Tech
The Last of Us Season 2 review: Joel and Ellies return devastates and infuriates
The Last of Us Season 2 is just as moving as its predecessor, but it's also infinitely more frustrating.
Just like in Season 1, series co-creators Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (creator of The Last of Us game) have crafted a stirring post-apocalyptic tale about the relationship between survivors Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), one that's just as likely to fill your heart as it is to stomp it into tiny pieces. But as the season seeks to widen the world of The Last of Us beyond its central pair and the settlement of Jackson, Wyoming, it often comes up short of the in-depth world-building that made Season 1 feel so lived-in and complete.
The Last of Us Season 2 is a haunting continuation of Joel and Ellie's story.
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
The Last of Us Season 2 picks up five years after the Season 1 finale, when Joel wiped out the Fireflies in Salt Lake City in order to save Ellie's life. Now, the two live in the thriving community of Jackson, alongside Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel Luna) and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). However, their relationship has frayed to the point that they're barely on speaking terms. Joel reckons with the loss by speaking with town therapist Gail (a wonderfully no-nonsense Catherine O'Hara), while Ellie throws herself into patrol duty with new friends Jesse (Young Mazino, Beef) and Dina (Isabela Merced, Alien: Romulus).
The season's early episodes spend a lot of time establishing the daily rhythms of Jackson, from city planning and council meetings to community dances and baseball games. The mundanity of the tasks allows us to sink into a post-apocalyptic world where stability is possible. That stability makes Joel and Ellie's silent treatment all the more heartbreaking, especially given all they went through to make it to Jackson in Season 1.
If Season 1's motto was "endure and survive," then Season 2 is about what happens in the wake of these survival attempts. That means Joel continues to reckon with his murder of the Fireflies, and more importantly, his lie to Ellie about what happened in Salt Lake. The impact of that lie reverberates across the season, with The Last of Us carefully peeling back layer after layer of how it has warped Joel and Ellie's connection. Pascal and Ramsey are once again phenomenal together, each a portrait of emotional restraint just seconds from snapping. Pascal brims with guilt and melancholy, while Ramsey simmers with rage, and by the end of the first episode, you'll be aching for the two to talk it out and rekindle their found father-daughter relationship. (By the end of the season, forget aching — you'll just be broken.)
Joel isn't the only character reeling from his actions in the Season 1 finale. Firefly Abby (a magnificent Kaitlyn Dever) and her crew of fellow soldiers are the sole survivors of Joel's rampage, and they want revenge. Their quest for vengeance will rope the citizens of Jackson into a larger conflict, one that extends to a war-torn Seattle clawed to bits by the tyrannical Washington Liberation Front (WLF) and the religious extremist Seraphites.
The Last of Us Season 2 is stunning, but incomplete.
Credit: Liane Hentscher / HBO
The WLF (whose members are known as Wolves) and the Seraphites (whom the Wolves call "Scars") are major new power players in The Last of Us Season 2. Yet despite all the fanfare for their arrival, they feel disconnected from the season, even though Ellie spends much of it on their home turf in Seattle.
In theory, this makes sense. As a newcomer in this world, Ellie has no idea what conflict she's stumbled into, and she fittingly spends much of her time trying to avoid these rival factions. Yet The Last of Us often cuts to scenes of WLF leader Isaac Dixon (Jeffrey Wright) discussing attack plans, or Seraphites revering their prophet. These sequences do flesh out the world somewhat, but there's a perfunctory sense to them. The show primarily uses them to set up Ellie's next encounters, as opposed to immersing us fully in this new environment. (A torture sequence involving a monologue by Isaac about cookware is a season highlight, though.) Otherwise, we have very little knowledge of the nature of their conflict, or even a deeper idea of who these characters are. Like Ellie, all we do is observe instead of inhabit, with the Seattle episodes becoming a far cry from the beautifully wrought Jackson episodes.
The disjointed nature of many of these Seattle scenes comes as a result of not having a clear emotional anchor in the WLF or Seraphites. Without one — and with the season's unfortunate underuse of Dever, Mazino, and Luna — The Last of Us Season 2 feels incomplete.
