It insists upon itself. That’s the central issue with The Last of Us. This critique, which Seth MacFarlane borrowed from a film professor for his Godfather-disparaging character Peter Griffin, perfectly captures the essence of the show. Every point is made a bit too forcefully, every sorrow is portrayed a bit too dramatically, every villainous act is egregiously inexcusable, every act of anti-heroism is justified in its brutality, and every attempt at profundity leaves the show floundering in shallowness. It aspires for greatness, yet only manages to resonate with the most basic audience. It insists upon itself, Lois.

In the concluding episode of the brief seven-episode second season, Ellie finally locates Abby, but not in the way she anticipated. When she limps back to her group’s dilapidated theater hideout, Dina extracts the truth from her: Ellie spent the evening gleefully extracting Abby’s whereabouts from an infected Nora, leaving her to endure her injuries and fall victim to the fungus. She also confesses to Dina regarding Joel: He had slaughtered the Fireflies, including Abby’s doctor father, which is the reason Abby killed him, something Abby had always known. 

With these two revelations, Dina decides it’s time to return home. Visibly vulnerable after removing her shirt to allow Dina to tend to her scratched back, Ellie quietly agrees with the plan. The following morning, she departs with Jesse to meet up with Tommy, who is also part of the undertaking, so the trio can gather the injured and pregnant Dina and ensure a safe return home.

But two concurrent events change the pair’s plans. Gunshots ring out and distress calls about a sniper are heard on the Wolves’ radio, leading Jesse to believe Tommy is pinned down. But rather than help rescue her adoptive uncle, Ellie wants to head for the remote aquarium, which she now recognizes as Abby’s location from Nora’s cryptic last words. They split up, angrily.

Ellie has a wild adventure on the way to her target. First, she sees a virtual armada of Wolves take off for the forested area controlled by their enemies, the Seraphites, coming in dark and inaudible in the thunderstorm that night. Next, her little boat gets swamped by a massive wave, casting her up on a rocky shore opposite the aquarium. There, she’s captured and nearly lynched by the Seraphites (it insists upon itself), with a small child casting the deciding vote for her disembowelment (it insists upon itself), until a distress whistle comes in indicating that their village is in peril. 

Left to her own devices, Abby escapes, but sees a massive wall of explosions erupting in the middle of the trees behind her as she motors away. This would appear to be the work of the sneak-attack armada, a matter of careful planning by Isaac, who spends the night nervous that his chosen successor Abby is nowhere to be found. 

Sure enough, the only people Abby finds in the now-abandoned aquarium are Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer), the two remaining members of Abby’s assassination squad. Ellie tries to get her location out of them without killing anyone, but Owen goes for his gun anyway (it insists upon itself), and she shoots him to death. The bullet, however, passes right through his neck and also nicks the carotid artery of Mel, who by the way is also pregnant (it insists upon itself). The dying medic is unable to pass along instructions for an emergency c-section to a horrified Ellie, and both mother and baby die (it insists upon itself).

Tommy and Jesse show up to pull the stricken young woman away from the scene. Tommy’s proffered justification, that they made their choices and got what was coming to them, rings hollow even by The Last of Us standards, so much so that even Ellie rejects their cold comfort. Perhaps she’s troubled by seeing her friend Jesse’s criticism of her — that she only ever does things for herself and never considers the common good — proven so deadly accurate. She shot and killed a pregnant woman in her quest to avenge her mass-murdering father, whose actual killer she never even managed to catch. It’s a game with no winners.

But Ellie gets one extra chance to play anyway, because, well, it insists upon itself. Finally ready to move on, Ellie hears a scuffle and discovers Abby, who shoots Jesse dead and holds Tommy at gunpoint. Ellie insists she’s the person who killed her friends, she’s the reason Joel went on his rampage in the first place, it’s her Abby wants…then a gunshot, a cut to black, a brief flashback revealing the full scope of the Wolves’ massive stadium-sized base of operations, and it’s roll credits. 

This isn’t a bad episode of television. It might be the best episode of the season, in fact. It may be as simple as so much of the actual action — the Wolves’ huge amphibious assault on the Seraphites — happens offscreen, left to the power of suggestion. We know something big is going down, we know it involves boats moving in darkness and bad weather, we know it triggers an Apocalypse Now–sized cataclysm in the forest. I like not knowing more, and moreover I like how it puts us in the same position as Ellie and company, who’d have no way of knowing what’s going on either. 

But, again, it insists upon itself. You know? It guilds the lily, it stacks the deck, it puts its thumb on the scales until basically every moral question it raises becomes impossible to answer. Is it more wrong to revenge-kill people Kill Bill style if one of them happens to be pregnant, or is that always shitty to do? Are both the Seraphites and the Wolves equally bloodthirsty and bloodsoaked, or do material differences exist that give one side any number of obvious structural advances over the other, rendering two-sides-of-the-same-coin talk a dead issue? Is there a point to having Ellie opt out of vengeance against Abby only to force the possibility on her again, other than trying to have your cake and eat it too? Is it FUCK THE COMMUNITY or isn’t it?

All this would be one thing if The Last of Us actually was a Kill Bill style, lovingly made, over-the-top genre pastiche, knowingly playing by the moral rulebook of The Movies. It’s The Last of Us that’s aiming for nuance, and thus can be judged by that standard. It hopes that by yanking the control stick back and forth between black and white as hard as it can, it can produce a compelling shade of gray. The result is a moral murk that gets tougher to stare at the longer you look.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.