The Last of Us Season 2, Episode 7 Review – “Convergence”

“Convergence”, as the title suggests, is an episode for The Last of Us to not only bring together its many characters from season two, but align the show’s thematic material, for one final, focused hour on Ellie’s journey of vengeance, and how it affects everyone in the world around here. Instead, “Convergence” is a mess of leaden dialogue and choppy plotting, which makes for a much more confusing episode – especially when The Last of Us oddly begins to soften the story around Ellie, turning the show’s final hour of 2025 (and potentially, the last time we see Ellie until the end of season three sometime in… 2027?) into a distonal mess, devolving into a series of plot bullet points as it careens towards its brutal (and brutally unsatisfying) final moments.

“Convergence” picks up where “Feel Her Love” left off, Ellie returning to the theater after killing Nora, where she finds Jesse and Dina ready to ignite the awkward love triangle I don’t think anyone is really invested in. And from the start, it fills the hour with overt imagery and stilted dialogue; if Jesse constantly talking about how he has to live isn’t obvious enough, we also get a scene where Ellie takes off her shirt and sits in a dressing room with Dina, because the script (credited to Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin) needed a lazy visual metaphor to go alongside Ellie revealing to Dina what actually happened back in Salt Lake City (which leads to a rather cold response from Dina, a moment the episode has absolutely no time at any point to return to… she’s not even seen in the season’s final moments).

When he isn’t looking at the camera talking about how he “REALLY CAN’T DIE” because he has a kid on the way, Jesse is angrily chiding Ellie for her selfishness – dialogue that would hold more weight and gravitas if it wasn’t painfully obvious what is happening to his character (he literally calls himself a good guy two minutes before he’s unceremoniously shot in the face by Abby), and B). Jesse’s first moment in the spotlight turns out to be his worst appearance of the season; he doesn’t have dialogue so much as he has pointed observations on Ellie’s self-serving behavior (behavior he exacerbates by bailing her out multiple times this season, which Ellie thanks him for by banging his ex-girlfriend), and the episode gives his character absolutely nothing to work with, outside of being heralded as a proficient soldier who convinced himself he was a good human being, because he never killed anyone out of pleasure.

In theory, it makes for an interesting contrast; someone raised in Jackson and learned to adopt their values of community, whereas Ellie’s been hardened for nearly two decades by a world that killed her mother in cold blood, handed her a broken moral compass, and basically told her to figure it out herself. Her mentor, a dead murderer, provided a much different formative experience than what Jesse experienced, raised in Jackson, the antithesis to the self-preserving selfishness driving the actions of most other people in the world, Ellie and Abby included.

Instead of giving Jesse real character development through the season, however, The Last of Us slaps a few Post-It notes with character traits written in Sharpie on them to Maria’s supposed successor, building up an improbably moral man through some real bad dialogue, including calling himself a good guy, telling Ellie “I was taught to put other people first”, or whenever digging into the lame tensions of the season’s incredibly vague, boring love triangle, where Jesse vacillates between being angry and bummed at the situation. Even stranger is how he ultimately just shrugs his shoulders at the whole situation, telling Ellie “I love her, but not the way you do”.

Had we been offered a single scene of Jesse and Dina along the way, maybe there’s be some heft to this conflict (all we get is a story about Jesse banging some girl on her way to Mexico for two weeks, noting his refusal to leave and be happy because he feels he owes the community who saved him). The world’s most undercooked love triangle is offered up as a source of tension in this specific episode, because there’s really not a whole lot to do while the show waits for the right time to send Ellie off to the aquarium to find Abby; but instead of focusing on the character dynamics of the three characters we’ve followed, The Last of Us decides to take a few unnecessary asides; first to briefly show Isaac so we can establish why Abby matters to the WLF, before shifting back to Ellie for the season’s most CGI-laden, underwhelming sequence, when her tunnel vision takes her through the storm and the choppy waters to the aquarium, where she encounters Owen and Mel.

It’s here, oddly enough, where The Last of Us shows some of the biggest shifts from game to screen; Ellie makes her way to the aquarium literally untouched and unseen, save for a thoroughly pointless moment where she capsizes her little boat and ends up on the shores of what I assume we can call Seraphite Island (she’s about to be eviscerated as we saw in previous episodes, until an alarm goes off, presumably marking the beginning of the WLF’s barely-mentioned full-on assault of the cult tribe). Save for a bitter Jesse half-heartedly trying to stop her, Ellie’s meets no resistance from anyone on her path to Abby – even when she meets Owen and Mel, and Owen’s dramatic decision to reach for a gun leads to her shooting one bullet through both of them.

