To some extent, you probably want a mid-run season of a serialized drama like The Last of Us to leave you less than satisfied.

It’s a good thing when a show makes you wonder about the characters within it, or hungry to dig deeper into the lore. If you find yourself groaning with impatience to find out what happens next, it just means you’re invested in the plot.

But there’s mysterious, and there’s incomplete. By the time the season two finale has Ellie (Bella Ramsey) chasing after one group of people we don’t really know, whose motives and goals remain opaque to us, only to get waylaid by a different group of people we don’t really know, whose motives and goals remain opaque to us, HBO’s hit video game adaptation has fully tilted into the latter. Its lasting impression is one of anticlimax, as it becomes apparent that the answer to most of the questions it raises is: “You’ll see next season.”

Nevertheless, there’s still much to love about the new episodes, including some jaw-dropping action and next-level work by stars Ramsey and Pedro Pascal — and the fact that I’m still more eager to turn the next page than I am to ditch this book altogether is a testament to the strength of its storytelling, if not necessarily its structure.

In any case, that vague sense of frustration doesn’t really set in until late. Early on, it’s a pleasure just to catch back up with Joel (Pascal), now in his 60s, and Ellie, now 19. The five-year time jump has been kind to them in some ways: They’re comfortably ensconced in the mountain community of Jackson, Wyoming, where Joel has been reunited with his brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and sister-in-law, Maria (Rutina Wesley), and Ellie’s found pals closer to her own age, including on-off couple Dina (Isabela Merced) and Jesse (Beef’s Young Mazino).

The pair’s own bond, however, has suffered, for reasons that may or may not have to do with the terrible lie that ended season two. As of the premiere, they’re barely on speaking terms.

Inevitably, though, a crisis comes charging in, forcing Ellie and Joel to spring into action at devastating personal cost. The first installments of part two are carried by a breathless momentum, as bold, ambitious plot twists are set into motion fast and early. Those who’ve complained about the relative lack of zombie action will be pleased to find there’s no shortage of it this year. One sequence, in particular, rivals any Game of Thrones battle in its epic scope, its graphic brutality and its surely astronomical VFX budget.

All the while, co-creator and showrunner Craig Mazin doubles down on the nuanced character work that’s allowed the series to stand independently of its source material. Pascal’s performance as Joel is moving as it’s ever been, carried as much by the words shimmering, unspoken, in his eyes, as by whatever gruff or fumbling words tumble out of his mouth. But this outing is really Ramsey’s turn to shine, and they blow even their earlier work out of the water. The latest plot twists put Ellie through the ringer, but as ferocious as Ramsey is in the character’s explosive rage or crushing sorrow, more remarkable still is their gift for expressing entire symphonies of feeling with an almost imperceptible furrow of a brow, or the barely visible flush of a cheek.

Of the new cast, Merced makes the biggest impression as Dina, Ellie’s best buddy and eventual love interest. Over the season’s travails, their chemistry deepens from easy and comfortable to fiercely devoted to movingly tender. When they look at each other, you can practically feel the butterflies in your own stomach. Also worth special notice is Catherine O’Hara as Gail, the town’s only (and therefore severely overburdened) psychotherapist. While not an overtly comic character, her sardonic, whiskey-fueled outlook has a way of cutting right through the bullshit of defense mechanisms like Joel’s, to amusing and moving effect.

But then there are all those fresh faces who aren’t bad, exactly, so much as severely underused. Kaitlyn Dever exudes a blistering fury as Abby, a soldier hell-bent on vengeance, but with so few other notes to play, she registers more as a plot point than a person. Even sketchier are characters like Isaac and Hanrahan, ruthless military types who never really transcend that hazy description despite being played by formidable actors Jeffrey Wright and Alanna Ubach, respectively.

Not coincidentally, all three (along with several other affiliated characters who also struggle to leave much of a mark) are primarily based in Seattle, where our main characters eventually make their way, only to find themselves in the crossfire of a war that they don’t understand and we don’t either.

The conflict does yield some big jolts and indelible images — I audibly yelped to watch a guy slice a man’s torso open, such that the intestines came spilling forth. And it helps bolster this season’s central ideas about cycles of violence and vengeance, passed down through generations or traded between enemies. The new setting also offers some fun new bits of worldbuilding; we learn, for instance, that the concept of “Pride” did not survive the apocalypse when Ellie and Dina are puzzled by all the faded rainbow flags dotting one abandoned neighborhood.

But the central matter of who these warring factions are, or why they’re fighting, is never even summarily explained. I can only presume those details are being held back for the third season, and once they are, maybe this one will come to look more fulfilling in retrospect. From this vantage point, though, I can’t say it’s especially interesting to watch our leads skulk around twinned forces that could only generically be described as “militants” and “ultra-religious weirdos.”

The Last of Us has always been peppered with reminders that this world is bigger than Joel and Ellie’s personal predicament. The difference is that the nine-episode first season took the time to meaningfully explore subplots like Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam’s (Keivonn Montreal Woodard), or detours like the extended flashback “Long, Long Time.” This seven-hour batch is leaner and more focused, but at the expense of the restless inquisitiveness that yielded some of the earlier chapter’s most rewarding surprises. It’s also more open-ended, with more than one major plot development bubbling up simply to get shoved aside for resolution later.

There’s still plenty of feeling — I could bring up tears right now just thinking of Ellie singing a plaintive acoustic version of A-Ha’s “Take On Me” to Dina in a rare and fleeting moment of calm, or Joel delighting in Ellie’s unfettered pleasure at a perfect birthday gift. And I can’t say I was ever less than entertained. Even the material about those strange and unexplained factions contained enough harrowing or unsettling elements, or else passed by quickly enough, to keep me engaged.

But I did find myself missing the rich lyricism of that previous chapter, the sprawling humanity of it, the devastating finality of it. Maybe all of that, too, is being saved for season three.