"Convergence" is the seventh and final episode of the second season of the American post-apocalyptic drama television series The Last of Us. Written by Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin, and directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado, it aired on HBO on May 25, 2025. The episode follows Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina's (Isabela Merced) third day in Seattle to kill Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). They are joined by Jesse (Young Mazino), who seeks to regroup with Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and return home.
The episode was filmed in July and August 2024, primarily in Downtown Vancouver. The decision to end the season on a cliffhanger signifying the third-season change to Abby's perspective was written to match the game on which the season is based; the writers felt it remained the best way to tell the whole story. Critics praised the direction, cinematography, and Ramsey and Ariela Barer's performances; some considered the writing powerful and interesting while others found its changes unnecessary and ending abrupt. Ramsey submitted the episode to support their nomination for Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. The episode was watched by 3.7 million viewers on its first day.
Plot Ellie returns to the theater after torturing Nora. She reveals to Dina that Joel massacred the Fireflies in Salt Lake City—including Abby's father—to save Ellie. Dina, unnerved, wants to return home. On Ellie's third day in Seattle, she and Jesse leave to find Tommy, arguing about Ellie's selfishness. Jesse prevents Ellie from interfering when Washington Liberation Front (WLF) soldiers assault a young member of the religious group Seraphites. Jesse discovers Dina is pregnant with his baby. He shares that he loved someone from a passing group who asked him to join her to Mexico, but he stayed in Jackson out of loyalty to the community.
The two scope out Seattle. Ellie spots an aquarium, and, from the information Nora gave her, realizes Abby is located there. Jesse angrily admits he voted against her proposition to avenge Joel to protect the community, stating Ellie does things for selfish reasons. Jesse searches for Tommy while Ellie heads for the aquarium. Meanwhile, WLF leader Isaac prepares the group to attack the Seraphites' island. He is worried about the disappearance of Abby's group, as Isaac wants Abby to succeed him when he dies.
En route to the aquarium, Ellie is hit by a giant wave and beaches on the Seraphites' island, where she is apprehended by the group. The WLF invasion diverts the Seraphites, and Ellie escapes. At the aquarium, she confronts Abby's friends Owen and Mel and demands Abby's whereabouts. Owen grabs a concealed gun to shoot her, but Ellie fatally shoots him and the bullet strikes Mel's neck. The pregnant Mel begs Ellie to save her baby via C-section but Ellie is too shocked to do so before Mel dies. Tommy and Jesse arrive to bring the distraught Ellie back to the theater.
Agreeing to return home, Ellie thanks Jesse for rescuing her and they reach a mutual understanding. They overhear a commotion and rush to the lobby. Jesse is fatally shot in the face by Abby, who has arrived at the theater to avenge her friends and holds Tommy at gunpoint. Ellie surrenders, admitting that she killed Abby's friends and was the person for whom Joel killed her father. Abby points her gun at Ellie, angrily telling her that she wasted her chance to live. A gunshot rings out.
Three days earlier, at the WLF base in a former sports stadium, Manny wakes Abby, having both been summoned by Isaac.
Production Conception and writing
"Convergence" was written by Neil Druckmann, Halley Gross, and Craig Mazin, and directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado. Druckmann and Mazin co-created the television series; Druckmann co-directed The Last of Us Part II (2020), the video game on which the second season is based, and co-wrote it with Gross. Mazin found the title reflective of the episode's events, being spoken in dialogue in reference to a convergence zone. The credits feature the song "Burden in My Hand" by Soundgarden; to Mazin, its lyrics implied similarities between Ellie and Abby, prompting interesting questions about whether they would be close if they had known each other.
Mazin felt the flashbacks depicted in the preceding episode might have occurred in Ellie's mind as she returns to the theater after torturing Nora. When Ellie admits to Dina that torturing Nora came easy to her, Druckmann disagreed with Mazin's interpretation, feeling Ellie lies to herself to imitate Joel's strength but is actually haunted by her actions. Nora saying two words to Ellie while being tortured—eventually leading Ellie to the aquarium—was Gross's idea. The scene of Ellie on the Seraphites' island was not included in the game; it had been written in early drafts but later cut. Mazin found the inclusion of the Seraphite child ordering Ellie's death on the island representative of innocent children being indoctrinated into extreme tribalism during war without a chance to view others without negativity. In the game, Ellie kills the WLF's dog Alice as it attacks her; the scene was omitted from the episode as the writers felt the live-action violence was more visceral, and the aquarium sequence being placed between several heavy moments made Alice's death "probably one too many".