One can see how desperate The Last of Us is to get its simplistic themes across in “Convergence” when Mel is dying, and suddenly starts begging Ellie, trying to coach her through an impromptu C-section while she bleeds out on the aquarium floor. In theory, this is the culmination of Ellie’s arc this season; she comes face-to-face with her own senseless violence, Mel serving as a neat parallel to the also-pregnant-and-in-peril Dina – unfortunately, it comes across as a pandering moment, The Last of Us trying to ratchet up the tragedy through the unnecessary addition of a pregnant woman begging for her baby to be saved, by someone who has proven all season she’s incapable of taking action herself, unless the means are distinctly in service of the ends she pursues.

More importantly, the fact Owen and Mel’s deaths are accidental, combined with Ellie’s relative ease of navigating through Seattle, changes the tenor of her actions as a character. In the game, Ellie’s actions to avenge Joel are filtered through her distinct choices of violence, and how Joel’s personality and traumas have filtered through to his surrogate daughter – she kills a lot of people through the course of the game, brutality that is reflected in her inability to reconcile herself with Joel’s death, and willingness to pursue vengeance over peace at every possible turn. She makes those decisions herself (whereas in Part I of the games, her choices are products of her environment), and that cloud of darkness forms the heart of the game’s conflict, reflecting on cycles of violence and how difficult it can be to break them (Ellie observing this on a micro level, where the Seraphite/WLF war playing out in the background observes on a macro level, mostly through Isaac’s furrowed brow and long, deliberate sighs).

It’s an odd change, especially as the series doubles down on the immature decisions she makes in pursuing Abby, which eventually lead her back to the theater (supposedly a dangerous journey to make in dark, at night, while the WLF and Seraphites are fighting it out… however, we never see Ellie’s journey back to the theater, or two seconds of the two groups battling it out). Here, we get the worst Jesse/Ellie scene of them all, where Jesse openly talks about himself as a good person, and the two of them oddly reconcile, right before Jesse runs through the theater doors and takes an unceremonious bullet to the face, right in front of Tommy and Ellie (where is Dina? Who knows!).

And that’s really The Last of Us in a nutshell, right? Shitty people get to contend with their awful decisions, while the good people of its world get violently discarded, as byproducts of a violent world and its violent means. After holding its cards close to its chest all season, Jesse learns he’s a father and immediately spends the rest of the episode talking about how he can’t die, he’s not going to die, and he can’t die because he’s going to be a father – it goes so hard on this single line of dialogue, it robs the moment of any real pathos because it because “Convergence” hits the viewer over the head with the same two pieces of thematic material over and over again – that is, until it cuts away in the final minute to Abby’s perspective, the final image of the season a laughably dramatic reveal of the words “Seattle… Day One” on screen, a reminder that the whirlwind of unresolved story bits we’ve spent 53 minutes watching will stay that way for a long time, since we’re now going to go back and spend what appears to be a large chunk of season three retracing Abby’s movements around Seattle, until her and Ellie finally cross paths (as an added bonus, we get Abby firing a gun at Ellie right before we cut to black for the underwhelming “flashback”).

It makes for a disappointing final hour, The Last of Us repetitively observing the same points about violence and its endless cycles, undercutting some of the season’s best episodes and reflections with a markedly dumb hour leaning much farther back into the misery porn approach of season one, than the more balanced, even occasionally hopeful pockets found within season two. And it does so in the oddest ways, absolving Ellie of her own agency, cutting back on her violent nature and turning some of the most pivotal points of her character into moments of impulse and accident, rather than the careful, coordinated actions of an immature young woman driven by sadness and passion to exact revenge on a world that’s continued to take everything from her.

Instead, we get a season finale that thinks its a few shades smarter and more dramatic than it really is, a rather unremarkable final hour, a mish-mash of tones and ideas deliberately half-cooked as The Last of Us knowingly builds to a cliffhanger we’re not going to resolve for (probably?) at least another two years. While on a large scale, the plotting makes sense, “Convergence” loses itself among the many details, teases, and allusive moments it tries to fill its hollow emotional core with. It makes for a whiplash of an episode after last week’s “The Price” – by what we’re shown, Ellie has clearly learned nothing in her dogged pursuit of Abby, making the choice to split their story neatly in half between seasons an even stranger one, leaving the season feeling unfinished not only narratively, but thematically – like Jesse (RIP), “Convergence” lands with an unremarkable thud, held back by its own self-righteousness, poor plotting, and a series of character choices that seem to undercut some of what The Last of Us is trying to say as a story. Though not a season finale bad enough to completely cloud what is yet to come, “Convergence” is a dispiriting, underdeveloped finale too enamored with its own reflection to tell a satisfying, contained story, ending an abbreviated, long-awaited second season on a surprisingly low note.

Grade: C-