On Sunday, May 25, the sophomore season of HBO’s The Last of Us ended with a literal bang, but an emotional whimper. With the season’s end comes the end of Seattle’s time in the limelight. The bulk of Season 2, which put the zombies in the backseat and followed a quest for vengeance for the brutal murder of Pedro Pascal that led two characters (one new, one old) into the heart of the Emerald City. This Seattle is not our Seattle. Earlier episodes even made us consider that this alternate universe Seattle may have been better than the Seattle we know and love. Now that we have witnessed all of what The Last of Us thinks of our home on Puget Sound, we think it’s pretty clear—they don’t get us at all.
Let’s dive into it.
(If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read this.)
After a flashback episode that took place at the communist compound in Wyoming, and did everything it could to pull every string the heart has, we return to Seattle for the big finale. Our heroes are again hunkering down in the fictionalized Paramount Theatre. We see music posters. Van Morrison played here. This is a town known for music!
Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Jesse (Young Mazino) venture out into Seattle to find Uncle Tommy (Gabriel Luna), though Ellie would rather find her nemesis, Abby (Kaitlyn Dever). That bitch killed Pedro. The Washington Liberation Front member she killed in that hospital basement said Abby was at “Whale wheel.” What could this mean? Put your heads together, Seattleites.
Ellie and Jessie turn into a downtown alleyway that has the wooden utility poles you find in the city the show was actually filmed in—Seattle’s more beautiful neighbor, Vancouver BC. The alleyway is also so broad it has multiple abandoned cars littered throughout. Moss is in heaven here; grass is in hell. Lawns are long gone. We are not sure, however, where this alleyway is supposed to be, but we are pretty sure it is the same fictional alleyway where the Seattle Police Department rapped along to Macklemore’s “Downtown” in their 2018 cop lip-sync video:
Then, Ellie and Jesse venture onto a legit downtown street. We see the remains of glassy skyscrapers. The street is littered with destruction and refuse. Rotting cars are upside down. Moss, again, covers everything. We expect this is what everyone who exclusively drives cars in Seattle thinks 3rd Avenue looks like, now that it’s a bus-only street. Anyway, the important thing—the only accurate cherry on top of this confused Seattle—is the crane that has faceplanted across two skyscrapers in the distance. This is true for the city in the previous decade. But not so much so for the city that got frozen in the year 2003, the year that fungal zombies destroyed the world. The Microsoft boom of the late 90s has nothing on the Amazon boom that erupted in 2012.
While walking, Jesse tells Ellie that he knows all about Dina (Isabela Meced). She is pregnant. He is the father. They must become a family. That sort of thing. At this moment, Jesse delivers a line that might become as iconic as “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane”:
“I’m gonna be a father. Which means I can’t die. But, because of you, we’re stuck in a war zone. So how about we skip the apologies and just go find Tommy so I CAN GET US AND MY KID THE FUCK OUT OF SEATTLE!!!”
We flash to Costco of all places. This is where a Washington Liberation Front (the army that runs Seattle and is at war with the matriarchal cult from hell, the Seraphites) base is. The WLF base? It is unclear. (We will not play a videogame to find out—not for lack of will, but our lack of the machines that make gaming possible. Well, and also will.) This makes sense to us. We assume we’re at the SoDo Costco? Nevertheless, this shot is making us reconsider our entire apocalypse plan. We will head straight to Costco in the event of the world’s end. This WLF stronghold begs the question: Can the apocalypse Kirkland?
Within a tent near the Costco base—though, we like to think they set this tent up inside the Costco—WLF Leader Isaac (Westworld’s Jeffery Wright) is planning some sort of attack or defense. Honestly, we got too caught up with the Seattle of it all to pay close attention to the plot or what Isaac had in mind. We also don’t think this is truly our fault since we haven’t dealt with the WLF plot line in a long time (episode 1? 2? 3?).
The important part about this conversation to us is the woman he’s talking to, Elise Park (Hettienne Park), discusses the weather. Now this, for sure, is a very Seattle thing. Park addresses the inexplicable onslaught of rain (not like Seattle rain anyone here knows) as the product of a convergence zone. Okay, okay, we’ve experienced convergence zones, so that kind of rain could happen. Park says the rain will get worse and darkness will come at 21:30. To us non-military folk, that is 9:30 p.m. That probably puts the time of year close to the summer solstice. For instance, on the longest day of the year this year, Seattle will experience a 9:12pm sunset. Despite the explanation, the rain remains inaccurate. At least getting the rain wrong remains the one thing consistent among all media about Seattle. (Watch The Killing, which was also filmed in Vancouver.)
Back to Ellie and Jesse. We are in a bookstore. There’s a curving staircase. The books seem mostly intact. This is because Seattle is literate and values knowledge even in the apocalypse. We assume that this 2003-era downtown bookstore is the old Elliot Bay Book Company, which was in Pioneer Square until 2010. That wooden paradise would have turned to rot in the soggy Seattle of The Last of Us. So, the bookstore Ellie and Jesse find themselves in is colder, harder, more concrete.
