'The Last of Us' finale sums up everything the show's first season did right

Editor's note: This article contains heavy spoilers for season one of The Last of Us and minor spoilers for the game The Last of Us Part II.

Last night’s finale of the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us turned out to be a microcosm of everything that worked across the nine episodes, as well as a reminder of what showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann will want to work on when they pick things up for season two. Throughout the season, The Last of Us has been exceedingly faithful to the original story — but Mazin and Druckmann smartly expanded on the stories of everyone surrounding Joel and Ellie to make the world much richer. In a perhaps too-tight 44 minutes (the shortest episode of the season), the show wrapped up the first part of the story, ending with Ellie’s “Okay,” just like the game.

That single word that tells us Ellie accepts Joel’s lies about what happened between him and the Fireflies, that he’s being honest when he says that they stopped looking for a cure and that her immunity doesn’t mean anything. Joel’s ostensibly off the hook for his murderous rampage through the Salt Lake City hospital to save Ellie from having her brain dissected by the Fireflies. Of course, Ellie being a cure for the cordyceps infection was the whole point of their journey — but not the point for Joel. And the look on Ellie’s face throughout the episode’s coda tells us she’s not convinced, despite what she says before everything cuts to black.

Really, there was no other place it could have stopped. Throughout the season, Mazin and Druckmann made plenty of deviations from the game’s main story, but things always came back to the most important beats in the relationship between Joel and Ellie. The importance of these events in the Salt Lake City hospital cannot be overstated, as they form the basis for everything that follows in the game The Last of Us Part II. As such, some expected to get some hints of how the hospital bloodbath will tie into events to come, but the show stayed firmly focused on the events in the first game. That’s for the best, as Part II has a sprawling, complicated story of its own; shoehorning in a few teases of what’s to come probably would have taken away from the immediacy of what happened between Joel and Ellie.

Before Joel’s killing spree and Ellie’s acceptance of his lies, we were treated to another of the flashbacks that Mazin and Druckmann have masterfully dropped throughout the season, this one going all the way back to Ellie’s birth. People who checked out the many collectibles in the game surely found Ellie’s letter in her backpack from her mother, Anna, who writes to her newborn knowing that her life is about to be cut short.