to comply. Ellie says she won’t because she’s “not like” them. When she crosses state lines to torture and kill someone who killed somebody important to her, it’s very different than when they do it, of course.Owen stops Mel from grabbing the map by saying he’ll do it. He slowly turns to the table, but instead of picking up the map, he grabs a handgun stowed under it. Ellie is quick with her trigger finger and shoots him right in the throat. The bullet goes straight through him, and hits Mel in the neck as well. She falls onto her back and, instead of cursing Ellie, she asks for her help. Not to save her life, but someone else’s. She opens her jacket to reveal her pregnant belly, and asks if Ellie has a knife to cut the baby out of her before she dies. Ellie is in shock and doesn’t know what to do. Mel tells her she just needs to make one incision. That isn’t enough direction, and Ellie panics. She doesn’t know how deep or which direction to cut. As Mel starts to become delirious, she repeats “love transfers” and then asks Ellie if the baby is out. But she hasn’t even made one cut. Mel finally drifts off, and Ellie realizes it’s too late. She sits there until, eventually, Tommy and Jesse find her. Tommy attempts to comfort her, but she’s in shock and doesn’t speak. Finally they leave and head back to the theater.Naughty Dog / Cinematic GamingWhy can’t this show stop giving the audience outs to not turn against its leads? The death of Mel, specifically, feels like the show bending over backward to teach Ellie a lesson without laying blame at her feet. Mel’s death here is an accident. She’s an innocent bystander who dies because Owen and Ellie made choices, and she was, quite literally, caught in the crossfire. In Part II, by contrast, Mel “shot first.” Well, she tried to stab Ellie, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it. Ellie reacts in self-defense and stabs her right back, but she did it fully knowing she was about to send Mel to an early grave. The gut punch Ellie feels upon learning that she’s pregnant is a moment of dramatic irony, because the game’s shifting perspectives had already revealed her pregnancy to the player way back in the opening hours. So when you’re slamming the square button to fight back, you know that Mel isn’t the only one about to reach her untimely end. Here, she doesn’t even get that moment of agency to fight to protect herself. She’s just collateral damage. It’s a small but important distinction. At this point in the show, Mel’s only real trait is a clear distaste for Abby’s violence, and now, when she finally shows up again, she’s just an unintended victim of Owen pulling a gun on Ellie. Sure, season three will fill in those gaps, but the end result will be the same. Mel died not because she was fighting back, but because she was an inch too far to the left.Then there’s the matter of her pregnancy. Again, in the game players already knew about this by the time Ellie reached the aquarium, while the show kept it secret until the end. It’s hard not to see this last-minute reveal as a knife being twisted for shock value, but that’s only half the problem. My friend Eric Van Allen (co-host of the Axe of the Blood God podcast) would often joke with his college friends about how Michael Caine’s characters in Christopher Nolan films so often show up just to tell you, the viewer, in very literal terms what the story is about. Throughout most of this season, Gail has been this character, the one burdened with the heavy task of diegetic literary analysis, but Mel’s delirious “love transfers” line may be even sillier than anything Gail spouts; homegirl is bleeding out and telling Ellie that pain is not the only thing we inherit from our parents? Just one week after Joel tearfully told Ellie that he hopes she does better when she has a kid than he or his abusive cop father did?Perhaps in a show that hadn’t already spent two seasons using literalism as a writing crutch, Mel speaking her final hopes for her unborn child might have landed for me. But I think I’m just too jaded towards it now for even what should have been a genuine expression to feel like anything other than a heavy-handed, patronizing declaration of what lessons I’m supposed to take away from the story. I don’t think characters overtly communicating their beliefs and feelings about a situation is an inherently poor way of writing dialogue. In fact, some of my favorite works have managed to execute this well thanks to strong acting and stories that lent themselves well to this style of writing. The Last of Us, a series that often relishes in grounded dialogue that forced you to read between the lines and unearth that meaning yourself, the Last of Us show’s inability to let nearly any emotion, belief, or theme go unspoken feels so contrived and tiresome that even someone expressing something thematically resonate feels like being told what to feel. Mel uses her last words to tell me the themes of the story. Just in case I forgot. Thank you, Last of Us show, I don’t know how I would have ever understood your thematic richness if you didn’t make your characters tell me about it, even in their death gasps.The group makes it back to the theater and Ellie is still in shock, so much so that she doesn’t even look at Dina as she enters the building. Some time passes, and Tommy and Jesse are mapping out their route home on the stage. The storm is still pretty rough, so they’ll stay overnight and hope the sun is out when they wake up. Ellie finally joins the group, and Tommy reassures her that Mel and Owen played their part in Joel’s death, and they made the choices that brought them to that fateful end. Ellie can only fixate on what she didn’t get to do.