HBO Can't Chicken Out Of The Last Of Us Season 3's Scariest Scene

Published Oct 8, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. The Last of Us has already hinted, both on and off-screen, that it’ll be adapting the game’s most terrifying boss battle for the TV show. As teased by the season 2 finale, The Last of Us season 3 will follow Abby on the same three days we just watched Ellie tear through Seattle. Abby’s three-day crusade comes with plenty of its own challenges — ascending a rickety skyscraper, descending a bombed-out hotel, getting caught in the middle of a brutal civil war — but the scariest part, by far, is when she faces the Rat King. Where Ellie’s story was all about revenge, Abby’s story is about what happens next. She got her vengeance, and it solved nothing, so where does she go from there? Abby takes two young Seraphite runaways, Lev and Yara, under her wing, and protecting them gives her a new lease on life. But she can’t move on from the trauma of Joel until she confronts it. That confrontation arrives, appropriately enough, in the “Trauma Center” of the same hospital where Ellie tortured Nora for Abby’s whereabouts. While searching for crucial medical supplies in the basement, Abby comes face-to-face with a friendly fellow dubbed “The Rat King.” The Rat King is a monstrous fusion of various different infected people. It’s an absolute nightmare to kill that thing, but it makes for one of the most thrilling sequences in the entire game, and the TV show can’t afford to ignore it. The Last of Us season 2 included a wink to gamers when a W.L.F. commander was discussing the hospital basement and said that “not even rats” occupy those floors. Then, showrunner Craig Mazin teased, “Nobody knows what’s on B3,” suggesting that we’ll see what’s down there when the next season of The Last of Us rolls around in 2027. The Rat King Isn't Just A Boss Fight - It Has A Deeper Purpose The promise of the Rat King in live-action is extremely tantalizing, but the TV show has to go all-out on the terror; it can’t water down the threat, like season 2 did with the stalkers. The TV adaptation nailed its portrayal of stalkers — they were just as sleek, stealthy, and scary as the ones that terrorized us in the games — but they proved to be much too easy to defeat. They were more like set dressing than a genuine threat. When Ellie and Dina were surrounded by stalkers, with seemingly no means of escape, they were saved by a deus ex Jesse. When Abby encounters the Rat King in The Last of Us season 3, she can’t just take it out with a headshot and call it a day. It’s so scary in the game because it’s so drawn-out and atmospheric. The TV show needs to recreate that atmosphere, rebuild that tension, and stay in the fear for a good few minutes. It might not sound like such a big deal, because it’s just a boss fight. But the Rat King is more than just a boss fight. What made HBO’s The Last of Us so successful in the first place was that it used the new medium to its advantage. Whereas video games are required to dive into the action as quickly and as often as possible, TV shows can take longer to sit in the drama. So, The Last of Us TV show deemphasized the action and put more focus on the quieter, more emotional scenes. So, we skipped the bloater fight in the high school gymnasium, we skipped Ellie and David fending off a horde of infected, and we skipped Joel’s ordeal in the hospital basement. But the Rat King isn’t just an action scene; it has a deeper dramatic purpose. The Rat King symbolizes Joel as the source of Abby’s trauma — a merciless killing machine tearing through a hospital — and defeating it symbolizes Abby facing her demons and coming back to the light. The Last of Us season 3 would feel incomplete without it.