The Last of Us Part 2 Ending Explained

Ellie has Abby pinned underwater, both hands locked around her throat, after a fight that has already cost Ellie two fingers. Every reason the game has spent twenty-some hours building is right there in her grip. She lets go anyway.

That single choice is the entire argument of The Last of Us Part II, and it only lands if you have the chain of events leading up to it straight — because this is not a game that hands you a clean villain and a clean reason to stop. Full spoilers below for the whole game. If you are not there yet, our Part II enemies guide or skills guide will not ruin anything for you. This piece covers the story only — not the first game's ending, which we have already broken down in full in The Last of Us ending explained, and which you should read first if you have not, because everything below is the invoice for that decision.

Why Abby came for Joel

Short version, because the first game already covers the long one: in 2034, Joel stormed a Firefly hospital in Salt Lake City, killed the surgeon about to operate on Ellie, and shot the Fireflies' leader Marlene twice in a parking garage so she couldn't retaliate. That surgeon was Jerry Anderson. His daughter, Abby, was there when it happened, and in the years after she joined the Washington Liberation Front in Seattle specifically because it gave her the training and the reach to eventually find the man who killed her father.

In 2034, Joel finally tells his brother Tommy the truth about what happened at that hospital, and that same night he gives a teenage Ellie a guitar, the instrument that becomes the emotional throughline of this entire game. Four years pass. It is now March 2, 2038, and Joel and Ellie have settled into an uneasy peace in Tommy's community of Jackson, Wyoming — until a routine patrol runs straight into Abby Anderson.

March 2, 2038: the Baldwin Lodge

Joel and Tommy find Abby's group under attack from an infected horde and, not knowing who she is, save them and shelter with them at the nearby Baldwin lodge during a snowstorm. Inside, introductions happen. Someone says Joel's name. The room goes quiet, and Abby — shotgun already in hand — shoots him in the knee.

What follows is not a fight. Abby's friends restrain Tommy and pin Joel to the wall while she tourniquets his leg to keep him conscious, then beats him with a golf club. Ellie, arriving separately on horseback after the group fails to return, finds the basement, is grabbed and pinned by Abby's friends, and is forced to watch the end of it. She is still screaming that she will kill all of them when Abby finishes Joel off and the group leaves. Ellie is knocked unconscious moments later and wakes up next to his body.

That night in her room, still in shock, Ellie tells Tommy she is not going to let this go. The next day she sits beside Joel's fresh grave in the Jackson cemetery, and Tommy — over Maria's objections — sets out for Seattle to find Abby's group first. Ellie and her girlfriend Dina follow him without waiting for permission.

What three days of revenge actually cost

This is the part of the story easiest to skip past on the way to the finale, and it shouldn't be. The middle of Part II is not filler. It is the receipt.

Over three days in Seattle, Ellie kills Jordan, one of the group present at Joel's death, and finds Leah already dead at the Seraphites' hands. Tommy, working separately, tracks down and kills Nick. Ellie corners the WLF medic Nora in a hospital basement and tortures her for Abby's location — Nora does not survive it. At an aquarium serving as Abby's private hideout, Ellie corners Owen and Mel, Abby's closest friends, alone; she kills them both, and it visibly breaks something in her. In between, Dina reveals she is pregnant, with Jesse's child, in an abandoned theater the group is using as a shelter — a detail the game drops in the same breath as the killing, on purpose.

None of this makes Ellie feel closer to closure. It makes her worse at stopping.

The Theater: the fight nobody wins

On the third night, with Ellie, Dina, Tommy and Jesse regrouped at the theater and planning to leave the city, Abby and her companion Lev track them down using a map Ellie's group left behind. Abby ambushes Tommy alone in the front hall. When he mocks her for not shooting him in the back, she beats him to the floor instead — which draws Jesse and Ellie running in. Abby kills Jesse with a headshot on sight.

With Tommy as a hostage, Abby has Ellie surrender, and Ellie offers to trade her own life for Tommy's. Abby, furious that sparing Ellie and Dina back in Jackson bought her nothing but two more dead friends, decides to shoot Ellie anyway. Tommy lunges for the gun; Lev shoots him in the leg to break the struggle, and Abby knocks him down and fires at his head at point-blank range. The bullet grazes rather than penetrates — Tommy survives, but the wound costs him the eye and leaves him with permanent nerve damage down that side of his body. It is the reason he can never go after Abby himself again, and it is why the next chapter of this story runs through Ellie instead.

Ellie flees backstage with Abby in pursuit. Abby and Lev beat both Ellie and Dina in the fight that follows, and Abby is set to kill Dina when Lev talks her out of it. Abby leaves both women alive with a warning never to cross her again, and walks out with Lev to search for her missing friends — not knowing yet that Ellie already killed them.

One year later: why Ellie goes alone

The game jumps forward roughly a year. Ellie and Dina are living on a farm outside Jackson with Dina and Jesse's infant son, JJ. Ellie is trying, and visibly struggling, to be a parent instead of a soldier — a clanking shovel in the barn is enough to trigger a full hallucination of Joel's death, loud enough that it scares JJ.

Then Tommy arrives. Blind in one eye, walking with a permanent limp, he has spent the year working contacts and has a lead: Abby and Lev relocated to Santa Barbara, California. He wants Ellie to finish what he no longer can. Dina immediately shuts the conversation down, telling Tommy they are done chasing Abby. Ellie, caught between them, tells Tommy she can't do it again. He calls her out for breaking the promise she made him in the hospital after Seattle, storms out, and rides off — and Dina follows him out to tell him exactly what she thinks of putting this back on Ellie.

