The Last of Us, like God of War, Horizon and the Spider-Man games, is a series that helped define PlayStation’s game library and helped set it apart from its competitor during the console wars.
In 2023, HBO gave us a television adaptation of its incredibly dark, violent and desperate mushroom-zombie-filled world, which though lighter on the zombie action than its source material was still a fantastic journey with compellingly flawed characters played by incredibly talented actors. Now, two years later, we’ve been given a second season based on the even more grim and gristly (and controversial) The Last of Us 2.
I bought The Last of Us 2 from Best Buy on opening weekend, completed the game and haven’t touched it since. Though I personally loved its twisted, bloody journey, I only remember the broadest strokes of the story, and with these recaps each week, as much as I can, I’ll be talking solely about the show.
So let’s get into it, episodes one and two of the second season of The Last of Us.
Episode 1: “Future Days“
We pick up our story where we left Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) in the first season, with Ellie asking Joel if it was true that there was no way for the Fireflies to actually make a cure and that they just let them go. Joel lies to her face and says yes.
Here we cut to a shot of giraffes nibbling on greenery, referencing the giraffes from the first game that were intended to represent life’s beauty and hope for the future. (There I go, already breaking my “don’t talk about the game rule.”) Unfortunately, this symbol of hope is immediately shattered as we see a small cluster of graves.
This is where we meet Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) and her crew, survivors of Joel’s deadly rampage through the Firefly facility in Salt Lake City in his desperate attempt to rescue her from having her brain harvested in the hopes of engineering a cure for the cordyceps infection. Abby wants revenge on Joel though she has no idea where he came from or where he could have gone in the three days since he killed her father, the doctor who was set to perform the surgery on Ellie. That’s when Owen (Spencer Moore) suggests that they regroup with some of the remaining Fireflies at the Seattle base, then try to track him down from there. Abby, full of rage, gives the chilling vow, “When we kill him, we kill him slowly.”
Cut to five years in the future and we see Ellie and Joel living relatively normal lives in the thriving city of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The city has power, food, shelter, weapons and is preparing to celebrate the new year. Joel is now working as a foreman, helping to build and expand the settlement as more and more refugees come in faster than they can accommodate them. Meanwhile, Ellie is an angsty, rebellious teen. The relationship between adoptive father and daughter is on the rocks. Ellie’s sparring partners are pulling their punches and going easy on her so they don’t invoke Joel’s wrath, and Joel’s brother and city leader Tommy (Gabriel Luna) says he’s going to pull her from patrols because Joel is worried for her safety.
Joel has been going to therapy, paying for his sessions with marijuana. We sit in on one of his sessions, which starts out relatively uneventful with Joel lamenting the distance that has grown between him and Ellie. Though she tries her best to grin and bear it, Joel’s therapist Gail (Catherine O’Hara) isn’t buying into his “woe-is-me” schtick. She berates him for complaining that Ellie is acting like any other rebellious teenager and lying to her by not telling the whole truth, then tells Joel she hates him for killing her husband Eugene a year ago and that despite the mitigating circumstances she can’t bring herself to forgive him. Gail hopes that she can now find her peace with Joel and promises to help him. Joel tearfully admits that he saved Ellie, indicating that after all these years his lies and violence prevent him from finding peace, and that perhaps on some level Ellie knows it too.
Despite Joel’s overprotectiveness, Tommy agrees to let Ellie go on patrol and she her friend Dina (Isabela Merced) discover the corpses of a bear and several clickers outside an old grocery store, and despite the misgivings of the other scouts, Ellie and Dina go into the grocery story to look for any surviving infected.
Once inside the upper floor of the market, Ellie and Dina locate a surviving clicker, and smashing a bottle to lure it in, Ellie stabs the mushroom zombie to death. As they celebrate a good kill and start to leave, Ellie falls through the rotting floor where she encounters a new kind of infected, one that is much faster, smarter not completely covered in fungal growth like the clickers, allowing it to still see her. During their fight, the infected manages to bite Ellie before she can kill it, but thankfully our heroine is still immune. Back in town, Ellie tells the city council including Tommy and his wife Maria (Rutina Wesley) about the infected and how it made her feel like it was hunting and “stalking” her, unlike the clickers who simply react to sounds.