“But Abby gets to live,” she says.“Yeah,” Tommy responds. “Are you able to make your peace with that?”“I guess I’ll have to,” she says, defeated.She looks to Jesse, who won’t even look up at her. Tommy realizes they might have something to talk about and walks to the lobby to pack. After some awkward silence, Ellie thanks Jesse for coming back for her, even though he had no reason to after the way they clashed.“Maybe I didn’t want to,” he says. “Maybe Tommy made me.”“Did he?” Ellie asks.After a second of contemplation, Jesse drops the act and says, “No.”“Because you’re a good person,” Ellie responds.“Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “But also the thought did occur, that if I were out there somewhere, lost and in trouble, you’d set the world on fire to save me.”Ellie says she would, and the two finally see one another, even if just for a moment. Jesse acknowledges that Ellie’s vendetta isn’t entirely selfish, and that when it comes to defending the people she cares about, dead or alive, you won’t find someone more loyal in all of Jackson. It’s good that they finally had this moment of connection after all this drama. But damn, I miss Ellie and Jesse being bros, and I miss her giving him shit for being a sap in these final moments. But most of all, I miss that dopey good ol’ boy with a heart of gold saying his friends “can’t get out of their own damn way.”All that understanding is short-lived, as the two hear some ruckus in the lobby, grab their guns, and book it to the entrance. The second Jesse opens the door, bam. A gunshot rings out in the lobby, and he is on the floor. We don’t even see that it was Abby who fired it until after we get a gnarly shot of him with his face blown open. He’s gone. It was instant. The Last of Us Part II tends to draw out death. It’s either long and torturous like it was for Joel or Nora, or it’s short like Owen’s and Mel’s, but in any case, the game typically lingers on the fallout for a bit. Jesse’s death, by contrast, happens so fast that you can’t even process it before you have to deal with the situation at hand. The show follows suit, and it’s recreated practically shot for shot. But that’s hardly the most disorienting (complimentary) thing that happens in these final minutes.“Stand up,” Abby growls forcefully from the other side of the desk Ellie has taken cover behind.She repeats herself: “Stand. Up. Hands in the air or I shoot this one, too.”Ellie can see Tommy on the ground with a pistol aimed right at his head. He tells Ellie to just run, but she tosses her gun where Abby can see it and crawls out from cover. Abby recognizes her immediately. Ellie asks her to let Tommy go, to which Abby replies that he killed her friends. Ellie says no, she did.“I was looking for you,” Ellie says. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. I know why you killed Joel. He did what he did to save me, I’m the one that you want. Just let him go.”Naughty Dog / VGS - Video Game SophistryHm. Okay. We’re almost at the end. I gotta get another little quibble in before the curtains close. I mean, come on, we’ve been through seven episodes of me complaining together. You can’t take one last gripe? This line from Ellie is slightly altered to account for the fact that she knows more about Abby in the show than in the game, and it means we miss one of the most important subtle interactions in all of the story. As I mentioned earlier, Ellie doesn’t know anything about Abby’s father in Part II. She assumes that Abby killed Joel because he took away any chance of the Fireflies developing a cure, so she cites that in this high-stakes moment. The original line is almost identical to the one in the show, but instead, Ellie says “there’s no cure because of me” and suggests that killing her would be the extension of Abby’s presumed vendetta. Then, we get some incredible, subtle acting from Abby actor Laura Bailey, who hears what Ellie’s saying, has a brief moment of angry disbelief on her face, and then scoffs under her breath before picking right back up where she left off. In just a few seconds, you see Abby realize that, after everything, these fuckers have no idea how much pain she’s been through over the past five years. But they’re not worth the breath it would take to explain herself. They don’t deserve to know the man her father was and what he meant to her. All that matters right now is that Ellie pays for what she’s done.Abby still views herself as the righteous one here, as she points out that she let Ellie live when she did not have to do that. It turns out that Ellie wasn’t deserving of her mercy, that she squandered it by killing her friends. Part of me has wondered if all the exposition-heavy dialogue in this show, such as Dever’s villain monologue in episode two before she murdered the shit out of Joel, was written to give its actors more words to say in front of a camera. When you’ve got big names like Kaitlyn Dever, Catherine O’Hara, and Pedro Pascal in your cast, you don’t want them to not talk, right? But all these elongated exchanges have also robbed actors like Dever of those subtle moments. Hell, she led an entire film with next to no dialogue in 2023’s No One Will Save You, and was great in it, so