Please note there are spoilers for episode 4 of The Last of Us below. Proceed with caution.
The second season of of The Last of Us is winding down. Though we tragically had to say goodbye to Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller in only the second episode of the season, this week’s episode brought him back for one last hurrah.
Told through a series of flashbacks, Episode 6, “The Price,” chronicles the development and degradation of Ellie (Bella Ramsay) and Joel’s relationship in the years between their arrival in Jackson Hole and Joel’s death.
We begin the episode by flashing all the way back to 1983 with a much younger Joel and Tommy. Tommy is terrified of being beaten by their father, but Joel says that he will take the blame instead. When their father, a cop arrives home, he questions Joel about what happened and says that if he were not a cop, they would both be in custody. Joel tries to cover, but their father says that he knows that Tommy tried to buy drugs and Joel beat up the dealers. Joel confronts his father, saying that he won’t let him hurt Tommy, and this softens him. He cracks a beer open for himself and his son and tells the story of how he once stole a candy bar and how his father beat him so badly that his jaw had to be wired. Joel’s father tells him that he is “doing a little better than my father did. And when it’s your turn I hope you do a little better than me.”
The title sequence plays, and at the end we once again have two mushrooms for Joel and Ellie. (For those of you who have been skipping the title sequences, since Joel’s death there has only been a mushroom to represent Ellie.)
We’re now in Jackson Hole two months after Joel and Ellie have arrived. Joel enters a bar and meets with Seth (Robert John Burke), who he gives a bag of LEGO to in exchange for a birthday cake. Joel then returns home and works on crafting a custom guitar, carving bone ornamentation and adding in some etchings based on her drawings of moths. While he’s working, Tommy (Gabriel Luna) comes in with Ellie who is hopped up on painkillers after she burned her arm on a kitchen pot while working kitchen duty. Joel’s initial concern and anger are abated when Ellie apologizes and says that she “just really wanted to wear short sleeves again.”
The next day is Ellie’s birthday and Joel surprises her with the cake that Seth made, though he’s misspelled her name as “Eli.” Before Joel can cut the cake, she’s already begun eating it with her bare hands. Joel surprises her with a guitar, which he promises to teach her how to play. Ellie requests a song, and though Joel says he’s not a singer, he relents and sings Pearl Jam’s “Future Days,” the same song Ellie tried to sing at the theater in Episode 5 but couldn’t finish.
A year passes and it’s Ellie’s birthday again. She and Joel are out for a walk as Joel leads her to her birthday surprise. Now that she’s turned 16, she asks Joel if she can start going out on patrols, citing that Jesse started patrols when he was 16. Joel, ever the concerned parent, asks if there’s anything going in between her and Jesse because he has a keen eye for these things, and Ellie of course denies it.
They finally arrive at their destination, which is a giant dinosaur statue, which leads to a science museum. Ellie explores the space exhibits, which Joel has greased up to ensure that they work. To complete the day, Joel shows her the Apollo 15 space pod in the museum and has her sit inside it with a space helmet from one of the displays. He gives her a cassette tape of a launch sequence and Ellie imagines herself going into space.
The next birthday is not so pleasant. Joel bursts into Ellie’s room holding a cake to find her making out with another girl and getting a tattoo. Joel’s supposed to be out on patrol but he came back early to surprise her. He storms off, upset by her “experimenting.”
Ellie goes to the garage, which is mostly empty, then at night starts to move her mattress. This catches Joel’s attention and he tries to stop her, giving her a “my house, my rules” speech. She hits back, saying, “No it’s not, they gave it to you. You don’t own anything.” This quiets Joel down and he says that it might be good for Ellie to have her own space and offers to fix up the garage for her. He then asks her about her tattoo, and why she’s always drawing moths. They’re symbolic, she says, and that she once read about them in a book about dreams.
The next day, Joel visits Gail (Catherine O’Hara) to ask her about dreams. He assumes that moths in dreams symbolize change and new life, but Gail corrects him. Moths symbolize death.
Now we jump two years into the future and find Ellie in the garage, now her living space, rehearsing some questions she wants to ask Joel. Questions about what happened in Salt Lake City. Joel knocks on the door and she scrambles to hide her list.
For her 19th birthday present, Joel has agreed to take her out on her first patrol. It’s an easy route that isn’t supposed to have any danger, and even though Ellie isn’t taking the training seriously, Joel is having a good time and wants to spend more time with her like this. A call comes in over the radio that a nearby patrol has run into some infected and they’re the closest ones available to help. Joel’s first instinct is to send Ellie back to Jackson, but she pushes back, telling him that she’s his partner, not his child. He relents and they hurry off to help.
When they get to the site, it’s not pretty. They encounter a horse dragging a body, a dead infected and Eugene (Joe Pantoliano) who has been bitten and will soon turn. Joel wants to kill Eugene on the spot, like patrol protocol dictates, but Eugene asks to be able to see his wife Gail one last time and Ellie begs Joel to let him. There is enough time before he’s supposed to turn for them to make it back. Joel agrees and sends Ellie to fetch the horses, but she’s reluctant to leave until he promises her that he won’t kill Eugene.
Except he has no intention of keeping that promise. Joel leads Eugene to an isolated spot with a nice view. Eugene pleads to Joel not to do this and that he needs to hear his wife’s last words to him and see her face. Joel tells him that we can see the faces of the people we love anywhere, and when Eugene is ready, he kills him.
He and Ellie take Eugene’s body back to Jackson, and Joel tells Gail a story about how brave Eugene was and how he did the deed himself, which brings her some comfort at first. However, Ellie steps in and tells her that it was all a lie, that there was time for them to have their last moments together but that Joel robbed them of that. Joel broke his promise to her and this is the consequence.
Nine months later, and we’re back to the New Year’s Eve party and we witness the confrontation with Seth from Joel’s perspective.
Later that night, we see Ellie confront Joel on the porch. She tells him that she already knows that he lied to her but is giving him one last chance to tell the truth of what happened at Salt Lake City with the Fireflies. And he does. He tells her that while it was possible for the Fireflies to try to make a cure, the process would have required Ellie to die. Ellie is upset that he took that opportunity for her life to have meaning away from her, that her purpose would have been to die so that others would live. Joel breaks down, saying that he would have done the same thing over again and if the price for her life is that she turns away from him, then he’ll gladly pay it. In a full-circle moment, Joel says that she can’t understand it now, but if she should ever have a child of her own he hopes she’ll do better then him. The moment, their last conversation, ends with Ellie telling Joel that while she doesn’t think she can forgive him, she would like to try.
With one last flash forward, we’re back with Ellie in the present day as she returns to the theater after dispatching Nora.
This is probably my favorite episode of the season. Not only do we get more time with Pascal as Joel, but we see things through his perspective again and finally learn how his relationship with Ellie got so bad. A lot of the episode also deals with Joel dealing with the consequences of his actions. He’s a man for whom the ends have so often justified the means, and often protecting the ones that he loves requires him to do things that others would find unsavory. The final scene between him and Ellie also gives more context why Ellie is willing to go as far as she is for her revenge. She was ready to come to terms with what Joel did to her, to finally begin the painful process of healing and forgiveness, and Abby stole that from her.
Joel’s story is finally over. With one episode left in the season, where will Ellie’s rage lead her and those around her?