Ellie heads home and cleans her bite wound. Joel comes by for a very awkward visit, encouraging to socialize with the other survivors and offering to restring her guitar. She does in fact go to the party, however she mostly stands on the sidelines until Dina drags her out for a slow dance. The friends share a tender moment together that leads to Dina eventually confessing her feelings for Ellie and the two kissing. It’s a brief bit of joy for Ellie, which is unfortunately shattered when a man named Seth (Rober John Burke) hurls a homophobic slur at them because of all the things to survive the apocalypse hate had to be one of them. Ellie quickly moves to confront him, but Joel is even faster, knocking Seth to the ground and telling him to leave the party. Now Ellie turns against Joel and chastizes him for fighting her battles for her.
When she returns home, Joel is waiting for her on the porch with her newly strung guitar, however, Ellie walks past him without a word. Elsewhere in town, we see that the cordyceps fungus has already taken root, hidden among the roots and other plant detritus clogging up a pipe in one of the construction sites. There is also another threat looming, as miles away we see that Abby and her crew have finally located Jackson Hole and gaze at the lights of the city from afar.
Episode 2: “Through The Valley“
Episode two really leans into the split perspectives of the main characters, dividing its time between Ellie and Abby’s activities.
We open with a flashback dream sequence. Abby walks through the Firefly hospital as alarms blare and she is warned by a future version of herself not to enter the operating room where her father lies dead.
She then wakes up from the nightmare in a lodge house with her companions. Though they came fully prepared to hunt Joel down, the group at large is not sure about their odds. By the light of day, Jackson Hole is much bigger and better fortified than the shabby tent settlement they expected. It’s a big city with gates, trained guards, a working power grid and even if they managed to sneak in they would have no clue where to start looking for Joel. In her single-minded drive for vengeance Abby suggests capturing and torturing a patrol for information, though this clearly makes the rest of the group uncomfortable. They didn’t sign up for this kind of violence. They’re not here to torture innocents, just to help Abby get the one man they know is guilty of killing their former comrades. When Abby goes out on watch duty, Owen tells the rest of the group that their goal now is to convince Abby to abandon the plan, “Because if we don’t, the only people getting killed out here are us.”
In Jackson Hole, Jesse (Young Mazino), one of the community leaders and Dina’s ex-boyfriend, wakes Ellie up for patrol, teasing her about both the fight the night before and for kissing Dina. Though he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge, he does tell Ellie that “It’s kind of fucked up you did that, though.” He tells Ellie that Joel and Dina have already left on their patrol but that Joel initially wanted to be partnered up with Ellie before deciding to let her sleep in a little more instead.
The town is a flurry of activity. Another patrol discovered a pile of frozen infected with 30 live ones underneath using the corpses as shelter. That combined with the news of Ellie’s “intelligent infected” has the town on edge. Ellie and Jesse stop by the town restaurant before heading out, where Tommy is detailing the plans in case there is an attack: all those capable of fighting are to take to the rooftops while all noncombatants are to hide in the cellars. At Maria’s insistence, Seth begrudgingly apologizes for his behavior the night before, blaming it on alcohol and giving her and Jesse some sandwiches as an attempt to make peace, though Ellie could not seem to care less. A storm is brewing over the mountains, and as Ellie and Jesse leave the safety of Jackson Hole it only threatens to get worse.
Abby is on her own patrol/watch duty back up in the forest near the lodge when she spots a patrol and decides to follow it. As the storm gets worse, Tommy instructs all patrols to return to base or to shelter in place if they are too far out. Jesse and Ellie hole up in an old 7-Eleven that Gail’s husband Eugene used to use to grow weed. Jesse and Eugene used to be patrol partners, and we get a little bit more information on who Eugene was, including that he was a former Firefly that left because “he was tired of killing people.”
As Abby is trailing the patrol, she falls down an icy hill into a field of frozen, dead clickers. But this is where that information from earlier in the episode comes into play: Abby’s movement wakes up the horde of living infected hiding underneath, and there are more than 30 of them. Many more.
They chase Abby to an old abandoned copper mine and she is almost eaten by mushroom zombies until she is saved. Unfortunately for us, the person who saved her happens to be Joel who was hiding from the storm with Dina in the mine. Faced with the dilemma of the death by zombies or death by freezing, Abby suggests that they head back to the lodge where her friends are waiting with blankets and supplies and who would be happy to help them get back to Jackson Hole. I’m reminded of 11th grade English class, when my teacher explained the definition of dramatic irony as “when we know something that the characters do not.” I believe this is a prime example of that.
