“Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for God’s wrath, because it is written, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in the day of the dystopian future story. Not all that long ago, historically speaking, this wasn’t the case. There was a time when a popular view on the return of Christ described in Revelation was post-millennialism, which held that the world was just going to keep getting better (because we made it that way) until Jesus returned to reward us for all our good work. Then the 20th century happened. After two world wars and an ensuing half century of chaos mostly released on the world by the ideas of Darwin, Freud, and Marx, we gave up on a hopeful future, and our thinking turned dark. The Last of Us on HBO, is a great example of this. With the second season now behind us, let’s talk about how it was, and why the Gospel is better.

I would have reviewed this season sooner, but I honestly didn’t realize it had ended. I had seen something about the seventh episode’s being the season finale, but when I finished watching it, it ended so abruptly and with basically none of the major storylines resolved, I thought there surely must be more yet coming. But, no, that was it.

If you haven’t watched any of the series, and didn’t read my review of the first season (which you can do here, which I’ll recommend doing because I’m going to continue as if you mostly know what’s going on from season 1), here’s a quick primer. The series is based on a video game series by the same name. It’s one of the better video game-to-screen adaptations ever done. It’s a unique take on the zombie genre. A particular type of fungus has adapted to take over the minds and bodies of human hosts who become mindless, bloodthirsty creatures that gradually, over time, become more and more horribly disfigured by the host, which are driven by an insatiable need to spread the fungus to new hosts. The series basically asks the question: What would happen after this global tragedy? What would become of human society? The answer is that it mostly becomes a totalitarian mess.

The second season picks up five years after the events of the first season. Joel and Ellie have settled in Jackson, a democratic, peaceful, functioning society that has emerged from the chaos of the initial apocalypse, and is still going strong. Out of the gate we are briefly introduced to Abbie and her militia friends. Abbie is the daughter of the doctor who was going to develop the cure for the fungus infection from Ellie’s brain, and who Joel murdered at the end of season 1 in his efforts to save Ellie from the Fireflies’ plans to use her death to save the world. And Abbie wants one thing more than anything else: revenge.

Initially watching the first few episodes feels fairly even, but thinking back over them now, it was all rushed. There’s a love story written in for Ellie (which I’ll mention with a content warning as it is a lesbian love story whose payoff is stopped just short of being given full screen time). There’s also a looming threat of a fungus zombie attack on Jackson which comes, but is woefully underdeveloped.

The real substance of the season is Abbie’s plans to exact revenge on Joel for killing her father. She is brutally successful in these aims. Not knowing how to locate Joel, she winds up doing just that when he saves her life from the beginning of the fungus zombie attack that ultimately gets turned on Jackson. After escaping back to the random mountain house where her crew has holed up to figure out how to find Joel, Abbie thanks Joel for rescuing her by blasting him in the knee with a shotgun, and then beating him to death. The final part of the beating and its rather horrible – not to mention completely shocking if you haven’t played the games – ending happens in front of Ellie.

Ellie, of course, swears to get revenge, setting up the second part of the season. In a journey that effectively mirrors Abbie’s journey to find Joel, Ellie makes her way to Seattle with the singular goal in mind of finding and murdering Abbie and her friends for killing Joel. What she doesn’t know is that Abbie is a leader in a large and well-equipped militia that is currently battling against a weird religious cult that has sworn off all technology, but is brutally effective with their more primitive weapons. In the end, Ellie manages to find Abbie…or rather Abbie finds Ellie once again after the latter has indeed killed nearly all the other members of her crew. And that’s where the season ends, bringing exactly zero resolution to the major plot piece. As I said before, the writers brought zero resolution to any of the plot pieces.

On the whole, the second season was really good. The acting was tremendous. The set design and character interactions were outstanding. The drama and tension were thick. The emotional responses the various directors managed to draw out of the cast was incredible. The musical score is excellent as well. But by not resolving any of the plot lines from the season, the whole thing wound up feeling hollow and unfulfilling.

From a content standpoint, it earned its MA rating. The language is awful, and, honestly, needlessly so. They could have cut out 75% of the foul language, especially the F-word, and it would have had zero impact on the final product. Cutting out 100% wouldn’t have impacted it, but this is HBO, so that was never a possibility. And the violence and brutality was definitely taken up a level from the first season. It was more disturbing to watch and more personal. And, as mentioned before, the love story for Ellie added little to the plot as well. It was included because it was in the original game, but they didn’t need it. Honestly, they spent more time developing that plot point than just about anything else. On the whole, the season was really about Ellie’s falling in love and Ellie’s seeking revenge. Everything else was underdeveloped and rushed.