she has the chops to pull off that kind of acting. Communicating something through body language and expression is just as powerful as a poetic piece of dialogue (or in this show’s case, the most literal, unpoetic dialogue a person can fathom), but this show rarely, if ever, understands that.Image: HBOAnyway, Abby says that Ellie wasted the chance she was given when the ex-Fireflies spared her, and points her gun right at Ellie. We hear a bullet fire and Ellie shouts before a hard cut to black. But wait. That’s the season finale? You expect us to wait for two years, probably, to find out what happened? Well, about that. You will probably have to wait even longer.We do have one more scene this season, however: a flashback. We see Abby lying down on a comfy couch with an unfinished book resting on her stomach. She’s in a deep sleep before Manny (Danny Ramirez) loudly enters the room and wakes her up. He says Isaac wants to see them, and she stirs awake. She gets up and walks out of this cozy living space and into a giant football stadium. The entire field has been repurposed for agriculture, manufacturing, and housing. Abby takes a second to look at the whole operation before heading to Isaac’s, but the camera lingers over the field as bold white text flashes on the screen: Seattle, Day One.Alright, TV newbies, welcome to the second divisive twist of The Last of Us Part II. In the game, the player goes through Ellie’s three days in Seattle, killing Abby’s friends and mostly ignoring the war between the W.L.F. and the Seraphites. Meanwhile, Abby has been kind of an enigma the whole time. Every time Ellie finds a new lead, Abby has already come and gone. When Abby finally shows up at the theater for another round of vengeance, it’s clear that a lot of the story happening in this game has happened off-screen. That’s because you’re about to see an entirely different perspective on the last three days, and you’re going to play as Abby when you do it.As you can imagine, this shit drove some players nuts at the time, and you’ll still find angry people online complaining about it to this day. For all my problems with this season, I have to commend the show for actually going for it. HBO has taken the coward’s route in adapting this story for so long, it’s almost surprising that it’s ending here and, from the sound of it, season three will be entirely about Abby and what she’s been doing these past three days. It’s very likely we won’t see Ellie again until next season’s finale after we’ve followed Dever’s character for several episodes. Despite some ham-fisted attempts by the show to build sympathy for Abby early on, it seems like swaths of TV newbies still demand blood. Will viewers complain for an entire season as Dever takes on the lead role? I’d like to think they won’t. I hope that new audiences are more open to her than the worst people you’ve ever met were when the game launched.Despite all the golf club swings I’ve taken at this show, I’m looking forward to examining it further as HBO rolls out the next two seasons. The Last of Us Part II is one of my favorite games of all time, but I genuinely fucking hated The Last of Us’ second season. I don’t expect my feelings to improve in season three. At this point, the rot of Mazin’s poor creative decisions runs too deep for the show to be salvaged and reach the highs of the games. But if nothing else, it’s been a rewarding ride. Thank you for joining me on this seven-week journey. I think I’m due for a replay of The Last of Us Part II to wash off this stink. This shit was ass, HBO. I’ll see you in the ring again next time.

This article contains full spoilers for every Final Destination movie, INCLUDING Bloodlines. For more than a decade, we thought we’d finally made it. It’s been 14 years since the last Final Destination film, the last time Death started killing off those who escaped its plan in exceedingly gruesome fashion. We thought we were free to go to theaters in safety once more. But as the mortician William Bludworth, played by the late great Tony Todd, has taught us, there’s no escaping Death. The franchise is back with one of its best entries: Final Destination Bloodlines, written and directed by newcomers to the franchise Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein. Bloodlines has a shinier look and a different approach, focusing on a family instead a group of random teens. But it follows the well-established principles of a Final Destination movie, especially in its incredible kills. In celebration of Bloodlines bringing Final Destination back to screens, we’re ranking all of Death’s achievements across the franchise. Because Final Destination movies are ultimately about good, gory fun, we’re ranking them from the most boring to the most enjoyably incredible. Like Death itself, we do have a few rules here. We aren’t counting any deaths in the premonitions that open each movie, nor the mass casualties that occur in the actual events, which means that you won’t see the infamous pile-up from Final Destination 2 or the incredible tower sequence that opens Bloodlines. Also we’re focusing on Death’s kills, so kills done by human beings don’t count. Even with those restrictions, Final Destination gives us plenty of memorable kills, as Death always makes a show of getting even. 40. Alex Browning’s Off-Screen Demise (Final Destination 2) Is it a mark of respect that the first movie’s protagonist Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) doesn’t die on screen? Or is it the ultimate insult that we learn via newspaper clipping in Final Destination 2 that he was knocked in the head with a brick? Interpretations may vary, but no one can disagree that Alex’s death deserves the bottom spot. Played by comedy great David Koechner, paper plant boss Dennis Lapman of Final Destination 5 has one of the gnarliest premonition deaths. Dangling off a collapsing bridge, Dennis almost pulls himself back up when he’s doused with hot tar, burning alive as he lets go and drops to the water. That incredible end makes his actual expiration all the worse, as he goes out when a loose wrench on a shop floor gets hurled into his head, no real setup involved. 