And then it happens. Ellie, whose partner, Dina (Isabela Meced), is pregnant, checks out the children’s section and examines a book about Sesame Street’s Grover. It’s ominously called The Monster at the End of the Book. Now, why is this scene a bit misleading? If you have lived in Seattle long enough, then you very well know that our bookstores are more likely to have a section devoted to dogs rather than to human babies. Seattle is the third-most childless city in the US (Number 1 is, of course, San Francisco). Need more proof? Go to Cal Anderson park to see the truth in front of your nose. The city’s park people built a playground for kids, and nothing for dogs. But the playground is always ghostly, never used. But the dogs! My god. They are everywhere, and even take over the whole park around 5 p.m.
Hearing gunfire and assuming it’s Tommy, our team ventures up, up, up. This bookstore is in a tall glass building! Ellie and Jesse survey the landscape. From the looks of their downtown vantage, they are somewhere in mid-downtown, perhaps, West Edge, which is actually a real name of a neighborhood. Ellie spots a wheel—a Great one. We will forgive production for forgetting the Great Wheel wasn’t built until 2012 and including it in a show where time stopped in 2003. And where is the Viaduct in all of this? This is all beside the point, which is that Ellie spots a whale on the side of the Seattle aquarium situated in spitting distance of the building they’re standing on.
Jesse, map in hand, determines the shots are coming from Eastlake. “This is South Lake,” he said, pointing to Lake Union. He traces his finger up to the marina near East Lake. That’s where the shots are coming from. We looked at his map and then our own. Could Tommy be battling WLFs in the remains of Duke’s Seafood?
It doesn’t matter because we don’t see it. Ellie abandons Jesse to go murder Abby. We see her walking down big, regal steps (the Harbor Steps???) to a dock floating in a stormy Puget Sound. Waves—yes, waves—batter boats. The aquarium is somehow miles away, floating in the middle of choppy Elliott Bay.
Ellie climbs into a small boat, pulls the motor’s cord, and it goes into the night. Because we know the landscape, we assume she is heading south toward the aquarium. Torrents of this early-summer convergence zone rain blind her. A rogue wave straight out of The Perfect Storm (yes, it’s that huge) plows into Ellie’s craft.
She washes up on a pebbly shore. Forest kisses the beach. Some of the Seraphites are here. Or are we to believe this is the same forest as the one in the middle of the city two episodes before? It doesn’t square with our mental maps of Seattle. Discovery Park would be insane, except it does fit the bill for wildness. Perhaps this is some area of Magnolia? We wonder if that part of Seattle has forests. We do not know anything about Magnolia (Indeed, one of us has visited Brooklyn far more times than that obscure neighborhood with a bridge that passes over Terminal 91.) Or maybe we got it all wrong and this is one of the islands? This might make more sense. We can imagine the anti-science Seraphites being the descendants of the vaccine haters of Vashon.
Ellie makes it to the aquarium. We don’t see enough of the inside to critique its Seattleness. However, it was a missed opportunity to not use that cool, brutalist-style domed room with all the eerie blue-green glass tanks. Alas. Ellie kills two people, a man and a pregnant woman. It is a bad idea to be pregnant in this Seattle. (Recall what we said about the children’s section in the bookstore.)
Tommy and Jesse find Ellie bent over her mistakes (murder, muder, and, if you are a Christian nationalist, a third murder). They take her back to the Paramount Theatre. There, Tommy consults a map for a way out of the city. He points to a big green square on the same latitude as Lake Union, east of I-5. This is where Capitol Hill is. Tommy says, “The park is a no go.” The park?? Does Seattle have a Central Park in this universe? Did Paul Allen’s Seattle Commons actually get built in this Seattle (and placed not in South Lake Union, but in Capitol Hill)? Another win for Apocalypse Seattle.
Abruptly, Abby appears. She shoots Jesse in the head, dead. She holds Tommy at gun point before turning the gun on Ellie. Bang! Before the season ends, we flash back to Abby’s “Seattle Day 1.” We see the WLF camp in what was then called Seahawks Stadium (it became Quest Field in 2004, and CenturyLink Field in 2011). Because the world came to an end in 2003, the Seahawk’s Super Bowl-winning season (2014-2015) never happened. There was to be no Beast Mode, no Legion of Boom in this moss-covered Seattle. If you know our city then you know that the Kingdome, which was demolished in 2000, would not have been ideal, in a practical sense, for a post-apocalyptic army base. CenturyLink is open to the air and sky and so great for growing food and capturing power with wind turbines.
And just when you think The Last of Us neglected to include the city's most famous form of music, grunge, it plays Soundgarden’s “Burden in my Hand” as the credits roll.