What the season does do really well, albeit unintentionally so, is to demonstrate why the Christian worldview is better than its alternatives. The whole story revolves around revenge. First is Abbie’s revenge against Joel for killing her father. Second is Ellie’s revenge against Abbie for…well…killing her father. That’s it. It’s all revenge. And in both cases, the revenge (or near revenge in Ellie’s case as the season abruptly ended before the payoff of her efforts) brought the ones seeking exactly zero satisfaction. It also destroyed or nearly destroyed all the other relationships in the revenge-seekers life. There was no sense of nobility given to the girls’ actions. They were obviously selfish in both cases, something multiple characters along the way pointed out to them. Neither girl cared even when their efforts brought deadly threats to the lives of other people they cared about. They were both willing to torch everything in their lives in pursuit of their attempt at vengeance. Nothing felt good about it. Nothing felt worth cheering about their pursuits. It was a pretty bleak story.

Writing to the believers in Rome (and which we’ll be giving direct attention to in a few months), the apostle Paul had something to say about personal pursuits of vengeance. “Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for God’s wrath, because it is written, ‘Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”

Let’s not mince words: Paul’s way is better than the path walked by Abbie and Ellie. Although I don’t think this was their intent, the writers of the second season of The Last of Us offer a brilliant demonstration of why. Their way led to more vengeance, more destruction, more ruined lives, and gave neither girl any satisfaction. None. Paul’s way, and the way Christians have sought (admittedly, occasionally poorly and otherwise unsuccessfully) to follow ever since, on the other hand, doesn’t lead to the kind of immediate, short-term emotional gratification we desire when we have been grievously wronged by another person, but it has led to a flourishing of life everywhere it has been applied.

The fact is, we’re not good at vengeance. Like The Last of Us demonstrates, we often go beyond vengeance itself to creating additional wounds that will create new victims who will in turn seek vengeance on us. We’ll seek our vengeance, which will create the need for yet more vengeance, and the crazy cycle continues, destroying lives as it goes. The other reason we’re so bad at vengeance is that instead of aiming for justice, we aim for personal satisfaction. This personal satisfaction is often shaped by our initial emotional response to whatever offense we have been dealt. That means it is going to be set way beyond what actual justice would more rightly and righteously accomplish. In other words, in attempting to soothe raw emotions by making someone else feel as badly as we do, we just create more problems. In responding to sin with sin, we just get more sin.

There’s a better way.

When you accept that there is a God who is holy, righteous, and perfect in justice and love, you can leave vengeance and justice entirely to Him. Because He is all those things and more, you can be certain that He will make things right; perfectly right. He will accomplish justice. His vengeance and wrath will be complete in ways ours will not. They won’t add to the amount of sin in the world. They’ll stop at justice rather than going beyond in pursuit of some vision of emotional satisfaction that won’t ever be achieved.

So then, what do we do instead? If we aren’t going to be pursuing our own twisted vengeance, what should we do? Paul tells us. Quoting Scripture once again, Paul says, “But, ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing you will be heaping fiery coals on his head.'” Hatred seeks out more hatred. It wants to expand its terrible kingdom. When we respond to hatred and vengeance with more hatred and vengeance, that’s all we’ll ever get. But when we respond not in kind but with kindness, it stops the cycle from spreading.

This council was actually given to Ellie before she went on her revenge journey. The people of Jackson got together to decide if they were going to support her request to go and avenge Joel’s killing. As they debated, one man spoke up in favor of forgiveness. He said something to the effect of encouraging the town to walk a path of forgiveness instead of one that will only lead to more violence, possibly threatening the whole town. At the end he added a note that Christians advocate for this kind of thing, and they’re right about it. And he’s not even a Christian.

Ironically, there was a fungus that infected people, turning them into mindless, violent zombies threatening the world. But the real threat to the characters this season was an infection that affected everyone. No one could avoid it. That infection was sin and its bitter fruits.

In the end, what made the season so depressing is that the characters were all conquered by evil. Every single one of them. As followers of Jesus, that should not be us. Paul commands as much. “Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.” When evil rears its ugly head—whether in the world around you or in your own heart—responding with evil will never make things better in the ways that matter most. At best, responding in kind will offer a temporary reprieve. But it won’t last. Evil must be eliminated. It must be conquered. And righteousness is the only force that has ever successfully conquered it.

So, in Christ, let us conquer evil. Let us crush it out of existence. With His righteousness. Neither Ellie nor Abbie nor just about any other character in The Last of Us sets an example worth following. The only one who does confesses to not being a Christian even as he acknowledges the greater wisdom of the Christian worldview. Go figure. Watch the second season if you enjoy the genre, but learn the lesson it teaches even if you don’t. That matters more.