38. Wendy Cristensen, Julie Cristensen, and Kevin Fischer Crash Off-Screen (Final Destination 3) With the exception of the original Final Destination, the protagonists end their films thinking they’ve beaten Death only to realize that the Grim Reaper has one more trick up his sleeve, and the movies end with shocking cuts. The worst of them comes in Final Destination 3, one of the weaker entries overall, in which Wendy Cristensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), her sister Julie (Amanda Crew), and pal Kevin Fischer (Ryan Merriman) all perish in a train crash. Technically we see them meet their end in impressive carnage, but that all happens in a premonition, which this list rules out. So we have to go with the death that happens onscreen—well, on soundtrack, as the movie cuts to black with the sound of the crash. 37. Janet Cunningham, Lori Milligan, Nick O’Bannon Death By X-Ray Truck (The Final Destination) Easily the worst of the series, the fourth entry The Final Destination also ends with a sudden attack on the protagonists. In this case, Nick O’Bannon (Bobby Campo), his love interest Lori Milligan (Shantel VanSanten), and her friend Janet Cunningham (Haley Webb) meet in a coffee shop to celebrate life, only for a truck to crash into the building. It’s a lot like the third movie’s ending, but at least this movie gives us neat x-rays to look at and imagine what horrible things happened to our heroes. 36. George Lanter and the Very Quiet Ambulance (The Final Destination) Played by the great Mykelti Williamson, George Lantner is the only character who acts like a human being in The Final Destination. So it’s a bit lame that the movie kills him off with a gag when he steps onto the road and gets flattened by an oncoming ambulance. He mentions “deja vu” right before it happens because his end is a callback to a similar one from the first film, which will be talked about shortly. It’s an unimaginative death and a mean joke at the expense of a likable character, which lands it toward the bottom of the list. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! 35. Nadia Monroy Makes Nick’s Dream a Reality (The Final Destination) For the most part, this list is ignoring both the premonitions and the mass casualties that occur after a premonition. The one exception comes with Nadia Monroy (Stephanie Honoré) of The Final Destination, who dies in the immediate aftermath of a premonition. After Nick has a vision of a massive Nascar wreck, he panics, which gets a group of people kicked out of the race just as the accident begins. As the survivors try to make sense of what happened, a tire flies out of the stadium and through Nadia’s head, replicating her death from the vision. 34. Perry Malinowski Salutes the Flag (Final Destination 3) Final Destination loves its out-of-nowhere surprise kills. A character thinks they’re safe, they make some ironic statement and, bam, they’re immediately dead. Usually, these kills aren’t nearly as funny or clever as the movies think they are, especially compared to the elaborate sequences that have become the franchise’s calling card. One of the worst comes when Perry Malinowski (Maggie Ma) gets unceremoniously offed when a loose horse breaks of a flagpole that goes through her chest, a forgettable death for a forgettable character. Horse looks cool though. 33. Darlene Campbell Stays at the Cabin (Final Destination Bloodlines) Although not as meta as, say, a Scream movie, the characters in Final Destination: Bloodlines know how Final Destination movies work. To the filmamkers’ credit, the knowledge adds tension to the movie, underscoring how knowledge doesn’t give them power to evade Death. Nowhere is that more clear than at the climax of Bloodlines when Darlene Campbell (Rya Kihlstedt)—a mother who has estranged herself from her children—decides to hide in her own mother’s bunker, thereby stalling Death’s hit list and saving her children. Noble though the sentiment may be, Darlene’s proclamation of love for her children distracts her, and she gets smashed by a falling pole, rendering her heroism moot. 32. Carter Horton Finally Sees the Sign (Final Destination) Played by Kerr Smith, Carter Horton is the onscreen antagonist of the first film, an annoying preppie who bullies Alex and the others and somehow gets to survive. So while we don’t actually see Carter get killed before the screen cuts to closing credits, his demise does rank above those from the third and fourth movies just because we wanted to see this guy get it for so long. 31. Samantha Lane Has Her Eye on a Stone (The Final Destination) The overwhelming majority of Final Destination victims are obnoxious, good-looking teens who mostly deserve to die. Wife and mother Samantha Lane (Krista Lane) certainly isn’t a saint but she doesn’t irritate us like every other jerk in The Final Destination. So we’re a bit annoyed that she gets such a cruel death when a lawn mower kicks up a rock that flies through her eyes while her young kids watch in horror. The kill does get a few extra points, however, for all of the playfulness before it actually happens, as Death sets up a few options to off Sarah before finally picking the rock. 30. Ian McKinley Splits the Fair (Final Destination 3) The franchise has never done great with its human antagonists, the regular guys who get tired of all the dying and take things into their own hands by killing the other characters. Ian McKinley (Kris Lemche) stands out a little bit more than the others. Instead of showing all the things that could off him, the camera simply follows Ian through a crowd while he rants about his immortality. That’s a bit dull, but it pays off when a firework shoots by him, apparently sparing him, only for the explosion to knock over a cherry picker that splits him in half. That extra beat is enough to make his sudden surprise kill a bit more satisfying. 29. Stefani and Charlie Reyes in a Logjam (Final Destination Bloodlines) Although a bit glossier and a bit kinder with its characters, Final Destination Bloodlines follows the beats of most entries in the franchise. In fact, its final moment, in which protagonists Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) and Charlie Reyes (Teo Briones) realize that they did not, in fact, stop Death and are about to die, feels like a callback to the infamous log premonition in Final Destination 2. However, Bloodlines ups the stakes with a lucky penny leading to a train derailment. The amazing shot of Stefani and Charlie goes bigger than any of the other movies’ shock ending, undone some by the cheap effects when two logs from the train car come loose and flatten our heroes. 28. Sam Lawton and Emma Bell Die in a Callback (Final Destination 5) Final Destination 5 has the best ending of the series, in which protagonists Sam Lawton (Nicholas D’Agosto) and Emma Bell (Molly Harper) survive the ordeal and board a plane to celebrate. It’s only then that we realize that the movie has taken place in 2000 and that they’re boarding Flight 180, the one that explodes at the start of the first movie. Thus we have to watch as the characters who have gone through so much die, but we also get to see the original disaster that started it all. Emily splatters when she gets sucked out of the plane and sliced by the wing, but Sam’s death isn’t that spectacular outside of the fact that he burns up in the same manner as Alex did in his vision. 27. Tod Waggner Hung Out to Dry (Final Destination) The first “real” death of the series, Tod Waggner’s (Chad E. Donella) end feels like a first draft to the spectacular kills to come. When water leaks from a toilet, Todd slips into the tub and gets a laundry cord wrapped around his neck. Todd’s desperate attempts to stand up and save himself, frustrated by the slick tub floor, give the death a level of pathos rarely seen in the series, but outside of that, it’s a fairly rote kill for the overall franchise. 26. Iris Campbell Gets to the Point (Final Destination Bloodlines) Bloodlines gives Tony Todd a glorious final scene as Bloodworth, but it’s the elderly Iris Campbell (Gabrielle Rose) who tells her granddaughter Stefani the rules of Death’s design. Throughout the exposition dump, the camera points to various classic setups, but Iris catches them all. So when Death does finally take her, using a flying fire extinguisher to send a weathervane point through her face, it’s because Iris wants to show Stefani how Death operates. That intentionality makes Iris’ end stand out, even if it isn’t the most elaborate on this list. 25. Rory Peters Goes Fencing (Final Destination 2) Final Destination 2 has the best premonition in the series, an incredible accident and pile-up filled with ghastly incidents. Toward the climax of the movie, that road destruction gets sort of recreated when a series of events launched by a car crash suddenly kill off other characters. It’s mostly fun, and wide shots let us see Death’s composition, but it’s hard to get too excited when stoner Rory Peters (Jonathan Cherry) gets split into thirds by flying fencing. 24. Clear Rivers and Eugene Dix Go Up in Flames (Final Destination 2) It was a nice reveal to show Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) had survived even the post-credit carnage of the first Final Destination to provide information to the victims of the second film. But that surprise was completely undercut by the film then killing Clear in a sudden hospital explosion, taking teacher Eugene (T.C. Carson), one of the more compelling characters in the movie, out along with her. Multi-victim kills always feel like a bit of a cheat, but at least this one had a nice build-up. 23. Carter Daniels’ Hate Crime Backfires (The Final Destination) The Final Destination‘s unlikable cast goes to the extreme when white supremacist Carter (Justin Welborn) singles out George Latner as the cause of his wife’s demise. So it’s especially satisfying when Carter, in the midst of burning a cross on George’s lawn, gets dragged behind his truck and burned alive. Carter may not get the most creative of kills, but rarely do we see such an awful person get their full and just reward like that. 22. Isaac Palmer Meets the Buddha (Final Destination 5) Unlike most entries, Final Destination 5 limited its nastiness to one character, and even then, actor P. J. Byrne knows how to find light notes in his depiction of smarmy exec Isaac Palmer. Byrne sleezes it up as Isaac steals a spa coupon from recently-deceased co-worker, leers at spa workers, and then condescend to the worker who performs upon him. From then on, it’s a classic Final Destination sequence, as a fallen candle ignites spilled oil to send Isaac pin-first onto the ground, crawling away until he inadvertently pulls a Buddha statue on his head, his karma fully earned. 