The Last Of Us Season 3 Will Make History After HBO's Past 2 Seasons

Published Nov 3, 2026, 12:30 PM EST

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

The first two seasons of The Last of Us have hardly been fun and lighthearted, but the show’s upcoming third and final season will be even darker and grimmer than everything that came before. The Last of Us season 3 is switching main characters yet again, this time from Ellie to Abby, as we see the previous three days in Seattle from her perspective.

Abby’s story is relentlessly brutal and intense; she teams up with two young Seraphite runaways, Lev and Yara, and goes through the horrors of war to protect them. Abby and Lev riding through a flaming battlefield while Wolves and Seraphites slaughter each other all around them will make Joel’s hospital massacre look quaint by comparison. Abby’s boss fight with the Rat King will make Ellie and Dina’s struggle against the stalkers look like a walk in the park.

But Abby’s story is just the tip of the iceberg; The Last of Us season 3 will also include the game’s epilogue in Santa Barbara, and that final stretch along the coast is the bleakest part of either of the games. Initially, showrunner Craig Mazin was floating the idea of dedicating the entire third season to Abby and saving Ellie’s California crusade for a fourth season. But now that his co-showrunner Neil Druckmann, the creator of the original games, has jumped ship, Mazin is also looking for the exit. He’s lined up a Baldur’s Gate series as his next big-budget video game adaptation for HBO, so he’ll be speedrunning the rest of The Last of Us in one season.

While The Last of Us season 3 is likely to be the show’s darkest installment yet, it’ll also be the first season to end on a hopeful note. Seasons 1 and 2 both ended on a pretty bleak note, but season 3 will end with a somewhat optimistic outlook.

Why The Last Of Us Season 3 Should Stay Faithful To The Game's Ending

The first two seasons of The Last of Us both ended with a harrowing twist. Season 1 ended with Joel lying to Ellie about having murdered all the Fireflies and doomed the human race, and season 2 ended with Jesse getting shot in the face and Ellie being held at gunpoint. But when season 3 reaches the epic denouement of the entire saga, after pushing through some of the grimmest, most haunting storylines yet, we’ll finally get to a feeling of hope. No matter how bleak it gets, it never succumbs to a nihilistic worldview.

As important as it is for The Last of Us season 3 to get Abby’s story right, it has to stick the landing in Santa Barbara, too. If it doesn’t capture the right emotions in that sequence, the entire story will fall apart. By the time you reach Santa Barbara in the game, you’re so overwhelmed and fatigued that you just want it all to be over, and that’s very much by design. It’s a brutal slog; you face the most evil faction in the franchise to date, you burn through all your remaining ammo and energy, and then you’re forced to fight someone you don’t want to fight.

The beauty of The Last of Us Part II’s ending is all in the nuances and the ambiguity. HBO’s adaptation already nailed the nuance and ambiguity of the first Last of Us game’s ending. The final scene of The Last of Us’ season 1 finale was a shot-for-shot recreation of Joel and Ellie’s closing confrontation from the game, and Bella Ramsey nailed the uncertainty in Ellie’s eyes as she reluctantly accepts Joel’s lie.

Without spoiling anything specific, The Last of Us games have the perfect ending. All the TV show has to do to have its own perfect ending is recreate that ending shot by shot.

The Last of Us