That incompleteness is intentional, stemming directly from bold, effective storytelling choices in The Last of Us Part II. Yet those choices' transitions to TV are jarring, especially after early adaptation choices suggest a different direction. It's often unfair to base an opinion on what isn't onscreen in an adaptation — the game and the show are different beasts, after all — but throughout The Last of Us Season 2, certain omissions practically scream to be included. (The season's strange pacing also comes as a result of its length: Seven episodes simply isn't enough for one of TV's biggest shows to tell a satisfying, compelling story.)
Yes, so much of this season is spectacular, from Joel and Ellie's wrenching relationship to a snowy Clicker battle that calls to mind Game of Thrones' "Hardhome." But ultimately, it's just one half of a great story — is that enough?
The Last of Us Season 2 premieres April 13 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and Max.
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It seems OpenAI has been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Anthropic has reportedly cut off OpenAI’s access to Anthropic’s APIs over what Anthropic is calling a terms of service breach.
As reported by Wired, multiple sources claim that OpenAI has been cut off from Anthropic’s APIs. Allegedly, OpenAI was using Anthropic’s Claude Code to assist in creating and testing OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which is due to release in August.
According to these sources, OpenAI was plugging into Claude’s internal tools instead of using the chat interface. From there, they used the API to run tests against GPT-5 to check things like coding and creative writing against Claude to compare performance. OpenAI allegedly also tested safety prompts related to things like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation. This would give OpenAI data that it could then use to fine-tune GPT-5 to make it more competitive against Claude.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, this violates Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, which ban companies from using Anthropic’s tools to build competitor AI products.
“Customer may not and must not attempt to access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” the terms read.
OpenAI responded by saying that what the company was doing was an industry standard, as all the AI companies test their models against the competing models. The company then went on to say that it respected Anthropic’s decision but expressed disappointment in having its API access shut off, especially considering that Anthropic’s access to OpenAI’s API remains open.
A spokesperson told Wired that OpenAI’s access would be reinstated for “benchmarking and safety evaluations.”
It’s not the first time this year that Anthropic has cut off API access. In June, the company cut off Windsurf’s API access after rumors that it was being sold to OpenAI. That deal ultimately fell through, but Anthropic’s cofounder, Jared Kaplan, told TechCrunch at the time that “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”
Anthropic has also tweaked its rate limits for Claude, which will take effect in late August, with one of the reasons being that a small number of users are violating the company’s policy by sharing and reselling accounts.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
It’s the end of another quarter, which means it’s time for yet another earnings call with concerning ideas for generating more revenue. This time around, it's Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told shareholders on Thursday that there’s “significant financial opportunity” in delivering ads through Alexa+, the company’s new AI-powered voice assistant.
“I think over time, there will be opportunities, you know, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations to have advertising play a role — to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue,” Jassy said, per the investor call transcript.
Since launching earlier this year, Alexa+ has reportedly reached millions of users. Unlike the original Alexa, which mostly turns off lights and sets timers, Alexa+ is designed to be more conversational, context-aware, and AI-driven. It can help you plan your date night, entertain your kids, and even dabble in basic image and video generation — all under the banner of your $14.99/month Prime subscription.
But so far, Amazon Alexa has been an ad-free experience. It's also more than 10 years old, and it doesn't make money; thus, it's been deemed a "colossal failure" by those within the company.
Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to make AI pay for itself. Both Google and OpenAI have explored ad integration in their AI products as a way to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in particular, has made a notable pivot: once firmly against advertising in his chatbot, he’s since reversed course, possibly opening the door for ads in future versions of ChatGPT.
Whatever the motivation, injecting ads into Alexa+ would mark a major shift in both user experience and Amazon’s strategy, especially given the assistant’s long history of being expensive to maintain and hard to monetize. Ad-supported Alexa+ could be Amazon’s attempt to finally turn its once-money-burning smart assistant into a revenue machine, without hiking the subscription fee (at least for now).
Alexa+ is still new, and what an ad-supported experience would actually look like remains unclear. According to Jassy, the idea is to frame ads as helpful, something to assist customers in discovering products they might be interested in buying.
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