Druckmann thought Ellie admitting that she knew about Joel's actions recontextualizes the scene in "Day One" in which Dina agrees to continue hunting Abby despite being pregnant: by withholding the information earlier, Ellie removed Dina's agency in making the decision with the full context, akin to Joel removing Ellie's agency in making a decision in the first-season finale. Mazin similarly found Ellie's admission similar to Joel's in the preceding episode, not wanting to tell the truth in fear of losing their loved ones; he noticed Dina turns from Ellie similar to the way in which Ellie turns from Joel in the first-season finale. Isabela Merced, who portrays Dina, felt the character reacted similar to how Ellie reacted when she found out. Gross recognized that Dina "extends [an] olive branch" in the following scene with a maturity that took Ellie years to achieve.
The writers compared Ellie's obsession with finding Abby—despite the people and duties around her demanding otherwise—to an addiction, which Druckmann and Gross had considered when writing the game. They thought Ellie had accepted the need to regroup with Tommy and return home, but seeing the aquarium prompts her to relapse to continue her revenge quest. Mazin felt Ellie undergoes several stages in the scene in which she sees the aquarium, entering a state of denial which prompts an argument that sounds convincing, then turning it around on Jesse when called out on it. Druckmann found it demonstrative of her hypocrisy as she seeks revenge for the death of her "community" (Joel) yet refuses to help Jesse look for another member of their community (Tommy).
Mazin thought the season's cliffhanger ending—signifying the following season's change to Abby's perspective—was risky, but felt HBO executives "understand that this show is going to be a different show every season". The writers were open to a different ending, considering interlacing Ellie and Abby's stories throughout the season, but Mazin wanted to maintain "the genetics of how this story functions". He thought they were "breaking quite a few rules" of television but felt "that is the point" of the series, reinforcing that the concept of protagonists and villains is inherently flawed. Druckmann said, like with the game, the upcoming context of Abby's perspective is necessary before her confrontation with Ellie continues. He compared the ending to the fifth episode teasing the sixth's flashbacks: the second-season ending establishes the "epic nature" of the third and its focus on Abby.
Casting and characters Bella Ramsey, who portrays Ellie, felt "the actual feeling of the rope" around their neck while filming with the Seraphites made the sequence more immersive. In killing Mel, Ramsey thought Ellie "realizes she has become all of the parts of [Joel] that she never wanted to become", finally seeing the consequences of her actions and comparing Mel to Dina due to their pregnancies. They found the scene "way more quiet and intimate and still" than Joel's death in "Through the Valley". It was one of their proudest scenes, feeling Ellie "goes from being sort of a villain to just a lost human being"; they believed Ellie, still remorseful over torturing Nora, never intended to kill Owen or Mel. The writers were fascinated with the extremes of Ellie's willpower: despite torturing Nora without hesitation, she is unable to gather the willpower to perform a C-section on Mel, regressing to a child; Gross considered it indicative of Ellie ultimately not being like Joel. Ramsey found the final scene complex to film, requiring several takes. In conversations with Mazin and Lopez-Corrado, they sought to find the balance of Ellie's trauma of Jesse's death and the shock of Abby's appearance, having sought to kill her for months; they considered this—with the added challenge of Ellie's grief switching to submission—"one of the hardest things" to perform, and felt the scene's abrupt ending made it difficult to finish filming. Ramsey was not aware of the gunshot cliffhanger until after the episode was released.
Young Mazino, who portrays Jesse, said he personally would have been "filled with dread and terror" upon discovering Dina's pregnancy but played the scene "more contained", thinking Jesse would have "a tight feeling of 'Let's get this done so I can get the fuck out of here. He felt similarly about Jesse's reaction to the Seraphite child being assaulted, removing emotion to focus on his objectives. In that scene, Gross thought Jesse prioritized his family while Ellie wanted justice, and Lopez-Corrado felt Ellie saw herself in the child, having been saved by Joel and wanting to do the same. Jesse was exasperated at Ellie's decision to continue hunting Abby, understanding her reasoning but feeling they had a better chance at leaving. Jesse tells Ellie that he voted against her proposition "with some relish and some satisfaction", as he is actively breaking his own rules and defying the vote to save Ellie and Dina. Mazino thought Jesse was sad as they depart, suspecting Ellie will likely die. He felt Jesse was jealous of Ellie's precocious nature; unaware of her immunity, he notices that she acts casual about serious events, admiring the lengths to which she goes to avenge her loved ones. Mazino found Jesse and Ellie's conversation at the theater emotional as it was filmed towards the end of the season's production.