21. Kat Jennings and the Jaws of Death (Final Destination 2) Nervous wreck Kat Jennings (Keegan Connor Tracy) gets one of the better sudden deaths in the series, largely because Death puts all the pieces in place for a symphony of chaos and then sets it off suddenly. Kat initially survives the car crash, avoiding the pointy pipe that ran through her back window and continues to stick out behind her head. When firefighters use the jaws of life to pry open her car door, however, the impact is enough to set off the airbags, slamming Kat’s head into the spike and setting off more carnage. 20. Lewis Romero Loses Weight in the Gym (Final Destination 3) A lot of the kills on this list are preceded by a character declaring their immortality, but few do it with as much apblomb as Final Destination 3‘s aggro jock Lewis Romero (Texas Battle). Like many Lewis responds to Death’s machinations by asserting his own free will… loudly. At the end, he does it while pumping iron in the gym, and his protestations shake the walls, knocking free swords used as part of his team’s decor. The swords cut the bands of his machine as they fall, freeing the weights to smash his head. Given that it was his actions that made the swords drop, Lewis did kind of control his own fate. 19. Nora Carpenter and the Creepy Hook Hand (Final Destination 2) Of all the kills on this list, the death of nervous mom Nora Carpenter (Lynda Boyd) seems the easiest to avoid. Well, at first anyway, when she rushes into an elevator and gets her hair caught on a hook, part of the prosthetic limbs that a creepy guy holds in a box. If Nora just settled down for a moment, or if the creepy guy would put as much effort into untangling her as he does smelling her hair, then she probably could have wrestled free before the elevator decapitated her. All that aside, it’s a pretty amazing and gory kill, one that has enough shock value to overcome any logistical leaps. The Final Destination movies are big on dying, but not so big on suffering, which is a good thing. We don’t want to think of these people as human beings, because that would ruin the fun of watching them go out. Erin Ulmer’s (Alexz Johnson) end in Final Destination 3 veers a bit too much toward suffering, as the camera holds on her as she moans in her last moments. Up until that point, though, the scene has fun with misdirection, making us think that we’re about to see Ian McKinley get crushed by boards until Erin gets knocked into a nail gun, which perforates the back of her head. 17. Jonathan Groves Takes a Bath (The Final Destination) On one hand, Jonathan Groves (Jackson Walker) feels like he was added to The Final Destination late in production because the producers found out the movie’s running a bit too short. Groves does show up in the opening crash scene, but we lose track of him and assume he’s dead until Nick sees him on the news. But we can forgive the shoehorning for the purely absurd way that Groves goes out, with an overfilled bathtub from the hospital floor above crashing down onto his bed. 16. Nathan Sears and Flight 180’s Landing (Final Destination 5) In addition to its fantastic kills Final Destination 5 also has the most well-rounded characters in the series, characters like junior executive Nathan Sears (Arlen Escarpeta). Nathan is fundamentally a nice guy but he gets caught up in a dispute with an older union leader, a dispute that ends when the leader accidentally dies during a fight. Thinking that was Death coming for him, Nathan comes to the leader’s wake to pay respects, secure in the belief that Death has skipped him. That assumption adds some pathos to the moment with gear from Flight 180 falls from the sky and crushes him, taking both good people and bad people. 15. Frankie Cheeks Trapped in the Drive Thru (Final Destination 3) Frankie Cheeks (Sam Easton) is one of the most unlikable characters in the franchise (which is saying something) and we don’t even know that he’s dead until after it happens. So why does it rank relatively high on this list? Because of the way it’s set up, looking very much like protagonists Wendy and Kevin are going to get killed in an unbelievable but well-orchestrated drive-through accident. While our heroes escape in time, a collision still occurs, sending a huge engine fan into the back of Frankie’s head. At first it seems like the duo passed their death onto an innocent bystander until we see a bloody necklace in the shape of a naked lady, and we all breathe a sigh of relief that Frankie Cheeks walks the Earth no more. 14. Tim Carpenter Gets Squished By Glass (Final Destination 2) Tim Carpenter may be the weirdest character in the entire series. The script says he’s 15, and actor James Kirk sometimes plays him as a teen and sometimes as an eight-year-old, which ends up feeling like he’s the MadTV character Stuart. That childlike nature leads to Tim’s end when, like a dumb kid, he just decides to chase after some pigeons because… they were there? The pigeons take flight, knocking a giant pane of glass off of a crane and sending the glass on top of Tim, smooshing the little weirdo. 