Did Ellie Die in The Last of Us Season 2 Finale?

The following story contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 finale.

A GOOD TV show is always trying to one-up itself. If one thing is seen as a success, it typically feels natural to wonder how things could possibly get bigger, bolder, and, hopefully, better, from there. But when you’re The Last of Us, and your first season goes out the way it did, how do you possibly raise the stakes from there?

The vast majority of The Last of Us season 2 has dealt with the fallout from the end of the first season, and that includes the death of Joel (Pedro Pascal) himself—a massive change for the show that changes just about everything. The season has centered on themes inviting audiences to explore empathy and to consider how damaging the cycle of revenge and seeking vengeance—something we see so often in the stories we take in—can really be. In episode 6, we get a bit of closure around Joel’s death, giving us a nice place for him to go out that’s not him being brutally, violently murdered by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) as he was earlier in the season.

Still, the climax of the episode revolves around the truth being shared between Joel and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) about Joel’s choice to murder all the Fireflies at the end of season 1. And that choice continues to have ripple effects on all of our characters from across this world—and even winds up costing Jesse (Young Mazino) his life. Everything we see exists in the aftermath of that choice, and one ultimate thing hangs over everything: Some choices have no undoing. What’s done is done.

And that’s something that both Ellie and Abby will have to understand and deal with in real time. As Ellie, Dina, Jesse, and Tommy (Gabriel Luna) spent the majority of the season searching for Abby in Seattle, somehow she figured out what was going on—and got ahead of it. She was in position to hold Tommy as her hostage, and to take Jesse out with a gunshot to to the head as he burst through the theater door; Against Tommy’s advice, Ellie tosses her gun away and lets Abby hold her up.

Abby and Ellie (who had just killed Nora, and had been forced to accidentally kill Owen and Mel) then have their big standoff, these two key figures of snowballing violence, aggression and emotion finally facing one another. After some talk about what both have done—Abby furious that Ellie has killed her friends after she spared her in Jackson—we’re left with Abby firing her gun at Ellie, as the screen cuts to black.

Does Ellie die in The Last of Us season 2, episode 7?

As far as The Last of Us HBO show goes, well, we’re clearly and deliberately meant to not know about Ellie’s fate at the end of the show’s second season; Abby clearly fires her gun in Ellie’s direction, and there’s an abrupt cut to black. After a couple seconds of nothingness, things pick up as we flash back to the very beginning of Abby’s story in Seattle, which will dominate the narrative of season 3. It’s likely that we won’t get an answer about Ellie’s fate until Abby’s story catches up with the tense moment we saw from Ellie’s perspective at the end of season 2.

But, folks, thinking logically, it’s very unlikely that Ellie dies in this moment. She is the protagonist of the show—at this point, the sole protagonist, after Joel’s death—and the end of the season is designed to make you worry. But it’s likely we’ll cut back when the time comes and Abby will have missed her shot, either accidentally or on purpose. And then we will continue to see how their standoff plays out.

Does Ellie die in The Last of Us Part II video game?

Obviously, potential spoilers for season 3 of The Last of Us here. But Ellie does not die during her confrontation with Abby in the game.

In The Last of Us Part II, Abby does intend to shoot and kill Ellie, but Tommy manages to jump up and wrestle the gun away from her, creating an all out moment of mania. While in the show we only see Abby, in the game she’s joined by a younger character named Lev as her backup—who shoots Tommy in the leg, before Abby shoots him in the head. Tommy loses a lot of blood in this moment, but, somehow, survives—though is physically disabled for the rest of the game.

During this scrum, Ellie gets up and grabs Jesse’s gun; eventually, Abby and Ellie have a big fight—and, considering that whole part will certainly be a part of The Last of Us season 3, we won’t get too deep into it. But there’s a lot of fighting, a lot of shooting, a lot of stabbing and slashing, and a lot of important, empathetic character moments. And we’ll be eager to see how HBO’s adaptation puts it all onto the screen in live action.