As Joel and company head up the mountain, Jesse and Ellie get a radio transmission that Joel and Dina are the only patrol team that has not made contact with home base and set out to find them, splitting up to cover more ground. Back at Jackson Hole, the cordyceps is discovered in the pipes, and since the fungus acts as one big hive-mind, this triggers the infected to come attack the town.
Tommy and Maria lead the defensive effort with Tommy doing his best to hold the gates while Maria sets up the defenses in town. For the most part, Tommy is able to keep the infected at bay using bullets, drums of gasoline and fire. That is until a massive bloater arrives on scene and Tommy realizes that it’s going to try to breach the gate, using its fungus-armored body as a battering ram. The infected break through and all hell breaks loose as the zombies flood the town, swarming into the streets and buildings and killing everything in sight. Tommy takes on the bloater by himself armed with a handgun and a flamethrower. It’s a tense fight, and while the flamethrower isn’t as effective as he had hoped, it’s got just enough power to overcome the hulking monster and Tommy lives to fight another day.
Miles away, Joel sees the fires in town and though he wants to head straight for Jackson Hole, Abby convinces him to continue heading to the lodge instead. When they arrive, Abby’s friends tend to Dina’s frostbite until Abby reveals who Joel is, and then take Dina hostage and drug her. Abby threatens to kill Dina if Joel doesn’t submit, which draws further discomfort from her companions. Joel surrenders, and Abby tells him why she’s going to kill him and that his actions caused the collapse of the Fireflies. She then shoots him in the leg, has one of her crew tourniquet his leg so he won’t bleed out, then beats him mercilessly with a golf club and then her fists. It’s a shocking display of fury and violence that disturbs her companions. Owen urges her to end it quickly, but Abby is going to relish every moment of her revenge.
By this time Ellie has picked up the tracks of Joel and Dina’s horses and has made her way to the lodge. She arrives just in time to see Joel being beaten to death and rushes in to save him but is outnumbered, overpowered and subdued. As Ellie pleads for Joel to get up, Abby stabs him in the neck with the broken golf club, and as Abby’s group leaves, Ellie threatens to kill them.
As Ellie crawls to Joel’s body and as she, Dina and Jesse take him back to Jackson Hole, the song Through the Valley plays, hence the name of the episode.
Reflections
Already, I think Season 2 is improving upon the show. We still have the powerful, raw, human performances from the spectacular cast and the complex web of actions, consequences and emotions, but what I felt like was missing from the first season was the zombies. Yes, we had some, but considering how much both the games and the show revolve around the concept of a zombie apocalypse, I felt a little cheated last season by how little there actually was. It’s like how I loved Amazon’s Fallout show but I was puzzled by the lack of the series’ iconic radroaches, mirelurks and super mutants.
Thus far, Season 2 has made good on that, giving us both grand, epic battles and tense, one-on-one fights for survival. The clicker makeup looks fantastic as usual and I’m enjoying seeing the variations indicating how far gone the individual infected are.
As someone who played the game, I obviously knew it was coming, and my only questions were how early into the season they would kill off Joel and if they would do it exactly like in the game. I agree with the team that episode two was the perfect place to catch some viewers unaware, who maybe hoped that Ellie would come and save him at the last second. It’s a reminder that this isn’t that kind of show. However, I don’t think that Joel’s death was handled as impactfully. Here’s where I’ll have to make a direct comparison to the games.
When Joel dies in the game, it’s unexpected. We don’t really know who Abby is or why she wants him dead. The tragedy is in how suddenly this beloved character, who we spent the last game playing as, is ripped from us. It’s like how shocking Ned Stark’s death was in the first season of Game of Thrones. By opening the season with Abby’s backstory and knowing that she’s on a quest to kill Joel, we’re robbed of that surprise and the full impact of his death.
Abby’s whole speech and motivation reveal to Joel before she kills him also makes it hard to empathize with her. After all, wasn’t that the whole point of The Last of Us 2? To force us to empathize with someone we initially are primed to see as the villain, to understand where their pain comes from? We’ll have to see how the HBO team handles the rest of the story, but I imagine it’s going to be more difficult to get any viewers to empathize with Abby now. While I can understand how her pain at losing her father pushes her to seek revenge, her whole character seems out of sync when she says that some things are just not acceptable while inflicting that same pain on Ellie as she helplessly watches.
Unless, of course, the whole point is to make her seem more unstable and unhinged?
I will say that the cameo of original Ellie actor Ashley Johnson as the singer of Through the Valley was nice. It doesn’t dull the pain of having to lose Joel all over again, but at least it’s something.