13. Andy Kewzer Goes Through a Chain Link Fence… in Tiny Pieces (The Final Destination) The biggest problem with The Final Destination is its reliance on CG blood, a scourge of 2000s horror. Still, sometimes the kills are so outrageous that we can forgive the poor effects. Such is the case when mechanic Andy Kewzer (Andrew Fiscella) gets blown into a chain link fence. It looks silly when his body collapses into goopy chunks, but the setup is satisfying, as is the sight of him getting blasted out of his garage into the instrument of his doom. 12. Terry Chaney Hit By a Silent Bus (Final Destination) For the first viewers of Final Destination, Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) had the standout death. Freaked out by Alex’s talk of Death coming for them all, Terry tells her friends to drop dead, steps into the street and gets splattered by a bus. It’s a funny moment, as long as you don’t think about it for a second (none of her friends have peripheral vision? The bus driver doesn’t see the gesticulating lady backing into the street?), and it got cheers in the theater. Over time, however, the sudden shock death has become a series trope, dulling the impact (pun intended) of Terry’s end. 11. Howard Campbell Gets a Trim (Final Destination Bloodlines) Patriarch Howard Campbell (Alex Zahara) gets the first classic-style death in Bloodlines, and what a glorious one it is. Occurring after the film has clearly laid out Death’s rules and process, the filmmakers luxuriate in the setup, taking time to highlight all of the things that could kill someone in Campbell’s well-appointed suburban backyard: a rake under a ripping trampoline, a shard of glass in an iced drink, a hose about to explode. After several minutes of anticipation, all of those things come together to set-off something we never saw coming, an electric self-propelled lawnmower, which runs over the face of the prone Howard. Iconic as it may be, Terry’s isn’t the best sudden shock death in the first Final Destination movie. That honor belongs to New York Rangers superfan Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott), who also dies without much obvious setup from Death. Billy goes after he and Alex confront the ever-jerky Carter, who decides to defy Death by parking on train tracks. Carter survives, but Billy can’t take it and starts having an angry meltdown, a meltdown cut short when the train kicks up a piece of shrapnel and sends it flying through Billy’s neck. Tod may be the first death in the Final Destination series, but Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) gets the first great death of the franchise. Still shaken up over the explosion of Flight 180, teacher Mrs. Lewton spills some alcohol on the ground while making dinner. When her cooking goes awry, the alcohol ignites, setting her house ablaze. But it’s not the fire that kills her. Rather she dies when she accidentally pulls a knife down from the counter, which embeds itself in her chest. 8. Evan Lewis Slips on Spaghetti (Final Destination 2) Sometimes Death orchestrates events in such an improbable manner that we can almost see a physical hand onscreen, manipulating events. Sometimes dumb people do dumb things and pay for it. It’s the latter event that brings down lottery-winning bro Evan Lewis (David Paetkau) in Final Destination 2, who just tosses a pot of spaghetti out the window. That decision proves disastrous when Death’s meddling leads to a fire in Evan’s apartment. Evan climbs out to make an escape, but he slips on his own spaghetti, which leaves him vulnerable to the falling ladder that pierces his eye. 7. Brian Gibbons BBQ Bomb (Final Destination 2) Although it’s a sudden kill with little setup, the death of Brian Gibbons (Noel Fisher) ranks so high because of how funny it is. At the end of the movie, survivors Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) and Thomas Burke (Michael Landes) join the Gibbons family at a BBQ where they all let off a bit of steam. No sooner does Brian joke about his and his father’s near-death experience than the grill he’s using explodes, sending his severed arm flying through the air. The arm lands on his mother’s plate, a darkly funny beat that makes it one step better than the average out-of-nowhere kills in the series. 6. Erik and Bobby Campbell Bond in the Hospital (Final Destination Bloodlines) Erik Campbell (Richard Harmon) is truly a unique character in the Final Destination franchise. First of all, he seems to survive his own elaborate death, a hilarious incident in a tattoo parlor (featured heavily in teasers). Secondly he and his brother Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) actually like each other, which makes their end so poignant. Off of Bludworth’s information, Erik decides to send the highly allergic Bobby into anaphylaxis so he can revive him, thus satisfying Death. But Erik gets too cute with his plan, and his action accidentally turns on and revs up an MRI machine in the room where the brothers are working. The intensified magnification first pulls in and crushes Erik, with his piercings in front and a wheelchair in back, and then snags a coil from a vending machine, sending it through Bobby’s head. 5. Olivia Castle’s Laser-Guided Fall (Final Destination 5) Okay, technically Olivia Castle (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) dies when she falls out of a window. But that’s not the part that sticks out in our mind. Instead we remember everything before that moment when Olivia gets laser eye surgery. As if torn from the worst thoughts of anyone about to get the surgery, we watch as Death shorts out the laser while the tech is out of the room and starts burning out Kimberly’s eye. No sooner does she escape than she slips on her beloved teddy bear and falls through the window, a somehow merciful end to the suffering. 