Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us season 2.
A dead man is walking around the set of The Last of Us season 3. Not metaphorically. On camera, in costume, alive.
A new set video from the season 3 shoot shows Jesse, played by Young Mazino, back on his feet. If you watched season 2, you know why that’s strange. Jesse was shot and killed by Abby, played by Kaitlyn Dever, in the finale. Sudden, brutal, over.
Fans have already started theorizing.
Why Jesse being alive doesn’t mean Jesse is alive
The math here isn’t complicated. Jesse died in season 2’s finale, so his return almost certainly points to a flashback, and the most likely candidate is the stretch he and Tommy spent in Seattle.
Tommy, played by Gabriel Luna, serves as a mentor to Jesse across The Last of Us. We last saw him badly wounded and held at gunpoint by Abby during the Seattle theater standoff.
That same setup plays out in The Last of Us Part II, where Jesse is killed. Tommy takes a bullet to the head and survives it, left crippled and blind in one eye.
Season 3 looks like it’s rewinding the clock
Everything pointing out of the season 3 shoot suggests a timeline that doesn’t move forward in a straight line. Earlier set images and videos indicated a stronger focus on Abby as a character. A video of Jesse alive and well suggests the show is leaning harder into flashbacks for its key players.
Which tracks with where the story left everyone. When your finale kills one lead and leaves another bleeding on a theater floor, the past starts looking like the more useful place to spend time.
Where Ellie fits into all this
Bella Ramsey, the series protagonist as Ellie, has said they’ll be returning for filming later this year. Their role is likely on the back burner while Abby takes center stage.
That’s a real structural shift for a show built around Ellie and Joel. And it’s the kind of choice that only works if the flashback material carries weight, which is presumably why Jesse’s back in the frame at all.
The short version of how we got here
The Last of Us was created by Neil Druckmann and developed by Naughty Dog in 2013, a survival-horror video game series with millions of devoted players. The story follows smuggler Joel and immune teen Ellie moving through an infested United States, fighting infected mutants and hostile human factions to stay alive.
HBO turned the games into a record-breaking series, now heading into its third season.
Jesse’s own place in that world was specific: a patrol leader in Jackson, a loyal friend to Ellie, and half of a complicated relationship with Dina, played by Isabela Merced. Then Abby pulled the trigger.
When you can actually watch it
There’s no official release date for The Last of Us season 3 at the time of writing. Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming on HBO Max.
So the most reliable read on season 3 right now comes from a shaky set video of a man who died on screen, walking through a scene with the guy who took a bullet to the head and lived.