That night, unable to sleep, Ellie goes downstairs, finds Joel's guitar, and starts to play — which triggers the flashback to the last real conversation she ever had with him, on his porch the night before he died. (More on that scene below, because it is also the last thing the game shows you.) When morning comes, Ellie has made her decision. Dina begs her to stay and take care of their family instead. Ellie tells her she loves her and cannot keep living the way she has been — and leaves for Santa Barbara without her. This is the detail worth being precise about: Dina does not go on the second trip. She refuses, on the record, before Ellie ever leaves the house.

Santa Barbara: the Rattlers and the beach

Two threads run in parallel here, shown out of order the same way Ellie's and Abby's three Seattle days were.

Abby and Lev, searching for the remaining Fireflies, track a radio lead to a house at 2425 Constance and finally make contact — the group has relocated to Catalina Island, and the man on the radio, recognizing Abby as Jerry Anderson's daughter, invites them to join roughly two hundred survivors there. Before they can leave for the coast, a slaver gang called the Rattlers ambushes and captures them.

Weeks later, Ellie reaches the same coastline, finds their abandoned boat, and follows their trail inland into a Rattler-controlled resort — the same faction covered in full in our Part II enemies guide. She breaks into their compound, frees the enslaved prisoners inside, and learns from their leader that Abby and Lev have been strung up on pillars along the beach to die of exposure. She finds them there. Abby is emaciated and barely conscious; Lev is unconscious. Abby cuts him down, tells Ellie there are boats nearby, and the two of them start carrying their people toward the water — genuinely just trying to leave.

Ellie stops her. Seeing her own wound reopen triggers a flash of Joel's dead face, and something in her locks into place. She throws Abby to the ground and demands she fight, threatening to kill Lev if Abby refuses again. Abby, unwilling to let that happen, agrees.

They fight in the surf, brutally and at length. Ellie stabs Abby in the chest; Abby forces the blade out and keeps fighting. Ellie eventually gets Abby's head under the water and holds it there. Abby, desperate, bites off two of Ellie's fingers. Ellie cries out, punches her down, and pins her again — this time with her legs, so Abby can't repeat it — and keeps drowning her.

Why Ellie lets go

Mid-drowning, Ellie has the same memory that hit her the night before at the farm: her last real conversation with Joel, told in full in the epilogue below. It is enough. She lets go of Abby's throat. Abby gasps back to consciousness, coughing, confused, and cautious. Ellie — sobbing, not triumphant — tells her to take Lev and go. Abby does. Ellie is left alone in the water as the sounds of the Rattler compound burning finally die down behind her.

This is not Ellie simply running out of rage. She has every physical advantage in that moment and does not use it. What stops her is not Abby — it's the memory of the one relationship she has left any hope of repairing, and it is not Abby's.

The epilogue: the guitar and walking away

Ellie returns to the farm to find it stripped and empty. Dina and JJ have gone, taking the animals and most of what they owned with them. The only room untouched is Ellie's drawing room, where her Savage Starlight posters, her sketches of Dina and JJ, and Joel's guitar are all still exactly where she left them.

She takes the guitar out and tries to play Future Days — the same song Joel taught her, the song she once used to make first contact with Dina and Jesse's memory throughout the trip. Her fingers, missing two knuckles now, cannot form the chords. She stops.

That failure triggers the flashback the whole game has been building toward: the night before Joel died, on his porch, the two of them talking over coffee after Ellie humiliated him in front of the town for defending her against a homophobic remark. Joel tells her he is glad she and Dina are together. Ellie, still raw, throws the real accusation at him — that he took her chance to make her death mean something by lying about the hospital and killing the people who could have used her immunity. Joel doesn't deny it, and doesn't apologize for it either: he says that if God gave him the same choice again, he would make exactly the same one. Through tears, Ellie tells him she would like to try to forgive him anyway, and leaves on that note — the last time they ever speak.

Back in the present, Ellie sets the guitar down by the window, gets up, and walks out of the farmhouse for good. The camera holds on the guitar's fretboard — a moth carved into the headstock, the same instrument Joel was cleaning in the game's opening shot — as she disappears into the distance. Cut to black. Credits.

The full timeline

Quick Recap of the Ending

• Abby Anderson is the daughter of Jerry Anderson, the surgeon Joel killed in the first game's ending, and she has spent years working toward finding and killing him for it.
• On March 2, 2038, Abby's group ambushes Joel and Tommy and Abby beats Joel to death with a golf club while Ellie is restrained and forced to watch.
• Over three days in Seattle, Ellie and Tommy kill most of the people responsible, at a heavy emotional cost that the game shows in detail rather than skips past.
• At the Theater, Abby kills Jesse, nearly kills Tommy (he survives, blinded in one eye), and ultimately spares Ellie and Dina at Lev's urging.
• A year later, Tommy — now permanently disabled — asks Ellie to finish the job in Santa Barbara. Dina refuses to go again, and Ellie leaves without her.
• Ellie finds Abby and Lev enslaved by the Rattlers, frees them, then forces a fight with Abby on the beach anyway, losing two fingers in the process.
• Drowning Abby, Ellie remembers her last real conversation with Joel and lets her go.
• Ellie returns home to find Dina and JJ gone, tries and fails to play Joel's guitar with her injured hand, relives that final porch conversation once more, then sets the guitar down and leaves the farm for good.