3. Ashley Freund & Ashlyn Halperin’s Tanning Session Gone Wrong (Final Destination 3) As this list shows, great Final Destination deaths fall into one of three categories: memorably mean, patently absurd, or impeccably designed. Ashley Fruend (Chelan Simmons) and Ashlyn Halperin (Crystal Lowe) are the prime examples of the first category. A pair of stock mean mall girls, Ashley and Ashlyn go to their favorite tanning spa, giant-size sodas in hand. Death ups the condensation on the drinks, which creates enough water to short out the beds, which turns up the heat, while a fallen shelf keeps them trapped inside. The sight of them burning alive is nasty enough, but the real kicker is the match cut at the end, which replaces two tanning beds with two coffins. 3. Julia Campbell Takes Out the Trash (Final Destination Bloodlines) Final Destination movies love a good fake-out and Bloodlines has the best one yet. Armed with knowledge from Iris, Stefani walks down a suburban street with a skeptical Erik, Death’s next probable victim. As the two walk, Stefani points out all of the things that could kill him: leaves from a blower, a soccer ball kicked by kids, a trash compactor. But to Erik’s mocking glee, nothing happens. Nothing, that is, until Erik’s sister Julia (Anna Lore) goes for a run. In the background. And out of focus, all of those things come together to knock Julia into a roadside dumpster, which is then emptied into the garbage truck where Julia is compacted while Stefani watches. 2. Hunt Wynorski’s Guts in a Pool Pump (The Final Destination) The best patently absurd kill in the entire franchise occurs to obnoxious bro Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano). After getting into an altercation with a little kid at a public pool, Hunt sits down to catch some rays when he hears his lucky coin fall into the water. Hunt dives in after it, just as Death starts messing with the equipment, causing the pump to malfunction and raise the pressure. The pump traps Hunt at the bottom and he gestures wildly for help, but no one sees him. Instead of drowning, Hunt gets his guts sucked out through his butt, a kill so wonderful that we don’t even care about the CGI viscera that caps off the scene. 1. Candace Hooper Doesn’t Stick the Landing (Final Destination 5) Easily the most glorious and well-composed kill of the entire franchise occurs early in Final Destination 5, when a standard routine for gymnast Candice Hooper (Ellen Wroe) goes horribly wrong. Director Steven Quale takes the time to show viewers the tools and space in which Death works, highlighting dripping water, a shaking girder, spilled dust, and other elements, before bringing them together as Candice goes through her flips. As a result, we understand every step in the system of catastrophes that leads to a ghastly end, with Candice’s crumpled body shuttering on the gym floor.

Helldivers 2 received an unexpected update with new weapon customizations and more enemy types, just in time for the Illuminate to come roaring out of a black hole with their sights set on Super Earth. “In a sudden, completely unprovoked offensive, they emerged. Nothing is safe, not even the heart of democracy itself,” the announcer shouts, exaggerated gravitas in his voice. “Liberty’s darkest hour approaches. Super Earth needs you.” The update lands with all of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Helldivers 2 brings to the table, but it also introduces new Illuminate enemy types, including the jetfighter-like Stingray and the Crescent Overseer, a foe that can launch attacks over cover. Then there’s the Fleshmob, described as “a Frankenstein’s monster of Voteless parts” that is reminiscent of Flood Carriers from Halo. The PlayStation Blog post hints at other, as-yet-unannounced enemies. Recommended Videos Helldivers can now customize their weapons, too. Most primary weapons have levels that can be raised by completing specific missions, and players can unlock different attachments that tweak everything from handling to ammo capacity. The update allows players to fine-tune their favorite gun to suit their playstyle by adjusting stats like recoil, reload time, and more. There are also new skins to pick from for each weapon, too. Helldiver 2‘s Superstore is also getting a boost. You don’t have to wait for things to come back into rotation; instead, you can browse through the entire library of items and purchase the ones you want with Super Credits, the game’s premium currency (but it can also be found in missions, so you don’t have to spend any realm money.) Related Finally, the update also tosses in a few new patterns for the Fast Recon Vehicle in several existing Warbonds, including Viper Commandos, Freedom’s Flame, Chemical Agents, and Truth Enforcers. The patterns unlock on May 15, coinciding with the launch of the new Masters of Ceremony Warbond.